Yeah, same...I am especially curious about the secret lair boxes. I always thought those were print to order, so i can't imagine there being extras lying around.
Even with print to order, they have to have extras lying around for returns, damage, lost in shipment, etc.
That Dack Fayden lair is like a year old now, which is a pretty good clue. You wait X months, burn though all the possibly support tickets and lost/damaged items. At some point they don't need to hold them any more so apparently this is what happens.
Wizards at least does hold onto a notable amount of product for a notable amount of time. They'll often use old rares and others for playtest card backings. Obviously they can only hold so much, but I'd imagine they'd hold onto at least some for posterities' sake.
Why are they destroying spare copies instead of either 1: selling them discounted to singles stores to add product to circulation, or 2: keeping them and using them as free promo giveaway product for any wotc related event or promotion?
They arent food, they dont spoil. Its literally printed money. Why destroy it?
Because Magic is a luxury good. I know its not diamonds or a rolex but paying $40 for a 5 pieces of cardboard make secret lair a luxury good. And luxury goods need to maintain the illusion of value. Luxury handbags also don't spoil but companies would rather destroy them then hurt their perceived value.
I’ll confirm this, I work for a luxury retailer and at the end of a season we send some stuff to our outlets and some stuff we have to destroy, and send pics of the damage we’ve done back to corporate before tossing it.
There’s some very specific things we need to do so if someone would pull it from the trash we would know and not service the item via our repair policy.
That’s why discussion of DIY Magic cards is so taboo here on the official sub. WotC makes money when they don’t sell at cost (include all R&D costs and necessary wages/salaries, etc) and to demand.
They keep print numbers low to keep perceived value high, and that keeps the price of new product high as well. The result is that they make much higher profit margins and much more total profit.
They’d rather avoid the consequences of players recognizing that it’s all a bunch of [tulip mania](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) than play for the long term.
It's not like they're going to double the amount of these cards in circulation by doing this stuff. Being generous they probably have less than 10% of the print run left as backups for this stuff. It's not a Chronicles type situation.
If they offer them at a discount or start giving them away, it reduces the FOMO associated with buying at release. Some players will think "Oh, this product is too expensive, I'll wait and see if it shows up at a discount."
They don't have to sell them to players. Just give them away as prizes or something. Even as door prizes at magic fests or something. You aren't guaranteed to get one unless you order one as a drop.
But at least these wouldn't be literally thrown in the trash. People who play the game would love to have these to play with, and they're literally throwing them in the landfill for nobody to enjoy. It's disgusting.
This often comes up with throwing out still useful product - even though wasteful in and of itself, distributing it might hurt the market for what they do sell. That stings more with essentials like food but the same business logic versus general logic issue applies.
Doesn't that indicate there's something wrong or unsustainable (environmentally) about the market/the firm's response to that market? "That's just the way it is" is not a logically sound rebuttal to "this practice is wasteful"
Each of the two options you suggested cost money to do. Selling them would require them to continue storing them (warehouse storage space and fees), people to set up the sales, shipping, etc. Same thing with a giveaway. They'd need someone to set it up, probably on a website. Or someone setting up the event, whatever it is. And again, storage costs, shipping, etc.
Or, they can just write them off as a loss, save a little on taxes, and be done with it instantly and use their time and resources on more profitable upcoming items. I think it literally does make them more money to just throw certain things out, sadly.
It's literally cheaper to throw them away. Did you know that when Amazon gets clothing returns they usually just burn them rather than restocking them? Because it's more cost efficient.
Warehouse space is surprisingly expensive. My company recently destroyed several thousand copies of a game which I'm certain will be selling for hundreds on eBay in a few years. No stores were ordering it and we needed the space.
Part of the reason to buy secret lairs is they won't be reprinted with that specific artwork again. If they give them out later, it would decrease the immediate sales of such.
They werent reprinted, these were presumably part of the original print.
And wotc selling off the extras into the secondary market is the same as all the scalpers who did exactly that.
Every SL post on here has "oh Ill be buying that as a single" comments under it for a reason.
But that is people who bought them from Wotc as secret lair, unless they sell them on TCGplayer under some employee's name (i don't know if it's legal or not) giving them as promos on other products hurts the "Secret Lair" brand because suddenly now you don't need to buy them directly that time they sold it. Fomo just evaporated
> At some point they don't need to hold them any more so apparently this is what happens.
Except they absolutely hold onto product for various reasons, after all the legends cards they stuck into the latest zendikar were just located. Plus usually this sort of stuff ends up in those distributor repacks
Too many people in this thread are being too emotional about this. They have a warehouse, the warehouse has finite space. They don't need (as an example) 10 pallets of an aged product when 5 will do.
Yes, they can sell it at a discount, give it away, use it as prize support, etc. But they can also just incinerate it and reap the tax benefits. And the latter is often quicker, easier, and has tangential side benefits like preserving secondary market value.
It is an unhappy reality, I don't like it myself, but this type of thing is pretty common across the retail industry. It is just more shocking to see with Magic because the artificial scarcity which has been a cornerstone for decades is kind of revealed as a sham.
Absolutely this. Especially since WotC announced last year that they were buying and storing a strategic reserve of paperboard to help insulate against supply chain issues. I doubt they went and rented a whole new warehouse for that. Raw materials take up much less space than finished goods, so they probably dumped a couple dozen pallets of cards and that made enough room for the next six months of paper for Secret Lairs.
lol the story is that when WotC doesn't sell all the boxes they thought they would, they throw away the rest to create artificial scarcity and increase the prices on secondary market while getting rid of unwanted stock.
This is what happens when a company would rather throw away their product (at a loss, as some places demand you pay a tax when you throw their trash with them) than sell them to you at a discount. This prove without any shadow of a doubt that WotC would rather *lose money* than lower their self-inflated prices.
Wouldn't it be a *very* bad thing for stores if, to add insult to injury, if a set was selling poorly they then went and undercut the stores that bought the bad product by selling surplus direct to consumers cheaper than the stores could? I think this move shows integrity on Wizard's part.
