Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1375: Supply Channels

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Once we print Magic cards, how do we get them to you, the players? This podcast talks about the various ways we do that.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, today, the topic everybody's been waiting for, supply channels. Dun, dun, da. This is actually a very important part of magic. Not something I normally talk about, but I thought I delve in today. And one of the things that I like doing on this podcast is just exposing you guys to things that you might not think about.

And there's lots of lots of different avenues of making magic. Most of the time I'm talking about design. But today I'm talking about something a little bit different. So what is a supply channel? So basically, we make magic cards. And somehow, we need to get the magic cards to you, the consumer. So how do we get... So we come up with them, we design them,

then we lay them out and edit them and do all this stuff we do, get art. And then we take them to the printer, and then the printer prints them. And then they chop them up and they put them in boosters. and then we make a product that we want to sell to you, the consumer. But how do we do that? How do we sell it to you? Well, there are a number of what we call supply channels, meaning different ways that we can get product to you.

So today I was going to talk through the major supply channels and talk a little bit about the history of those supply channels. I'm sure you joined in today going, oh, I want to hear about the history of supply channels. But I promise you, it is interesting. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning. So most of the time, Wizards of the Coast does not sell directly to you, the consumer. I will get to that.

Sometimes we do, but I will get to that. The most common way that we sell magic, and if you go back to the very beginning, I'm trying to do these roughly chronologically. So the story goes, Peter Ackeson is the founder of wizards, or one of the founders of Wizards, the first CEO of Wizards. Richard convinces him this idea of a trading card game. He's enamored. He wants to do it.

And so now Peter needs to produce it. So what Peter does is he gets in his car and he drives up and down the West Coast stopping at game stores to demo the games,

but not just game stores. He also needs to talk to distributors. And the reason for that is, mostly when we sell something, Wizard of the Coast sells product, we don't sell directly to stores. There are some exceptions, I will get to that, but most of the time, we sell to a distributor. What that means is a distributor is somebody who gets product, and there's different types of distributors for different products. We're obviously talking game distributors. But what they're doing is they're buying lots and lots of different games. They buy it from us, the manufacturer of the game. And then they sell directly to stores.

Usually we're talking like local game stores. I will get into mass market in a bit. That's slightly different. So the idea essentially is that there are different distributors. And distributors will vary by region, by country. One of the things I'm talking about today is supply channels. And in every case, there's a global asset. aspect of supply channels. I'll get to that in a little bit. But the idea essentially is there's somebody out there who buys many, many games if you're a game distributor. And the distributors can work in more things than just games. But normally, if you're a distributor, you tend to focus on something. Like you have some expertise. So normally if you're a game distributor,

you tend to get games. That's what you buy and sell games. Now maybe you also sell puzzles or you know, affiliated things, things that people in this, the stores that would sell will sell the same things. Now, it depends how big you are. Some distributors sell more things. There are distributors that do a lot of different things. It varies a lot in the distributors. Mostly who we were dealing with, especially the early days, was game distributors, people who sell to game stores. And the idea is, we sell to them, and then they sell to the stores. So if your local game store wants to buy magic, normally the way that they buy magic is

they will have one or more distributors. And like I said, usually distributors are, well, called geolocated. Normally, like, if you're distributed, you sell within a certain area. Often that's confined in a single country. Sometimes it's not.

There's some European distributors that sell in multiple countries and such. But, so the idea is you go to a particular market and you figure out who is the distributor or distributors for that market. oftentimes in foreign countries there might be a main distributor for the whole country that's very common for us

especially in the early days where we would sell to a single distributor within a singular country okay so the idea is that we do that so the story that that Peter tells so if you if you Peter does a great job of this there's a documentary called

Igniting the Spark I did a podcast on the podcast on the documentary I recommend watching it if you get a chance in it there's a story that Peter tells about how he's at I forget it was demo or origins he's at one of the game conventions that gears toward

people who sell games and he gets approached by somebody in a cowboy hat and at the time they're demoing magic magic's not for sale yet but the idea is the reason they're demoing the game is Peter needs to get enough money to be able to afford the first print run

