Arena Club recently introduced a new feature, which I feel is really interesting and compelling for some collectors, which I anticipate many will copy.It’s called buyback. Essentially it gives you a guaranteed buyback offer on a hit pack pull should what you receive is below your ‘risk tolerance’ level. It is a form of insurance.
The math on a real example from my purchase.
- $250 slab pack- Buyback cost 10% of the slab pack price, so in this example $25
- Total cost of pack is $275.
- Slab pack is revealed and you can decide to accept the card or accept the buyback offer.In this case,
I took the buyback offer and received $200 back.
I effectively paid $75 to protect losing more than 80% buy in. Given the pack odds are weighted to cards below buy in, its a clever high margin add on that targets a collectors risk loss thresholds, which in theory is already loaded to the downside. The psychological ‘insurance’ of getting 80% back if you don’t hit what you want is a variation of F2P gaming add on systems of ‘re-rolls’. It would be interesting to see how many of pack purchases also bought the buyback premium. Right now Arena Club limits your ability to activate this to 15 times. Be interesting if they tested making it unlimited, but make the re-roll of each new purchase pack sequentially higher — e.g. on pack 2 open, the premium goes from 10% of slab pack price to say 20%. My gut is that there is a segment that will keep re-rolling at decreasing value given the sunk cost fallacy. If the goal of the system is higher $ per transaction, they should consider progressive cost re-rolls.I expect this mechanic to become more prevalent in hit pack/repacks as this category continues to grow in popularity with collectors looking for a bit more de-risked breaking.
Collectors would you buy the buyback insurance?
