[_raoulcousins]

The head designer of mtg (I'm getting this from his Drive to Work podcast) seems to imply that a lot of what was done in the early years was not nearly as planned as the NPR story says. From what I understand, they were printing as much as they could in the early years. Checking whether packs were selling above or below retail may have started after the disaster that was Fallen Empires (late 1994), which was so overprinted and underpowered that it still sells today for below retail.

Interesting also that NPR said Wizards was very concerned with the secondary market prices, when Wizards spokespeople never mention secondary prices directly, referring to secondary prices indirectly with the phrase ``card availability''.