Remember, when Wizard of the Coast, before Magic came out, Wizards the Coast was a very small company. And so, just getting enough money to produce the first run of magic was a big challenge. Essentially, they needed enough money to be able to pay for the printing. And then the idea is, if the first printing sells well, they can use the money from the first printing for the second printing and such. So, and that's sort of the mafter idea behind how you do sales. So this guy comes with a cowboy hat

And he Playtest the game And he really likes it So he goes I'll be right back And he comes back with a guy with a larger A larger cowboy hat than him And he gets him to play the game And then they go back and they get another

Another person with even larger cowboy hat But anyway, this continues until they I guess they get to the largest cowboy hat Who is the distributor The person who runs the distributor and that person, convincing him to buy Magic, that was a person who wrote a check large enough that it could pay for Alpha,

that they were able to do the first print run of Alpha. And so the very first way that Magic was sold, the first supply channel we had was distributors. And the other thing to remember about early Magic is that the first run of Magic, Alpha and a lot of beta, mostly was East, sorry, was West Coast. Alpha, I think it was almost exclusively West Coast. and then Badea started moving to the East Coast

and then eventually it got outside the U.S., but it took a little while to sort of build up. When I say build up steam, it's not that there wasn't interest, it was just they only could print so much, and so that's sold up pretty quickly. But, so anyway, so we have distributors. That's the first way to get it. And like I said, one of the things that Wizards understood very early on

was the importance of your local game store. Another thing that Wizards did, by the way, just a little side note here is back in the 90s when Magic first came out, it wasn't unheard of for a game store to have some place to play. But it wasn't

the norm. It wasn't expected of a game store that there'd be places to play in the game store. Some did have it. But one of the things that Wizards really was one of the innovators in is the idea that a game store is a place

for gamers to gather on a regular basis. We did a lot of work over the years of creating different systems. There used to be a thing called arena, not the online game, but it was an in-store program. If you ever heard something like, oh, Vanguard, I did a podcast on Vanguard. Vanguard was done through Arena. There were a lot of internal leagues done through Arena. And the idea was just the very concept of Friday Night Magic. Friday Night Magic didn't just exist.

Friday Night Magic was years and years of sort of cementing this idea that, hey, you want to play magic, you want to come play with other people, you can do that on Friday night. And now, if you go to a lot of game stores, most game stores have multiple sort of magic nights. But the idea is, here's when people gather in our store. We do pre-releases, you know, we do Ptqs, that there's a lot of events specifically now run through the store to try to make the store a location for play. And that, Wizards was really in magic in particular was a really, really big part of that. And that part of making that.

So anyway, the reason I bring that up is to get to our next supply chain is, so once we started having stores play, we needed a carrot, if you will. So we created what's now called the WPN or the Wizards Play Network. Like I said, it's had different names, arena, and different things. But the idea essentially is how do we get game stores to present the, you know, we want to encourage game stores to be the center of play. Well, how do we do that? One of the ways we do that is saying to stores,

hey, if you reach a certain threshold, we will make you a special store. Once again, part of the Wizards Play Network. And there's a lot of things that come along with that. You have access to software to run programs. You have, you know, we have certain nights and we have things we do in like vanguard and programs, and we create different special things for you to do.

And one of the big things is if you're a WPN store, there's a limited about of stuff you can get direct from Wizards. So this is the next supply channel, what I'll call direct-to-store. There's distributors, but next is direct-to-store. Now, direct-to-store is limited. It's not that we just sell absolutely anything directly to the store, but if you're a WPN store, there are things that you can purchase directly.

For example, like pre-release kits, to run your pre-release. But that is one of the perks of becoming a WPN store. It's just having better access to magic product. And so one of the ideas essentially is if you demonstrate that you can build

a good magic audience, we will help you and get you more magic cards and magic programs and things for that. In general, even now, most of what we do is through distributors as far as local game stores.

Like I said, there's a WPN, there's some direct sale stuff that goes on directly to the game store, but the vast, vast majority is still distributors. Okay. The next level is online.

