Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne talks about bad Helvault behavior.

I guess it was too much to hope for that some dink would refrain from opening Wizards of the Coast's Helvault ahead of time, then taking photographs of the contents and posting them online.  Even worse, reportedly someone else unsealed the Helvault and posted the contents for sale on eBay.  A quick search on eBay didn't turn up any currently running auctions for one, so hopefully it got pulled fast.  Luckily, the first set of photos got pulled down as well but some other twits have bragged about copying and reposting them.

If a store owner cracked open the Helvault, I certainly hope WotC finds out whom and pulls their store status permanently.  WotC had set up a very cool promotion, especially by not telling anyone, except for those within the super secret circle at WotC, what it contained.  This essentially made the Helvault a giant booster pack with Magic players free to project onto it what it concealed.  There was even an amusing Twitter feed (#intheHelvault), with people tweeting what they thought it held.  Me, I hoped for a set of revised Dual Lands and a new Spindown counter.  Point is, whatever the Helvault held would be nowise as cool as what people thought it held.  It couldn’t be, that is the strength and the curse of our imagination.  Paraphrasing Mr. Spock from the Star Trek episode 'Amok Time,' "You will find the having is not as pleasurable as the wanting."

Cracking it open and posting the contents likely made the person who did it feel like they were important for a period of time and drawn some attention to their Website or Tumblr.  Meanwhile, WotC now has an event they put a lot of time and effort (and money) into that won't have nearly the impact that it could have; store owners who won't have as big a turnout for the opening of the Helvault as they expected prior to the breach (I have already seen postings from players who are skipping the pre-release as a result of finding out the contents of the Helvault); and players who had a potentially dang cool event ruined.  Here's hoping most of them haven't seen the posting of the Helvault contents; but given the pervasiveness of the Internet, it's not likely, unless they actively avoid the information.

On a related topic, I have heard secondhand of some retailers charging more for the events at which they'll open the Helvault.  As noted above, WotC put a lot of time and money into this promotion and is not charging them a plugged nickel extra to participate.  Our events at which the Helvault will open are getting more people than usually wanting to sign up and doing so much earlier in advance than normal, putting more money in the store’s pocket without us doing much more than what we normally do.  If players find out a store had charged more for a Helvault event, without providing anything extra to the players above and beyond what WotC provided, the players would justifiably be annoyed with the store.  Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.