Look man.. I work at a store, and there IS going to be a shortage of the product at times. This set is literally selling 3x better then the previous 5 sets here, and I'm seeing the same story across the nation from other stores. The current retail value of the cards in a pack is well over the retail cost of the pack, so it actually makes sense for the average person to crack packs rather then buy singles right now. That's rarely true by such a large margin.
Yes, that is not sustainable since they will keep buying packs until it's no longer true, but much like first run Zendikar, worldwake, new phyrexia and ravnica, stores will have a hard time keeping stock at times while Wizards catches up with demand. You get allotments from the distributors, and one of the biggest distributors (alliance) is already limiting orders for english Tarkir (they are almost sold out basically) and are out of stock of most of their foreign language boxes, such as korean/russian. We had to place a max order with 4 different distributors to meet demand for our pre-orders and projected sales for the first two weeks, and we are an advanced plus store. We rarely have to go to more then 2 to do so.
There has not been an entire cycle of cards like the fetch lands that Vintage, Legacy, Modern AND Standard players all wanted. Shocklands were close, but the original Ravnica ones were produced on a much larger scale then original onslaught lands, and they aren't used in Vintage/Legacy as much. Thoughtseize was another similar situation, but it was a single card in a set. It only 'tanked' when MTGO redemptions hit, and it's bottom was about $12, it's mostly held at $20 since it's been in standard. The fetches will be similar, where polluted delta will 'bottom' at $20-25 on SCG, the lowest of the others will still be $12-15. Shocks only bottomed at $12 while standard legal, and they aren't as high of demand or as low of supply (we likely won't have a 3rd set that throws some extra copies into the mix like dragon's maze did) as the fetches.
If it's near Northwest Arkansas, need to come visit us!
It was a foil windswept heath. New one, not onslaught version (which have dropped almost half their value). It sells for $50 on SCG, no one is going to pay more then that in cash, $25-35 is more likely. He didn't get ripped off at all if he traded into the store, he came out like gangbusters if that's the case. Buylist on those 3 would have been about $41. If he got retail value for the packs that's only about $62. It sounds like someone went a little bit higher then 50% value in cash, which is totally fair for him.