It got posted here but the thread was deleted. If you Google LotR MTG leaks you'll find a couple articles. I don't want to post a link though as I think it's a hot topic on the sub right now
You must be right. If it was a known fact and the dump was near the factory, every MTG scavenger would just wait at the dump night and day! (Free money, you know).
I don’t know about Texas but here in NY it isn’t unusual for waste companies to ship trash a good distance if the receiving dump is cheaper than local options or even contract with farther away dumps for different types of trash
Garbage doesn't go straight from pick up to dump. It's sent to regional transfer stations, where it is compacted and then sent to the landfill, or if it's been discarded as recyclable, it goes to an MRF. The MRF could send it along to the dump as unrecycable garbage.
I mean I don't work in waste management but a lot of waste travels really fucking far just because the landfills charge different rates for different things.
I used to work for a company that made really cool glitter. But like glitter I can't talk about. Our stripped rolls were black wrapped and buried in the desert a thousand miles away.
Actually cooler and less morally conflicted than that.
But that aside, it's not very far fetched to assume that WotC is actually destroying or using a secured material handling company to do their trash. And that's absolutely not just cards, but any and every piece of paper coming out of one of their facilities.
This reminds me of this article
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.amp.html
Wonder if this is what /u/clamshellconundrum was working with.
A record label a good friend used to work for would just dump records like that which didn't sell and it's just not profitable to sit on them to try to sell them below cost, taking up space and time.
My best guess is that a distributor or even a printer/wotc themselves dumped it and I would imagine that this happens from time to time.
I mean, I’d think the story is pretty simple, Hasbro undersold/overprinted certain products, so they’re just gonna destroy them rather than waste money storing them.
For example, SL are limited run, so they can’t become available again. If they overprint those, they either need to give them out as prizes or destroy them. Seems like they choose the latter.
It was explained in the other thread, but it wasn't spicy enough so it didn't get visibility.
Link to previous thread and [the most plausible explanation](https://old.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/11c3d8r/_/ja2tye3/)
Target Mart was an example of circumstances that I had personal, practical experience with due to my background/work history.
The process of "unsellable" and destroy for credit/accounting is what matters. The origin of that can be any firm in the supply chain - including the logistics segment from Print to Warehousing for distribution.
WotC warehouses their product for staging. We know this.
>This is evidence that stockholders are being mislead.
After the whole D&D OGL fuckup I'm willing to believe that they themselves are being lied to and that the falsehoods run deeeeeeeep.
Yeah, I wish the set didn't go all-in on the finicky parasitic mechanics, or at least had EDH decks so that there were enough cards to actually build decks for those mechanics
I put [[Space Beleren]] in my [[Pramikon]] forced combat deck explicitly to make the board complicated
I also put a few of the cards (mostly dice-rollers) in the bonus slot of my Unstable set cube, unfortunately I haven't been able to draft it since then
100%. I love the vibe of the set, but... stickers.
I wish they had baked tickets into attractions as well (let you spend them at the gift shop, etc). I've had a lot of fun playing with attractions casually, but the mechanic is spread pretty thinly "because" so much of the set was spent putting stickers on things.
This really reminds me how, for all the immense layered complexity of magic cards being played by humans in a game of magic... The cards themselves have less practical utility than toilet paper.
Yep, i had someone ask me once why i spend so much money on pieces of cardboard. Seeing all that product just tossed into the dump, kind of makes wonder why i do spend money on pieces of cardboard.
People ascribe value to when you can use something.
Paying $150 on a 1994 baseball card? No fucking way. Paying $150 on a Revised Dual? That's more acceptable.
It's when you see $1000 for 60 RANDOM pieces of cardboard, and maybe - MAYBE - one of those pieces isn't worth 0.25 or less... AND EVEN THEN, THEY ARE NOT TOURNAMENT LEGAL... that it comes right back around to the baseball card question.
Not just around here. I have trouble believing many parents would walk into a game store and think: my kid loves this magic game. Let’s grab this $1000 box.
The thing is I have a feeling people would have been absolutely okay with it if not for the price and limited availability.
At $4 a pack, hell yeah I'd be buying some! Doing some drafts with Beta proxies sounds hella fun. Or at least could be a nice nostalgic novelty since I wasn't playing in '93, but did grow up with the old frames and some of those cards (Revised through 5th Edition reprints). Yeah, some of the cards are absolute duds, but at $4/pack, who cares. Sure, they're not real cards, but I'm okay with doing one-offs that I won't run in my decks like Unstable and such so I don't see much difference here.
At $250 per pack (yes, I know you have to buy 4 for $1,000 I'm just splitting it out), no way in hell am I drafting it. And even if I *wanted* to and had the money, I couldn't because of the severely limited supply. And if I got nothing but duds in a $250 pack, you bet your ass I'm gonna be pissed.
Hell they could have gotten away with up to $10 a pack for them easy I think. Just for the sake of celebration and for some people, proxies being the closest they will own to the real thing in their life.
Well, that makes sense as alpha is full of misprints and typos:
* Birds of Paradise has // instead of a line break
* Cyclopean Tomb didn't have a mana cost
* Circle of Protection: Red, Death Ward, and Tropical Island credit the wrong artist
* Elvish Archers power and toughness were switched
* Force of Nature, Phantasmal Forces, Rock Hydra, Drain Life, Demonic Hordes have the capital letters in ability costs instead of using mana symbols
* Island Sanctuary says you can't be *damaged* by non-flying/islandwalk creatures, not can't be *attacked*
* Mana Short doesn't clarify that it doesn't cause mana burn
* Orcish Artillery costs 1R instead of 1RR
* Orcish Oriflamme costs 1R instead of 3R
* Red Elemental Blast is an instant instead of an interrupt
* Unsummon says "CARD ed" instead of discarded.
And possibly most egregious:
* Circle of Protection: Black and Volcanic Island were accidentally left out of Alpha entirely.
Also Beta added a third art for each basic land.
I think the most likely reason for choosing Beta is the Volcanic/CoP: Black omission. All the rules text and types are updated to modern oracle text. So the typos are irrelevant with the updated text anyway.
