What is the availability of the complete sets Wizards of the Coast is apparently selling?

Question

I recently found, what appeared to be complete sets made by Wizards of the Coast. I had been contemplating buying a complete set of Dragons of Tarkir, with seemingly many vendors making offers, and now I find that (at least on Amazon.com) there are no vendors offering.

1. Are complete sets always offered?
2. When are complete sets offered? Only as part of pre-release? Or for longer?!

An example of what I'm describing can be seen in this picture

Here is a link to an ebay auction, for a "factory sealed" complete set of Khans of Tarkir: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Khans-of-Tarkir-KTK-Complete-Set-with-Mythics-MTG-Factory-Sealed-/181643375810?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a4ac9f4c2

Here is a link that may rot more slowly, pointing to all magic the gathering "complete sets" offers on EBay:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/Complete-Sets-/19114/i.html

one week ago, there were at least 3 vendors providing "factory sealed" sets of Dragons of Tarkir on amazon. Now I can't find any.

Answer 1

The picture, and eBay auction you link to is for a set that Wizards sends out as part of Magic Online set redemption. The way this works is if you have all of the cards in a specific set, and it is before the cutoff date for redeeming that set, you can have Wizards remove the set of cards from your MTGO account and mail you a set of physical cards. This video shows the boxes from a set redemption, and what the contents of that boxes look like. These sets are never sold by Wizards, though as this auction shows they can be resold by third parties.

Wizards of the Coast is not selling complete sets of cards. Third party vendors such as Star City Games and Channel Fireball however do. These third party vendors offer the complete sets by opening packs and putting the sets together themselves.

These vendors usually offer these products (the larger ones pretty much always do, smaller ones may or may not, it depends on if they think they can afford to or not), as for how long they offer it it depends entirely on how easy it is to keep in stock, and restock when they sell out. This means in general you can find newer sets for sale, but as you go farther back it is less likely that they will have a complete set in stock.

Answer 2

Wizards of the Coast does not sell complete card sets to either the public or to retail.

What you may have heard about was the complete sets offered via Magic the Gathering Online. The deal is: if you have all cards in a set owned in your MTGO account, Wizards of the Coast can ship you the real physical cards, at your expense, and then will erase the digital cards, never to be seen again. This generally means collecting all of the virtual cards the usual hard way: boosters, trading, etc.

There are other conditions too, such as having to actually be eligible for redemption. At the moment, those sets are listed on this table, and comprise the sets and core sets from Return to Ravnica up to Fate Reforged. (So, no Dragons of Tarkir yet.)

Card traders will, of course, sell complete sets online they've put together simply by opening enough boosters and having enough luck, as diego points out. This is a totally unofficial thing that Wizards of the Coast doesn't offer directly.