Oh, sorry, not it's online. Next is mass market. Okay, so we're selling to the local game stores, the local game stores. We're selling to distributors, distributors are selling to the game. stores, game stores are song to you. That is great. But there is one small problem.

Game stores require a certain population density, meaning in order to be viable, enough people have, and the way to think of it is you need enough gamers to come to your store to have a game store and be profitable. But in order for that to exist, you need enough gamers to be within a certain radius of your store. Let's say a half hour, half hour drive. So the idea is, is how many people exist within a half hour, that would purchase your product. That is kind of your potential audience. The denser you are, the more people there are,

the more chance you'll hit your audience. And in dense enough populations, there may be more than one game store. Our big cities have multiple game stores. But the problem is, I don't know the exact stats off the top of my head, but I believe a majority of magic players do not live within a 30-mile drive radius

of a local game store. That local game stores are, you know, if you live in a big city, hey, most likely you do have one or more. But if you're outside of a big city, you know, in the suburbs or even farther away than that, you live near a city that's a little smaller city. Oftentimes you don't have access to a local game store.

But we still want to sell you magic. So the next sort of layer out is what we call mass market. The way you can think of mass market might be Walmart, Target, Best Buy. Basically, it's stores that have lots and lots of different stores. And in a smaller town, for example, they might not have a game store, but probably they'll have a Walmart or a Target. I mean, you're going to have some place where, you know, and those cater, a lot of them, I mean, there are some mass market things like GameStop

would be a mass market that's more focused. on games. Given it's more video games, but we have sold in games stuff, for example. So the idea essentially is we want to get magic into the hands of people who maybe can't get to a game store. And the answer to there is mass market. Now, the reason mass market is different than normal is mostly the way mass market works, especially if you're a big enough store, you don't go through distributors. We don't sell to a distributor who sells to Walmart or to Target or to whatever. We sell directly. to them, that we have mass market accounts, that we have somebody who interacts. And the reason for

that is that a mass market store is a lot like a distributor in that they're going to order a lot of product. Why? Because the store, because they have a lot of stores, they're acting kind of as distributor for their store. That, you know, I don't know how many targets there are, but there's lots and lots of targets. So there's somebody at the central target who purchases things for target and then sells it to different target stores. So the idea in mass market is it's a lot like a distributor just on some level. Once you get big enough, once you have a distributor that's just your individual distributor that is part of your company.

And we started, so obviously the distributors we started doing right away in 93. I would say mass market, I'm trying to guess. I think we didn't get to mass market. It took a couple of years. like 97, 98, 99, sometime around there. It took a little while, really, to build up to mass market. And there were a lot of learnings. Mass market is a very different, it is different than normal distributors,

even though I'm comparing them. It's a different animal. And when you're dealing directly with the store itself, there's more demands. A lot of the mass market stuff love to do things that are unique to them. You know, we want a special, a skew, what excuse to, SKU, It stands for a single product. It means something.

It represents something. I forget what it is going. But we talk about skews all the time. And that means it's its own brand, its own product. And so oftentimes when you do mass market, they want a skew that's unique to them. And maybe that's just a different version of something we're already making, which one or two bells or whistles added,

they just make it a little bit different. If you go to mass market stores to see that all the time, they'll sell records where there's an extra song, stuff like that. And maybe we sell magic, but there's an extra card or whatever. You know, there's things that we do. And sometimes we work with them. Sometimes there's products that mass market want.

For example, we've worked with mass market to do smaller boosters. Boosters that have less a number of cards in it, meaning to try to bring down the price point of the product. Because one of the things about mass market is there's a lot of impulse buying. I mean, every store has it, but there's more impulse buying in a mass store. And so just trying to get magic down to a lower price point. And so we've experimented with different size boosters and stuff. Okay, next, we're going to online. So while there are more people within the 30-minute mile radius of a mass market store,

or one of the ones we sell to, not everybody has access to that. And so the next level was, what if we sell things online? And there's a couple different levels of online. We could sell online to sort of, you want to think of a mass market online. like Amazon, for example. We could sell things through Amazon. We could sell things through. There's some amount of stores that we do sell through that have things online.