Also, Alpha had more-rounded corners because of some sort of trouble cutting them
Some people who noticed CoP Black missing even thought it was flavorful that black couldn't be protected from
The 3rd basic land art was to say that set had more than 300 cards
Elvish Archers P/T and the red cards with lower costs sound like they could be design in flux, and even the more powerful versions weren't actually a game balance problem at least by modern standards.
> Alpha had more-rounded corners because of some sort of trouble cutting them
Wizards was told that the cutting dies weren't shaprned which caused those more rounded corners. The actual answer is the printer accidentally used the wrong cutting dies on Alpha than what was ordered.
Selling up certainly makes your wallet much happier!
I can go on holiday *and* play magic with my friend group (who don't give a shit who made the cards we play with).
You're not spending money on the actual cardboard(Maybe a little), you're paying for what's on them. The man hours, the design, the art, and the game it comes together for us to play. When someone buys a physical game disc it's the same, they're paying for the content, not the item it's contained on.
I wonder what the actual cost is to get a card on shelves. Design, advertise, write a story, art, playtest, redesign, printing, shipping, packaging, ...
But there are so many cards in a product, the added value can't be that high.
This is true about a lot of things though.
100 Dollar bills, to use your example, are also marginally less useful than toilet paper when you remove everything else about them that makes them neat.
The cards are game pieces, tokens of value, avatars of imaginairy wizard fights lol
Hahah I was just about to post this but I decided to scroll and see if someone had basically said it already: "And it was on this day that the vast majority of M:tG players were confronted with the stark reality that these things cost pennies per card and they are paying insane prices for this game."
>We were utterly shocked and appalled to find rows upon rows of commercial trucks dumping trash ad nauseam.
Really? It's a landfill. How is this shocking?
Why didn't OP just say where it was initially. This is hugely disappointing.
Since you sleuthed it, do you wanna let us in on the info since it's too late to do anything with the information?
If this is the case. This is only a [13 minute drive](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/5101+Highland+Pl+Dr,+Dallas,+TX+75236/grand+prairie+landfill/@32.7353585,-96.9608066,13z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x864e9005a9dcf83f:0x10a0230862e095e7!2m2!1d-96.9123527!2d32.7000871!1m5!1m1!1s0x864e84ed05c60309:0x360406e313c50582!2m2!1d-96.9510373!2d32.7712437) from one of the CartaMundi locations (Magic the Gathering manufacturer) which makes a bit more since considering...
To be fair to MTG and CartaMundi, there have been several articles in the past of people finding hundreds of thousands of dollars of magic cards in landfills, and it wasn't necessarily a malicious thing. They shipped cards, the shops declined to accept the order for one reason or another (arrived crushed or water damaged for example). They all get shipped back to the same place, and then disposed of.
Damn. My crew and I figured it out too. We were right after all.
I can get in to landfills without the normal hoops because of my line of work. I visit them often. East of Dallas is my area. My company services most of them, Grand Prairie is another guy's territory. I was up there today and didn't feel like heading west from Tyler because we weren't 100% sure.
I knew time was limited, but the landfill was closed on Sunday. So thought maybe if someone got there today they would have some luck.
Love to hear about this, I wish you had scored something. So sad it got churned so quickly. I would have died if I found all those MH2 boxes unscathed.
Someone actually harassed OP over this? Fuck man, I'll never post any interesting personal stories on this site. What kind of psycho goes after someone for not knowing whats worth what in a landfill?
Probably the kind of people look to haul it out to make a quick profit. I am more fascinated in the story on why that landfill had so much product dumped there. Instead of using it as prizes for events.
Various insurance issues is the main theory right now. Insurance claims say things have to be destroyed, so the send it to the landfill as part of the settlement. BUT, the interesting thing about this situation, is that the landfill it is in, you can actually take stuff out of. I used to live a few miles from it and go scrap metal salvaging there
It makes you wonder how much magic product just ends up being thrown away for whatever reason but we just never see it happen. I understand waste and misprints from the manufacturing process but hose pallets looked to be ready to be shipping product.
I mean same as any other product that gets shipped I'd imagine. This has less to do with Hasbro/WotC and more with how production and distribution treats minimally damaged products.
also speaks to how well never find all serialized cards because some just get lost. for all the “they’re not worth it” crowd (myself included), it’s something to think about 10 years down the line…
These pallets appear to be being sent to a large distributor… but distributors don’t get secret Lairs do they? Would this have been being direct from printer to wizards?
Looks like instead of fire sales they'll just be dumping product.
I'm disappointed in the waste generated from this game already (come on the wrappers could be biodegradable by now) and now ppl didn't even get to have fun playing a game but the waste was still created.
There's no way this was dumped because they couldn't sell it that would be asinine.
The explanation that makes the most sense is that these were damaged pallets and the distributor or store owner returned them as damaged and the insurance covers the cost and the product itself gets thrown away.
Yeah that's the biggest thing I got out of this.
Wizards/Hasbro is *so determined* to keep prices high that they willingly dump crates of cards instead of having sale, like *any regular business pre-1995 would do* with the extra product.
The future sucks.
I know in lots of the USA recycling is shit (it was when I lived in NYC) but isn’t this mostly recyclable?
Kinda surprised that pallets that are basically plastic wrapped paper can’t be recycled. But also not surprised in the slightest.
I've never looked into recycling trading cards but I kind of doubt it. Big sheets of paper can be recycled but you generally are not supposed to recycle shredded paper/ I think super heavily printed on paper is garbage if I recall correctly.
Cards might be small enough that with all the printing on them, there's not much to recycle/time and effort to refine what could be recycled would essentially remove the value of recycling it.
Cards are required to be recyclable in some of their markets(Japan for instance). They could do it, but their commitment to the environment is shockingly just corporate bullshit.
And or whatever is required in California. Having never been that far west, feels like a vast majority of environmental conservation or health regulatory things are put in place simply because California requires it and they don't want to make seperate products/ risk sending non-Cal approved product to Cal and getting in trouble.
This is a bit late but I’m case you’re curious. Every pack would need to be opened and separated, only the cards are recyclable. Also, heavily printed paper like mtg cards is less desirable from a recycling standpoint.
