Glossary
What is a Magic or Pokémon prerelease?
A prerelease is the in-store event held the week before a new trading-card set hits general retail. Players pay an entry fee to open sealed product from the new set early, build a deck, and play in a small tournament — usually with promotional cards as prize support.
How prereleases run
The shop receives a prerelease kit from the publisher: branded packaging, sealed product, a promo card for each player, and (depending on the publisher) prize cards for top finishers. Players pay entry covering the kit cost plus a small margin for the shop.
Format is almost always Sealed: each player opens product, builds a 40-card deck on the spot, and plays 3–4 rounds of Swiss. The kept product becomes the player's to take home.
Why prereleases matter commercially
Prereleases are the highest-margin sealed-product event of the set cycle. Players buy boosters, sleeves, and deck boxes during the event. Many shops also run buylist tables on prerelease day to acquire the new set's chase cards before the autopricer-driven price drop.
Why this matters in card-shop software
Terms like Prerelease are not just vocabulary. They shape how a card shop models products, prices, customers, trade-ins, events, and marketplace listings. Generic ecommerce platforms usually treat these details as notes or custom fields; a TCG platform has to make them part of the workflow so staff can use them at the counter and customers can use them online.
Storefront Pro uses this kind of operational language throughout the platform: product records, buylist rules, POS screens, autopricing, deckbuilder results, and marketplace sync all depend on the same definitions. That consistency is what keeps inventory accurate when the same card can be sold in-store, online, or on a marketplace in several conditions at once.
Related terms
- WPN — The Wizards Play Network (WPN) is Wizards of the Coast's official retailer programme for Magic: The Gathering. WPN status grants a shop access to prerelease kits, organised-play prize support, sanctioned-event tools, and the right to identify itself as a recognised Magic store.
- Friday Night Magic — Friday Night Magic (FNM) is the weekly recurring casual Magic: The Gathering event run on Friday evenings at WPN-recognised stores. It's the most consistent in-store event in trading-card retail and the backbone of most card shops' Friday revenue.
- Sealed product — Sealed product is any unopened trading-card product still in its publisher packaging — booster packs, booster boxes, bundles, prerelease kits, starter decks, collector boxes. It contrasts with singles, which are individual cards opened from product.
Run a card shop? Join waitlist — Storefront Pro is waitlist-only this month after reaching the onboarding limit. Storefront, POS, buylist, deckbuilder, events, marketplace sync — all in one platform.