We can purchase things online. And there's stuff like Hasbro has a store. So some of the stuff we have, you can get through the Hasbro store. There's a bunch of different avenues. But the idea of online is that you can come and you can purchase what you want and have it mail to you. One of the nice things about online is it just opens up. gives more people access. And a lot of this idea of supply channels is just,

look, we want everybody who wants to play magic to be able to play it wherever they want to play it. And so a lot of that, a lot of the idea of supply channels is just finding different ways to get things to you. Online, once again, each supply channel is its own thing. They each have their strengths and their weaknesses.

A lot of online, in the past we focused a little more on the more basic line of stuff. We put a lot of learn to play stuff online. And we also do the sort of the basic tent pole releases.

Online, I mean, we were experimenting with stuff probably back in the 90s, but I don't think it was really until 2000s that I would say we had sort of a robust online presence. That took a while for us to happen. Okay. Next. is what we call direct to consumer.

So direct to consumer means that we sell directly to you, the audience. Probably the most famous example of this is Secret Lair. So I, Mark Hagen was the guy who created Secret Lair. I had him on. We did a big podcast talking all about why Secret Lair exists. I will recap it here, but if you want more detail, I have a whole podcast on it. So the idea is that in order to make something for, game stores, there's a certain volume. We have thousands and thousands of stores, I believe,

just in the WPN, and there's a lot more stores beyond that. So when we make something that goes in stores, even if we put just a little tiny bit in every store, the volume of that is really big. It's a lot. So there's some things that we want to do that we think there's an audience for that is too small to, it just doesn't match the model of a traditional detritory. distributor. It just doesn't, like, there's just, we can't sell enough. Like, for example, some of our print runs of Secret Layer, like, if we had one Secret Layer per store, we, our volume is underneath that. That if every store got one Secret Layer, that that's lower than, that's, we'd have to make more than we made to sell that Secret Layer. There's a lot of game stores. And then a lot of

what we try to do in a secret layer is very what we call niche stuff. Here's an artist with a really different take on magic, and there's people that will really enjoy that, but a lot of people won't. And so the idea of secret layer was we can focus and do things that are unique, that there's a smaller audience for. I will say, as time has gone on, one of the things we've started doing is there's some amount of secret layer stuff.

We now connect to our direct-to-stores, meaning there's certain secret layer. that we think are popular enough and we want people to have access to, especially stuff with original content, that we now make some of it available to stores so that stores can sell it to you. Mostly that's done direct-to-store through our WPN. So we're not selling to all stores. Like I said, that volume is a little too high.

But we can sell to a certain number of WPN stores. And it depends on the product. Not all secret layers are big enough that that makes sense, but some of them, the more popular ones that we know that have a higher volume, we can do that too. And so that is, and the thing about direct-to-consumer is, it is the most,

like a lot of what we do is going through intermediaries. This is the one where we're not. I'm not going to say, I mean, Secret Layer, obviously, there's lots of challenges. One of the hardest part for us of Secret Layer is if we don't print enough Secret Layer,

it sells out too quick, everybody gets in effect because they wanted one. If we print too much, then we have access, there's no, you know, But like, we've had to, like, get rid of stuff in the past. So if we make product that we just can't sell, normally ends up getting destroyed, which is not great, not good for the environment.

Like, we really don't want to make stuff we can't sell. And so there's this tricky thing of predicting how much to sell. And while you would think that might be easy, it is not for a couple of reasons. One is, oftentimes with Secret Layer, we're making things we've never made before. How much demand is there for this thing that we have no, nothing to go off of? And the other thing that's hard is the way it print. printing works, we have to go to the printer, we have to put in sort of what we want from the printer way ahead of time. And so we're making predictions and we don't even like one of the challenges of the last couple years has been.