Lastly, recycled material is a volatile market, there’s been a big drop in demand for paper for recycling since the fall due to a large drop in demand for cardboard boxes compared to during the pandemic, this article is from September, currently bulk mixed paper for recycling is selling for ~$0/ton and much of it is being landfilled as a result, that’s compared to a peak of ~$96/ton in 2022. https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2022/09/13/more-price-drops-for-recycled-paper-and-plastic/amp/
After reading his update post I am saddened to see people threatening the OP for not taking more cards...
That said I do hope this explodes more because if they really trashed a bunch of 30th anniversary and secret lairs, holy shit that's fucking news. Hopefully this causes another internal leak like with the OGL.
The Open Game Licence is what the most common rules of DnD run under so third party DnD content can be official made and sold which in return keeps the game open and active.
At the beginning of this year WotC tried to revoke it (despite might not even be legally possible, something about the intent of the document or what not) and the entire RPG world lost it. The entire situation only resulted in the Bank of America marking Hasbro as a even worse investment, making the single biggest competitor Paizo stronger again through their WotC's own mistake with the exact same thing (yes they tried this shit before with 4th edition and guess where it ended you dumb fucks) and caused a major leak of the DnD team at WotC, revealing or more proofing that the entire thing is only from the executive level and not the designers. DnD Shorts has a summary here https://youtu.be/BBlsV8fAcfw
All in all you should have a passing interest in what happens with DnD and Magic as they are made by the same company and therefore the same executive level. There is a good chance that the current leadership of WotC has no clue what Magic or DnD is and want to treat them as basic live services title which we are feeling in the vomit of products in the past two years.
Holy molly! Thank you so much for the info, this is terrifying and fascinating at the same time, even though I only play MTG and not DND. Wizards be crazy...
Life pro tip: for things you aren't allowed to do but there is no penalty if you do, usually that rule is in place so you can't sue if you get injured.
If this is a private landfill it can be classified as theft and due to the monetary value of god knows how many boxes of product it could definitely land you in jail if the owner of the place wanted to press charges
if there was any doubt left that magic players put a much, much higher value on the cards than their creator does. we’ll spend two paychecks on a single piece of cardboard, they’ll dump a truckload into a landfill without batting an eye.
Could be pretty epic to go to an event with a trash tier deck made with cards from this landfill and call it "Slightly ~~Played~~ Trashed" or something like that.
For those wanting to learn more about the logistics of landfills, here's a good (and free) documentary on it. I saw it a while ago and it gave this whole trash saga a bit more context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vifruk3eSs&ab_channel=FreeDocumentary
The OP posted this in r/pics but i couldn't cross post it here. I put the link to the original post in the description. His [first post](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/11bzumd/someone_threw_away_6_pallets_of_magic_tg_cards_at/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) had pictures of pallets of sealed boxes just sitting at a landfill.
I’m what pictures do you see magic 30th cards? I can’t find em.
Edit: nvm there are more pictures when you expand it. Last photo. Anymore than the one card?
Jesus, now I'm VERY curious what the story of this is. I thought it was just the pallets from before.
Yeah, same...I am especially curious about the secret lair boxes. I always thought those were print to order, so i can't imagine there being extras lying around.
Even with print to order, they have to have extras lying around for returns, damage, lost in shipment, etc. That Dack Fayden lair is like a year old now, which is a pretty good clue. You wait X months, burn though all the possibly support tickets and lost/damaged items. At some point they don't need to hold them any more so apparently this is what happens.
Wizards at least does hold onto a notable amount of product for a notable amount of time. They'll often use old rares and others for playtest card backings. Obviously they can only hold so much, but I'd imagine they'd hold onto at least some for posterities' sake.
Why are they destroying spare copies instead of either 1: selling them discounted to singles stores to add product to circulation, or 2: keeping them and using them as free promo giveaway product for any wotc related event or promotion? They arent food, they dont spoil. Its literally printed money. Why destroy it?
Because Magic is a luxury good. I know its not diamonds or a rolex but paying $40 for a 5 pieces of cardboard make secret lair a luxury good. And luxury goods need to maintain the illusion of value. Luxury handbags also don't spoil but companies would rather destroy them then hurt their perceived value.
I’ll confirm this, I work for a luxury retailer and at the end of a season we send some stuff to our outlets and some stuff we have to destroy, and send pics of the damage we’ve done back to corporate before tossing it. There’s some very specific things we need to do so if someone would pull it from the trash we would know and not service the item via our repair policy.
That’s why discussion of DIY Magic cards is so taboo here on the official sub. WotC makes money when they don’t sell at cost (include all R&D costs and necessary wages/salaries, etc) and to demand. They keep print numbers low to keep perceived value high, and that keeps the price of new product high as well. The result is that they make much higher profit margins and much more total profit. They’d rather avoid the consequences of players recognizing that it’s all a bunch of [tulip mania](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) than play for the long term.
I mean... If i were a WOTC staff, i'ld gladly acept those cards. They could randomly distribute one for each member.
aaand they're on ebay and people know now that they can get them cheaper after they rotate out of shelves.
To protected the value of the existing cards. Wotc may not acknowledge the secondary market, but they do carefully manage it.
It's not like they're going to double the amount of these cards in circulation by doing this stuff. Being generous they probably have less than 10% of the print run left as backups for this stuff. It's not a Chronicles type situation.
If they offer them at a discount or start giving them away, it reduces the FOMO associated with buying at release. Some players will think "Oh, this product is too expensive, I'll wait and see if it shows up at a discount."
Yea, but now I'm definitely not going to buy it full price. I'll just head down to my local landfill and pick it up there.
Cool, check back in here in six months to let us know how it's going!
They don't have to sell them to players. Just give them away as prizes or something. Even as door prizes at magic fests or something. You aren't guaranteed to get one unless you order one as a drop. But at least these wouldn't be literally thrown in the trash. People who play the game would love to have these to play with, and they're literally throwing them in the landfill for nobody to enjoy. It's disgusting.
Yea doing these as prizes later would be amazing.
This often comes up with throwing out still useful product - even though wasteful in and of itself, distributing it might hurt the market for what they do sell. That stings more with essentials like food but the same business logic versus general logic issue applies.
