Brohoof! Did you read Less Wrong? There's a FiMFiction group for that. http://www.fimfiction.net/group/1418/lesswrong Also, I was there when that science-fiction-y, technological singularity-touting pony story was written: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal

In other words, you think Hasbro hasn't made up their mind whether they want to sell MLP TCG in Russia? That's what I thought, too. Though I personally think it's kinda stupid from the business POV to pay for producing the intellectual property and not selling wherever possible (look at Apple, I think lately they maintain their profits just by selling their wares in even more countries, and even faster) Also, there's much evidence that shows that companies can successfully sell several similar brands in parallel, effectively expanding their profits by market segmentation, price discrimination or whatever. But Hasbro is a big сo., moves in mysterious ways and has the right to it. What ticks me off is that Enterplay representative wouldn't (couldn't) even tell me as much as why they can’t sell the game into my country. Indeed, it took pestering him with repeated inquiries to even admit that they can't! Enterplay is a small company, and should be approachable in theory. It doesn't look like they are overwhelmed with demand for their game and can easily afford ignoring honest inquiries from fans that wont to help promote it, either. I think I can well be the first Russian (or one of the few, anyway) to email them. So it almost looks to me like they are afraid to talk to me because they don't know if they can. The few times they did reply, they did pretty fast.

Hasbro does license MLP brand in Russia, to some extent: the first couple of seasons were dubbed and shown on kids' channel (no love from the fans for that, of course) and the merchandise is selling, too. So I really don't think there's a reason to not license MLP TCG, when they do already sell other MLP stuff.

Speaking of which, I haven't up to this moment thought that the situation with Hasbro or with Trader Joe's can do something with licensing, or that apparently parallel import _can_ be illegal at all. I guess I naively believed in the primate of private property and that if you are selling something you may not forbid buying it (unless it's some kind of regulated thing e.g. guns or drugs).

All this makes me want to become an anarchist of some sort.

Hasbro has an odd relationship with MLP CCG in the first place.

Cannot argue with that. Do you know that the reason you don't "tap" cards in MLP TCG, but "exhaust" them instead is because "tap" is a registered trademark. Apparently, Hasbro can't or won't allow one of its subsidiaries use a trade mark of their other subsidiary, even if it's basically their own! Crazy stuff, right? Finnish fans told me that.

I talked to Finnish fans at Crystal Fair con, who introduced me to the game. I was a couple of minutes late to the start of the panel and I was used to GDC (used to take part in Russian one), so when I saw guys confidently explaining how the game works, I thought they were the developers (that's the way it is at developer conferences). Turned out, those were the enthusiastic fans who learned of the game and wanted to promote it in Finland to create a wider audience, so that Hasbro/EnterPLAY would notice and start selling it officially, which should drop the prices, bring in official tournaments with developer-supplied prizes and expand the audience even further; that's their plan. They arranged the first ever unofficial (draft) tournament in Finland on the next day of the con. Half the people just heard of the game, like me, and I found it fun. So I thought: why not try the same in Russia? Only the situation is one step further removed for me: to the best of my knowledge, there's no store that sells the game in Russia, so thought of buying stuff on Amazon myself to get things going. With the ridiculous markup on TCGs in Russia, I could even break even with all the postage included, if I get lucky.

In Finland, they already had the stores that sell the game, despite not being released there officially; so they only had to find the one that allows them to sit and play, and went from there. Here's the store (Poromagia) representative setting up a stall in Finlandia Hall: http://i.imgur.com/WZoJERP.jpg Everything sold pretty well, even though half of it was the non-pony stuff.