Magic's growth has been at such a steep rate. And we mean they've been growing so, so quickly that when we're predicting, you know, like we're printing stuff anymore from six months to a year from now, like we're predicting. We're making predictions based on a percentage of the audience. but the audience that we're using is growing in a rate that we couldn't predict because it grew faster than expected. And so there's a lot. I know it's really hard when I say behind the scenes that something's really hard on some of you guys. I don't care. Just do it.

But there's a lot of things we do that are very, very difficult. There's moving targets and things in which, you know, it is hard to make a prediction in which there's nothing to use as the baseline for your prediction. And the good news is the more we do things and the more we do secret later, the more we have things to base it off of. So, like, we get better as we do more. And that's just generally true. Another place that sort of the final one I've talked about today is there's another

direct consumer. First I'm talking to direct consumer. I'm talking online, direct to consumer. Come online, order it. We'll mail it to you. The other direct-to-consumer is the idea where we go where players are. Conventions is probably the easiest one to talk about. We have magicons.

we sell things at MagiConn's that are unique to MagicCon. And you want to come to MagicCon or another related Magic Convention to be able to have access to that. And so we are now producing some stuff that that is where we sell it. We sell it at conventions. And when I say at Convention, MagicCon are the big ones, but there are a lot of other conventions that are magic-focused that some of that product also gets sold at.

Some of it's unique to Magic-Con. It depends on what the product is. The stuff that's unique cards were more likely to have more conventions of access to unique cards than we are to like a certain shirt or something. Oh, the other big thing, okay, so two big things I need to tack on this. Number one is I've not gotten much into global. We are a global game,

and so everything I'm talking about has to be replicated in many different countries. And one of the challenges is countries work very differently. Yes, every country probably has a distributor, but how they function, how they distribute, how their stores work. We do all the different channels we're talking about. We try to do a lot of those channels in other countries.

Not every channel is possible in every country. We do our best attempt to get as many of them that makes sense into every country. But there's a lot of nuance in that. And just how different, the infrastructure of countries varies. Just how it's set up and how distributors work and how stores work and how mass market. It can vary a bit of it. So it's not. is a change from each one.

The next thing is, I really want to address something that... So when I talk about the psychographics, I talk about Timmy and Tammy and Johnny and Jenny and Spike, you know, I explain that there are different kinds of magic players that have different psychological needs. I'll talk about formats, how there's different ways to play magic that just require different cards. and one of the through lines of making magic is I'm trying to, I and my team, you know, everybody,

we're trying to make magic such that everybody who wants to play magic can play magic. We want to enable, oh, I just realized something. I forgot an entire supply chain. Let me add that in real quickly. The supply chain I forgot about it was digital. I was very mindset in physical cards. But another way to get cards to people is,

hey, maybe, maybe the way you want to play is in the comfort of your own home through digital cards. So we first did Magic Online. That was back in the early 2000s, I think, and then eventually we did Arena. Magic Online was trying to be kind of the exact duplicate.

It is exactly magic as you know it, but it is online. And we did the thing where cards were one for one, where you could buy digital cards, but then if you collected a full copy, of digital cards, you could trade that in for physical cards. I try to show that they're similar between them.

Magic Arena was more us trying to say, look, video games are quite popular, there's a lot of elements that people love about video games. Could we take magic and the essence of magic play, but bring a more video game aesthetic to it? And so Arena sort of did that.

It is magic, and you are playing magic and it's magic cards, but it has a little more of a video game aesthetic and dynamic to it. So anyway, the reason I want to bring up digital, that's another way to get magic cards to you. That magic cards don't necessarily have to be physical. That one of the things about digital is that we want players to play how they want to play. And one of the things that's very true is some people don't have the time or the ability to go to a local game store or even a local mass market store and we want your ability to be able to play magic. As you get older, you get more

responsibilities. You often get married or have kids and maybe your time, you don't have the, like maybe you can carve time out, but the time you can carve out is not necessarily when they're having events. You know, you have to show up at a very certain time to play in a local game store, but on Magic Arena, you can play anytime you want. There's always people online and you can play. So I, sorry, I should mention that digital is important, but it is, it is one of our channels. I just, I forgot that. Um, okay. So, so, One of the things is really important, sorry, is much like there are different psychic graphics, there are different aesthetic profiles, Vorthos and Mel, there's different types of formats.