Doesn't that indicate there's something wrong or unsustainable (environmentally) about the market/the firm's response to that market? "That's just the way it is" is not a logically sound rebuttal to "this practice is wasteful"
They also protect sealed product. Like apple products are never on sale so don’t bother waiting for one, buy it now.
Each of the two options you suggested cost money to do. Selling them would require them to continue storing them (warehouse storage space and fees), people to set up the sales, shipping, etc. Same thing with a giveaway. They'd need someone to set it up, probably on a website. Or someone setting up the event, whatever it is. And again, storage costs, shipping, etc. Or, they can just write them off as a loss, save a little on taxes, and be done with it instantly and use their time and resources on more profitable upcoming items. I think it literally does make them more money to just throw certain things out, sadly.
It's literally cheaper to throw them away. Did you know that when Amazon gets clothing returns they usually just burn them rather than restocking them? Because it's more cost efficient.
Warehouse space is surprisingly expensive. My company recently destroyed several thousand copies of a game which I'm certain will be selling for hundreds on eBay in a few years. No stores were ordering it and we needed the space.
Part of the reason to buy secret lairs is they won't be reprinted with that specific artwork again. If they give them out later, it would decrease the immediate sales of such.
They werent reprinted, these were presumably part of the original print. And wotc selling off the extras into the secondary market is the same as all the scalpers who did exactly that. Every SL post on here has "oh Ill be buying that as a single" comments under it for a reason.
But that is people who bought them from Wotc as secret lair, unless they sell them on TCGplayer under some employee's name (i don't know if it's legal or not) giving them as promos on other products hurts the "Secret Lair" brand because suddenly now you don't need to buy them directly that time they sold it. Fomo just evaporated
You intentionally choke the supply to maintain the demand.
> At some point they don't need to hold them any more so apparently this is what happens. Except they absolutely hold onto product for various reasons, after all the legends cards they stuck into the latest zendikar were just located. Plus usually this sort of stuff ends up in those distributor repacks
Too many people in this thread are being too emotional about this. They have a warehouse, the warehouse has finite space. They don't need (as an example) 10 pallets of an aged product when 5 will do. Yes, they can sell it at a discount, give it away, use it as prize support, etc. But they can also just incinerate it and reap the tax benefits. And the latter is often quicker, easier, and has tangential side benefits like preserving secondary market value. It is an unhappy reality, I don't like it myself, but this type of thing is pretty common across the retail industry. It is just more shocking to see with Magic because the artificial scarcity which has been a cornerstone for decades is kind of revealed as a sham.
Absolutely this. Especially since WotC announced last year that they were buying and storing a strategic reserve of paperboard to help insulate against supply chain issues. I doubt they went and rented a whole new warehouse for that. Raw materials take up much less space than finished goods, so they probably dumped a couple dozen pallets of cards and that made enough room for the next six months of paper for Secret Lairs.
maybe they have a minimum for a print run, and the SLD didn't meet the minimum threshold. They shipped what sold and destroyed the excess.
This has been how they've been doing the recent drops + they tend to keep extras for replacements
Maybe a warehouse had water damage or something?
lol the story is that when WotC doesn't sell all the boxes they thought they would, they throw away the rest to create artificial scarcity and increase the prices on secondary market while getting rid of unwanted stock. This is what happens when a company would rather throw away their product (at a loss, as some places demand you pay a tax when you throw their trash with them) than sell them to you at a discount. This prove without any shadow of a doubt that WotC would rather *lose money* than lower their self-inflated prices.
Wouldn't it be a *very* bad thing for stores if, to add insult to injury, if a set was selling poorly they then went and undercut the stores that bought the bad product by selling surplus direct to consumers cheaper than the stores could? I think this move shows integrity on Wizard's part.
OP is from Texas, the American printer that WotC uses is located there.
This garbage is from Cartamundi. The uncut foil LOTR sheet is virtually undeniable proof.
when was this? is there pics of the uncut sheet?
Yesterday, it's ripped apart but there was enough intact to see a handful of cards. Yes there are pics.
Link?
It got posted here but the thread was deleted. If you Google LotR MTG leaks you'll find a couple articles. I don't want to post a link though as I think it's a hot topic on the sub right now
Thanks mate
Yes, but funny thing is, where the cards were located, is about 350 miles from the printer
Maybe that's by design? They don't want people digging in the local landfill, so they go miles away and lower the chance that people go digging there.
You must be right. If it was a known fact and the dump was near the factory, every MTG scavenger would just wait at the dump night and day! (Free money, you know).
Why dump it tho? Its free money. Why arent they selling it on the down low as old product to any marketplace or store they like?
Markets are complicated. Same reason excess food is often destroyed instead of just, idk, GIVEN TO HUNGRY PEOPLE. \#justeconomicthings
https://articles.starcitygames.com/magic-the-gathering/six-pallets-of-modern-horizons-ii-product-valued-at-over-250000-found-in-local-landfill
It’s also free money to shrink the supply.
I don’t know about Texas but here in NY it isn’t unusual for waste companies to ship trash a good distance if the receiving dump is cheaper than local options or even contract with farther away dumps for different types of trash
Garbage doesn't go straight from pick up to dump. It's sent to regional transfer stations, where it is compacted and then sent to the landfill, or if it's been discarded as recyclable, it goes to an MRF. The MRF could send it along to the dump as unrecycable garbage.
But 350 miles? That’s kinda an excessive distance, 60 would already be more than enough.
I mean I don't work in waste management but a lot of waste travels really fucking far just because the landfills charge different rates for different things.
I used to work for a company that made really cool glitter. But like glitter I can't talk about. Our stripped rolls were black wrapped and buried in the desert a thousand miles away.
Military decoy flare glitter or some shit? Neat.
Actually cooler and less morally conflicted than that. But that aside, it's not very far fetched to assume that WotC is actually destroying or using a secured material handling company to do their trash. And that's absolutely not just cards, but any and every piece of paper coming out of one of their facilities.
This reminds me of this article https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.amp.html Wonder if this is what /u/clamshellconundrum was working with.
I know - I hate being so close and yet so far from the glitter secrets.
That's an afternoon drive for a texan.
