It's no secret that Magic: The Gathering - Final Fantasy has been hotly anticipated and that stores are already selling out of product despite the set not yet being released.
Local game stores all over the place are reporting that they are having difficulty finding enough product to keep in stock not just for sales, but also for drafting and prize support for events such as Friday Night Magic. This is also true for the upcoming Chocobo Racing events that Wizards of the Coast announced for the Final Fantasy set as Wizards Play Network (WPN) member game stores are being required to use Final Fantasy play boosters as prize support for it.
"I tried to order enough, using multiple sources, and got allocated by all my distributors," states Michael Clark of Showcase Comics in Swarthmore, Penn. "They simply don't have the product."
To combat this supply problem, Wizards of the Coast is already printing up a new run of Magic: The Gathering - Final Fantasy play boosters. Problem is, this new print run isn't expected to hit distributers until more than a month after the set's release day.
"We are working to get more product to market, but unfortunately it is not expected until around July, at which time [Chocobo Racing] will be wrapping up," says WPN community manager Nelson Brown.
Some store owners seem to have saw this issue coming and have made adjustments on their end to ensure they'll have enough product to support events.
"I always make sure to set product aside to what I’m expecting event attendance to be for the entirety of the set… learned years ago you can’t rely on there being enough product," says Michael Glick, assistant manager of Game Night Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.
It's advice that Brown echoes, saying that local game stores should "consider reserving some Play Boosters to use for play throughout the season if [they] anticipate running out ahead of time."