Like, our job is to let people play magic. We want people to play magic however they want to play magic. But a corollary of that is we want them to be able to get magic, however, they need to get magic. And this idea that the game store is this equal spot, that just everything goes to the game store, then that is fair, is not true. Like I said, a lot, a lot of magic players don't have access to a local game store. That part of the reason we have all the supply channels, the reason we have distributed, direct to store, online, direct to consumer, digital.

The reason we do all these different things is that we want to make sure that everybody who wants to play magic not only can play in the way they want, but are able to get the cards in order for them to play. And I know sometimes that however you get your cards, it might just be like, well, this is the way people get their cards. That's not necessarily the case.

And yes, for example, local game stores are very important to us. Like I said, we spend a lot in time and energy in building them up and making them places to play. And that is great, and we want to keep that. And for people who have access to a local game store, we want you to use your local game store if, again, if that's how you want to play.

But if you want to play in your home on your kitchen table and invite your friends over, great. You want to play digital on your computer, great, or your phone or whatever. Wherever you want to play, we want to be there to help you play. And we need to be in places to help everybody get access to the cards

and that those are in different places. The one thing that I will, my final point of today is I do know that there's this worry when we get in one supply channel and not another supply channel like pretty much if you see something really cool but it's not available to your supply channel

you get very upset and go please make this available to the way that I purchase magic and we get that as much as possible we like to get things in as much channels as we can there are lots of reasons that can't always be the case the one last thing I do want to bring up is that magic has a very robust ecosystem. And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of

means within the ecosystem for cards to move around. The obvious one, for example, is trading, right? That if, you know, Magic is a trading card game. So if you have something, if you want a certain card and your friend or someone you know from the store has that card, you have the opportunity to trade something that you have for something that they have. And magic the ecosystem is way more robust than that. But the idea essentially is one of the ways we want to make sure that people have access to things is a volume issue. That if certain things can't go in every channel, then we want to make sure the channels that do have them have enough volume in them that the system can handle it. That there's enough there in the ecosystem that the ecosystem can then make sure that people get access to the cards they want.

And so one of the things that we're very careful of is when we make things, is making sure we make enough of them that we hit the need of the ecosystem. Now, I'm not saying, by the way, and once again, predicting how many people want a particular thing can be challenging. But I'm not talking about a particular style of a particular card. I'm talking more of the idea of we make something unique that people want access to. It's important that we have enough volume. So I'm not really talking about this artist of this card that exists in other.

forms. As much as I'm talking about, we're making a brand new thing that people want access to. We just want to make sure there's a high enough volume that the ecosystem can address the needs for different people to have it. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's chat.

I'm at work. Like I said, to sort of recap, if we have cards, we can sell the distributor which can sell to a local game store. We can do direct to a local game store on some elements through the WPN and things like that. We can sell to mass market stores. We can sell online.

We can tell direct-to-consumer either online or in person, like add events. We can sell cards through digital. So there's a lot of different avenues. There's a lot of different ways for us to get cards to you. And I do hear you. I do understand frustration when your avenue, your supply channel, doesn't have the thing you want. And that through many, many different factors, like I said, one of the things about the supply channels is each of them have

different challenges and how they function, and not everything can be through every channel. But we do want to make sure that we create enough of anything through the channels that we are making them that people want access to them hopefully can get access. Especially when I'm talking about unique cards. Like I said, a little bit less of, it's not crucial that everybody has the exact style of every card they want.

That, you know, it's more about making sure that cards that are unique that you want to play the game and have the functionality to play the game, getting that stuff out is the most important. We do understand there's... Cards have a lot of forms. If you can't... If not everybody can get every form of every card,

that is acceptable, because you can still play the game. And the key element is making sure that the game is playable. Obviously, first and foremost, magic is a game. So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed my talk today on supply channels. I, by the way, was talking about the major. There's some minor things I didn't end upon. But anyway, I hope you guys found it interesting. And now that I'm at work, we all know what that means.

It means at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.