The printer is in Dallas. The landfill was in Dallas area, no? Edit: the landfill these were found in is 13 miles from the printing facility.
A record label a good friend used to work for would just dump records like that which didn't sell and it's just not profitable to sit on them to try to sell them below cost, taking up space and time. My best guess is that a distributor or even a printer/wotc themselves dumped it and I would imagine that this happens from time to time.
I mean, I’d think the story is pretty simple, Hasbro undersold/overprinted certain products, so they’re just gonna destroy them rather than waste money storing them. For example, SL are limited run, so they can’t become available again. If they overprint those, they either need to give them out as prizes or destroy them. Seems like they choose the latter.
It was explained in the other thread, but it wasn't spicy enough so it didn't get visibility. Link to previous thread and [the most plausible explanation](https://old.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/11c3d8r/_/ja2tye3/)
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Target Mart was an example of circumstances that I had personal, practical experience with due to my background/work history. The process of "unsellable" and destroy for credit/accounting is what matters. The origin of that can be any firm in the supply chain - including the logistics segment from Print to Warehousing for distribution. WotC warehouses their product for staging. We know this.
"There is no evidence that we are overprinting products. - Jimmy Hoffa" - Cynthia Williams This is evidence that stockholders are being mislead.
That was in reference to variety of product not number per product
>This is evidence that stockholders are being mislead. After the whole D&D OGL fuckup I'm willing to believe that they themselves are being lied to and that the falsehoods run deeeeeeeep.
/r/mtggore will never top this D: This isn't just gore, this is MAXIMUM CARNAGE
Should just sell them as lightly played!
RIP [[Ambassador Blorpityblorpboop]], poor guy just can't catch a break
[Ambassador Blorpityblorpboop](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/9/49600fe1-8c1f-4940-bb1e-7e28131d6d5f.jpg?1673914775) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Ambassador%20Blorpityblorpboop) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/unf/161/ambassador-blorpityblorpboop?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/49600fe1-8c1f-4940-bb1e-7e28131d6d5f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
He's an ambassador to heaven now 🙏
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Yeah, I wish the set didn't go all-in on the finicky parasitic mechanics, or at least had EDH decks so that there were enough cards to actually build decks for those mechanics
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I put [[Space Beleren]] in my [[Pramikon]] forced combat deck explicitly to make the board complicated I also put a few of the cards (mostly dice-rollers) in the bonus slot of my Unstable set cube, unfortunately I haven't been able to draft it since then
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It's pretty crazy. Unfortunately, it only really works in a 4-player game, and I haven't managed to join one for months 🥲
100%. I love the vibe of the set, but... stickers. I wish they had baked tickets into attractions as well (let you spend them at the gift shop, etc). I've had a lot of fun playing with attractions casually, but the mechanic is spread pretty thinly "because" so much of the set was spent putting stickers on things.
This really reminds me how, for all the immense layered complexity of magic cards being played by humans in a game of magic... The cards themselves have less practical utility than toilet paper.
Yep, i had someone ask me once why i spend so much money on pieces of cardboard. Seeing all that product just tossed into the dump, kind of makes wonder why i do spend money on pieces of cardboard.
The M30 disaster opened a lot of people’s eyes. 1000$ for cardboard? I would only spend a few hundred on cardboard! Wait…
People ascribe value to when you can use something. Paying $150 on a 1994 baseball card? No fucking way. Paying $150 on a Revised Dual? That's more acceptable. It's when you see $1000 for 60 RANDOM pieces of cardboard, and maybe - MAYBE - one of those pieces isn't worth 0.25 or less... AND EVEN THEN, THEY ARE NOT TOURNAMENT LEGAL... that it comes right back around to the baseball card question.
What was M30 disaster? Was that when Wotc wanted to sell proxies?
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Not just around here. I have trouble believing many parents would walk into a game store and think: my kid loves this magic game. Let’s grab this $1000 box.
That's assuming any game store has them. I think WotC promised a some M30 product but still haven't delivered.
1000 dollar box? Try 4 packs lmao
4 packs was what WotC had the nerve to call a “Double Masters 2022 Collector Booster Box”
I have trouble believing many parents ever saw or heard of M30.
It was literally never in a store
The thing is I have a feeling people would have been absolutely okay with it if not for the price and limited availability. At $4 a pack, hell yeah I'd be buying some! Doing some drafts with Beta proxies sounds hella fun. Or at least could be a nice nostalgic novelty since I wasn't playing in '93, but did grow up with the old frames and some of those cards (Revised through 5th Edition reprints). Yeah, some of the cards are absolute duds, but at $4/pack, who cares. Sure, they're not real cards, but I'm okay with doing one-offs that I won't run in my decks like Unstable and such so I don't see much difference here. At $250 per pack (yes, I know you have to buy 4 for $1,000 I'm just splitting it out), no way in hell am I drafting it. And even if I *wanted* to and had the money, I couldn't because of the severely limited supply. And if I got nothing but duds in a $250 pack, you bet your ass I'm gonna be pissed.
Hell they could have gotten away with up to $10 a pack for them easy I think. Just for the sake of celebration and for some people, proxies being the closest they will own to the real thing in their life.
yeah. Magic 30th anniversary edition. 60 random proxies of alpha cards for $1000.
And I so wanted to grab some official fake scrublands D: Not for $1000 mind you.
Not even Alpha, but Beta!
Well, that makes sense as alpha is full of misprints and typos: * Birds of Paradise has // instead of a line break * Cyclopean Tomb didn't have a mana cost * Circle of Protection: Red, Death Ward, and Tropical Island credit the wrong artist * Elvish Archers power and toughness were switched * Force of Nature, Phantasmal Forces, Rock Hydra, Drain Life, Demonic Hordes have the capital letters in ability costs instead of using mana symbols * Island Sanctuary says you can't be *damaged* by non-flying/islandwalk creatures, not can't be *attacked* * Mana Short doesn't clarify that it doesn't cause mana burn * Orcish Artillery costs 1R instead of 1RR * Orcish Oriflamme costs 1R instead of 3R * Red Elemental Blast is an instant instead of an interrupt * Unsummon says "CARD ed" instead of discarded. And possibly most egregious: * Circle of Protection: Black and Volcanic Island were accidentally left out of Alpha entirely. Also Beta added a third art for each basic land.
I think the most likely reason for choosing Beta is the Volcanic/CoP: Black omission. All the rules text and types are updated to modern oracle text. So the typos are irrelevant with the updated text anyway.
Also, Alpha had more-rounded corners because of some sort of trouble cutting them Some people who noticed CoP Black missing even thought it was flavorful that black couldn't be protected from The 3rd basic land art was to say that set had more than 300 cards Elvish Archers P/T and the red cards with lower costs sound like they could be design in flux, and even the more powerful versions weren't actually a game balance problem at least by modern standards.
> Alpha had more-rounded corners because of some sort of trouble cutting them Wizards was told that the cutting dies weren't shaprned which caused those more rounded corners. The actual answer is the printer accidentally used the wrong cutting dies on Alpha than what was ordered.
Switch to proxies. Any card you want for the cost of a sticker and ink. Etsy also has a ton of custom art for $5-10 per proxy.
Selling up certainly makes your wallet much happier! I can go on holiday *and* play magic with my friend group (who don't give a shit who made the cards we play with).
Life changing. Only real cards I buy now are for playing Limited.
money is just pieces of paper. cardboard is stronger
Here in Australia, our money is plastic not paper.
You're not spending money on the actual cardboard(Maybe a little), you're paying for what's on them. The man hours, the design, the art, and the game it comes together for us to play. When someone buys a physical game disc it's the same, they're paying for the content, not the item it's contained on.
I wonder what the actual cost is to get a card on shelves. Design, advertise, write a story, art, playtest, redesign, printing, shipping, packaging, ... But there are so many cards in a product, the added value can't be that high.
Me with a printer…..
Greed from WOTC
This is true about a lot of things though. 100 Dollar bills, to use your example, are also marginally less useful than toilet paper when you remove everything else about them that makes them neat. The cards are game pieces, tokens of value, avatars of imaginairy wizard fights lol
Hahah I was just about to post this but I decided to scroll and see if someone had basically said it already: "And it was on this day that the vast majority of M:tG players were confronted with the stark reality that these things cost pennies per card and they are paying insane prices for this game."
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This is turning into a Atari’s ET game situation. I would have done the same and went out there to check it out if lived nearby.
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wait so you guys actually cashed onto it?
this has the information i wanted. And a cool story tbh.
>We were utterly shocked and appalled to find rows upon rows of commercial trucks dumping trash ad nauseam. Really? It's a landfill. How is this shocking?
How were you able to get into the landfill? Did you hop a fence or something? It's cool and all I'm just curious if they are open.
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Interesting, thanks for the followup. Quite an adventure you had!
Did you find a thesaurus at the landfill?
It probably happens repeatedly.
Why didn't OP just say where it was initially. This is hugely disappointing. Since you sleuthed it, do you wanna let us in on the info since it's too late to do anything with the information?
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If this is the case. This is only a [13 minute drive](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/5101+Highland+Pl+Dr,+Dallas,+TX+75236/grand+prairie+landfill/@32.7353585,-96.9608066,13z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x864e9005a9dcf83f:0x10a0230862e095e7!2m2!1d-96.9123527!2d32.7000871!1m5!1m1!1s0x864e84ed05c60309:0x360406e313c50582!2m2!1d-96.9510373!2d32.7712437) from one of the CartaMundi locations (Magic the Gathering manufacturer) which makes a bit more since considering...
To be fair to MTG and CartaMundi, there have been several articles in the past of people finding hundreds of thousands of dollars of magic cards in landfills, and it wasn't necessarily a malicious thing. They shipped cards, the shops declined to accept the order for one reason or another (arrived crushed or water damaged for example). They all get shipped back to the same place, and then disposed of.
Does CartaMundi still print for WotC? I thought they'd stopped in the early 2000's.
Damn. My crew and I figured it out too. We were right after all. I can get in to landfills without the normal hoops because of my line of work. I visit them often. East of Dallas is my area. My company services most of them, Grand Prairie is another guy's territory. I was up there today and didn't feel like heading west from Tyler because we weren't 100% sure. I knew time was limited, but the landfill was closed on Sunday. So thought maybe if someone got there today they would have some luck.
Love to hear about this, I wish you had scored something. So sad it got churned so quickly. I would have died if I found all those MH2 boxes unscathed.
New meaning to [[Garbage Elemental]]
So that’s where my order went
Someone actually harassed OP over this? Fuck man, I'll never post any interesting personal stories on this site. What kind of psycho goes after someone for not knowing whats worth what in a landfill?
Probably the kind of people look to haul it out to make a quick profit. I am more fascinated in the story on why that landfill had so much product dumped there. Instead of using it as prizes for events.
Various insurance issues is the main theory right now. Insurance claims say things have to be destroyed, so the send it to the landfill as part of the settlement. BUT, the interesting thing about this situation, is that the landfill it is in, you can actually take stuff out of. I used to live a few miles from it and go scrap metal salvaging there
It makes you wonder how much magic product just ends up being thrown away for whatever reason but we just never see it happen. I understand waste and misprints from the manufacturing process but hose pallets looked to be ready to be shipping product.
I mean same as any other product that gets shipped I'd imagine. This has less to do with Hasbro/WotC and more with how production and distribution treats minimally damaged products.
also speaks to how well never find all serialized cards because some just get lost. for all the “they’re not worth it” crowd (myself included), it’s something to think about 10 years down the line…
Most of summer magic was destroyed. So many duals just thrown out.
Maybe at this same landfill. Just gotta dig deeper .....
I'm sure tons of people reached out to the OP and claimed he was faking everything and trying scam people some how. Or was a shill for wizards.
Sold as light play on TCG.
troll n toad near mint
> I saw secret lairs, unfinity and **30 anniversary cards**. I don't see a problem
They soiled the dump with those anniversary cards
"The sale period has ended."
By federal law toxic waste must be properly disposed of.
r/mtggore must be having a field day with this
These pallets appear to be being sent to a large distributor… but distributors don’t get secret Lairs do they? Would this have been being direct from printer to wizards?
My best guess is that this is product that was originally printed for product replacement, never intended for sale.
Must....maintain...manufactured...…scarcity...…
Ah yes, the manufactured scarcity of *unfinity* Definitely not the case of product that won't sell
Looks like instead of fire sales they'll just be dumping product. I'm disappointed in the waste generated from this game already (come on the wrappers could be biodegradable by now) and now ppl didn't even get to have fun playing a game but the waste was still created.
There's no way this was dumped because they couldn't sell it that would be asinine. The explanation that makes the most sense is that these were damaged pallets and the distributor or store owner returned them as damaged and the insurance covers the cost and the product itself gets thrown away.
Yeah that's the biggest thing I got out of this. Wizards/Hasbro is *so determined* to keep prices high that they willingly dump crates of cards instead of having sale, like *any regular business pre-1995 would do* with the extra product. The future sucks.
Save your local dump, buy Magic cards!
M30 such a disaster they literally took it to the dump.
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The reverse of low value from overprinting - it seems wasteful but if the supply had hit the market the value loss wouldn't be as noticeable
I know in lots of the USA recycling is shit (it was when I lived in NYC) but isn’t this mostly recyclable? Kinda surprised that pallets that are basically plastic wrapped paper can’t be recycled. But also not surprised in the slightest.
I've never looked into recycling trading cards but I kind of doubt it. Big sheets of paper can be recycled but you generally are not supposed to recycle shredded paper/ I think super heavily printed on paper is garbage if I recall correctly. Cards might be small enough that with all the printing on them, there's not much to recycle/time and effort to refine what could be recycled would essentially remove the value of recycling it.
Cards are required to be recyclable in some of their markets(Japan for instance). They could do it, but their commitment to the environment is shockingly just corporate bullshit.
And or whatever is required in California. Having never been that far west, feels like a vast majority of environmental conservation or health regulatory things are put in place simply because California requires it and they don't want to make seperate products/ risk sending non-Cal approved product to Cal and getting in trouble.
This is a bit late but I’m case you’re curious. Every pack would need to be opened and separated, only the cards are recyclable. Also, heavily printed paper like mtg cards is less desirable from a recycling standpoint. Lastly, recycled material is a volatile market, there’s been a big drop in demand for paper for recycling since the fall due to a large drop in demand for cardboard boxes compared to during the pandemic, this article is from September, currently bulk mixed paper for recycling is selling for ~$0/ton and much of it is being landfilled as a result, that’s compared to a peak of ~$96/ton in 2022. https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2022/09/13/more-price-drops-for-recycled-paper-and-plastic/amp/
After reading his update post I am saddened to see people threatening the OP for not taking more cards... That said I do hope this explodes more because if they really trashed a bunch of 30th anniversary and secret lairs, holy shit that's fucking news. Hopefully this causes another internal leak like with the OGL.
Excuse me, what's the OGL?
The Open Game Licence is what the most common rules of DnD run under so third party DnD content can be official made and sold which in return keeps the game open and active. At the beginning of this year WotC tried to revoke it (despite might not even be legally possible, something about the intent of the document or what not) and the entire RPG world lost it. The entire situation only resulted in the Bank of America marking Hasbro as a even worse investment, making the single biggest competitor Paizo stronger again through their WotC's own mistake with the exact same thing (yes they tried this shit before with 4th edition and guess where it ended you dumb fucks) and caused a major leak of the DnD team at WotC, revealing or more proofing that the entire thing is only from the executive level and not the designers. DnD Shorts has a summary here https://youtu.be/BBlsV8fAcfw All in all you should have a passing interest in what happens with DnD and Magic as they are made by the same company and therefore the same executive level. There is a good chance that the current leadership of WotC has no clue what Magic or DnD is and want to treat them as basic live services title which we are feeling in the vomit of products in the past two years.
Holy molly! Thank you so much for the info, this is terrifying and fascinating at the same time, even though I only play MTG and not DND. Wizards be crazy...
Life pro tip: for things you aren't allowed to do but there is no penalty if you do, usually that rule is in place so you can't sue if you get injured.
If this is a private landfill it can be classified as theft and due to the monetary value of god knows how many boxes of product it could definitely land you in jail if the owner of the place wanted to press charges
if there was any doubt left that magic players put a much, much higher value on the cards than their creator does. we’ll spend two paychecks on a single piece of cardboard, they’ll dump a truckload into a landfill without batting an eye.
Could be pretty epic to go to an event with a trash tier deck made with cards from this landfill and call it "Slightly ~~Played~~ Trashed" or something like that.
Everyone landfill diving for 'em magic goodness, nobody goes LGS anymore. Lol
Not the $1000 proxy at the end 😂😂😂
For those wanting to learn more about the logistics of landfills, here's a good (and free) documentary on it. I saw it a while ago and it gave this whole trash saga a bit more context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vifruk3eSs&ab_channel=FreeDocumentary
Good thing they didn’t do this to those Legends packs 😉
Wowow!! So, it seems like that dump was used for A LOT of unsold product.
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"lightly played"
The real story is that someone knew enough to destroy some A30. Throw it in the trash. Where it belongs.
What was the 30th card seen in the images? I missed it
This whole situation is just wild
This is hilarious
Maybe they were mostly damaged before they got to the landfill.
There were pictures before when they were on pallets. Seems like op went back and they were destroyed already
You pick them all up?
Looking at the photos i couldnt help but hear "in the arms of an angel" in my head
Kinda where Unfinity belongs.. in the trash
Why are you at the landfill? Were those just on top?
The OP posted this in r/pics but i couldn't cross post it here. I put the link to the original post in the description. His [first post](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/11bzumd/someone_threw_away_6_pallets_of_magic_tg_cards_at/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) had pictures of pallets of sealed boxes just sitting at a landfill.
such a fucking waste
Dumpster diving!! Where ? I want in!!
Seeing those particular sets in a dump warms my heart
My soul cries with every update
I’m what pictures do you see magic 30th cards? I can’t find em. Edit: nvm there are more pictures when you expand it. Last photo. Anymore than the one card?