By Guo Heng Chin

I’m not going to lie. I have dragon sickness. I have an unhealthy obsession with my foil collection, I spend an inordinate amount of time procrastinating by checking out high end foils at the High End Magic Stuff for Sale Facebook group and every time I see an expensive foil can’t help but go full-Smaug:

I may not have amassed a collection of shiny trinkets at the level of Smaug’s but I do love my foils. I think most Magic players have some sort of affinity for foils, or at least a good portion of those I am personally acquainted with. Besides the fact that foils exact a higher collectibility and price, we humans seem to be attracted to shimmery objects and there is a whole industry dedicated to purveying shiny rocks and metals. Well, at least Magic players know their shiny trinkets could provide more value beyond being aesthetically pleasing; you can’t tap a gold ring for mana or use it as your Commander.

From a financier’s perspective, there are reasons to favor foils over non-foils in terms of investment potential:

Foils Are Forever

I wrote an article about the shifting paradigm for speculating Modern cards two weeks ago and a few readers asked about the security of Modern foils as an investment with Modern staples being reprinted across a wide array of Magic products from Thoughtseize and Chord of Calling in normal sets, Remand and Wurmcoil Engine in supplementary products and Modern Masters is now an annual or biannual phenomenon. Every expensive card that is a staple in the format is at risk of reprint.

Investing in foils is a way to hedge your bets against reprints. Compared with non-foil copies of a card, foil copies suffer a smaller price drop when the card is reprinted.  Lorwyn Thoughtseize was trending at $60 – $70 prior to being reprinted in Theros. You can buy one today at $35 a piece, even though the Theros reprint featured a different art. Foil copies of Lorwyn Thoughtseize took a hit from $200 to $175 when Theros reprints came out, and a further drop down to $100 last November, presumably due to the increased supply of foil Thoughtseizes in the market from foil redemptions (Magic Online redemption is available a month after a set is released on Magic Online).

However as of writing, a little more than a year after Thoughtseize was reprinted, a foil Lorwyn Thoughtseize now commands a hefty price tag of $240, higher than its pre-reprint price.

Normal versions of Ravnica Chord of Calling lost nearly five times its value from $40 to $9, whereas foil copies barely budged in price. Even foil Ravnica Lighting Helix which took a price dip when it was reprinted in Modern Masters back in 2013, rallied up to a price higher than its pre-Modern Masters price.  Speaking of Modern Masters, foil Morningtide Vendilion Clique and foil Ravnica Dark Confidant followed the same trend when they were reprinted in Modern Masters. Though those cards were not the ideal comparison for the fact that they were reprinted as a mythic in a limited print run product, they illustrate the price durability of foil Modern staples.

The risk of reprint is further mitigated by the fact that supplementary products rarely contain foils. When Wurmcoil Engine was reprinted in Commander 2014, the non-foil Scars of Mirrodin version lost around 50% of its value, dipping from $26 – $30 to $13 – $15. Foil Wurmcoil Engine only suffered a 25% loss in value, probably due to the fact that there were no foils in Commander 2014.

Let’s look at another Modern staple:

Compare the price trajectory between the non-foil version and the foil version; there was barely a drop in price for the foil version when Jace vs Vraska injected new copies of Remand into the market in March 2014.

Dizzying Heights

Foils have a lot more room for appreciation compared with non-foils. This effect is more pronounced in foil commons and uncommons that see play in Modern and Legacy. Compare the spike between normal and foil copies of Forked Bolt:

While a profit margin exists for speccing on commons and uncommons, its not as lucrative as speccing on mythics. Common and uncommon speculation is a low risk speculation; you do not put in much and do not win or lose much. Think of speccing on foil playable commons and uncommons as speccing on playable mythics. There is a higher entry price, but you stand to make more.

Foiling Out on the Cheap

Hopefully by this part of the article, I have convinced you that foils are better investments than those plebeian non-foils. However, we all know that foils are more expensive than non-foils.

I am in the midst of a multi-year journey to foil out my Modern and Commander decks and there are a few financial pointers I’ve picked along the way which may be of use to other collectors/players/dragons seeking to foil out their decks without breaking their bank account or just acquire foils for investment at a low enough price to see a profit.

Buy Foils When They Are Cheap

I know, it sounds like a protip. But it is one of those tips that are easier said than done. How many people got their foil Forked Bolts or foil Gitaxian Probes before those cards spiked? I know I did not. Signals were present prior to those cards spiking: Gitaxian Probe was a small-third-set card that was present as a playset across multiple archetypes in Modern and Legacy, but its foils were still selling for single digits up till March 2014. Forked Bolt was a UR Delver staple on Magic Online prior to its spike. Another common foil, Delver of Secrets dropped to $2 when Innistrad rotated, even though RUG Delver was already an established tier one Legacy deck.

Get in on foil common and uncommon staples in Modern and Legacy while they are still hovering around the middle of the single digit price zone, and if they are not at a risk of reprint in the short run. Mutagenic Growth is seeing play in Modern beyond Infect thanks to Shahar Shenhar’s Burn at the 2014 World Championship which ran four copies of Mutagenic Growth. While foil Mutagenic Growth is hovering at $5, I am not not inclined to buy it with Modern Masters 2015 around the corner. Foil Lingering Souls, on other other hand, seems like a good buy at $6 each, especially the FNM version which is going for just $2.43.

Getting into foils when they are cheap is not as easy as it sounds for the fact that most foil Modern and Legacy staples are already expensive. It feels counterintuitive to buy foil Abrupt Decay at $25 back in early 2013 as it was a card from a large set that was still being opened, or at $35 when it rotated out of Standard in the fall of 2014. Those were probably the best time to get your foil Abrupt Decays; today you would need to fog up $75 for one.

The only reason I have foil Steam Vents in my Modern decks is my decision in the middle of March 2014 to finally buy my playset of foil Steam Vents at $25 after weeks of deliberation. $25 for a foil rare from a large, bestselling fall set (every fall set seems to set new sales record these days) felt steep when I hovered over the confirm payment button. Two weeks later foil Steam Vents spiked to $45 – $50. Apparently, I bought one of the last playsets of foils Steam Vents that were available at $25 apiece.

That anecdote is not a humblebrag; it encapsulates a dilemma in finding the optimal time to pick up foil Modern or Legacy staples. There is always a lingering doubt if the price of a foil staple is already at its peak when its price is so high. The key is to override that doubt with good reasoning backed by solid data.

Abrupt Decay was played as multiples in a multitude of tier one archetypes in Modern and Legacy. Was $20 – $25 an appropriate price to pay for a top-notch eternal staple?  Steam Vents was the most-played shockland in Modern and third most ubiquitous card in Modern when I bought foil copies of it at $25 (it is now the most-played land and second most-ubiquitous card in Modern).

Evaluate the price of Modern and Legacy foils proportional to the amount of play they are seeing. I bought my foil Delvers at $2 when Innistrad was still legal with the reasoning that there was no way a Legacy staple with Modern potential (back then Modern Delver had no boats to ride to valueland) could be below $5.

I agree with Cliff Daigle in his article last December where he mentioned that now is an excellent time to pick up foil Khans of Tarkir fetchlands. If foil copies of shocklands, which only is played one or two (at most three) copies in Modern decks (or as a poor Commander player’s duals) could fetch up to $40 – $50 apiece, is it possible that fetchlands, which are played three to four copies in every single format they are legal in are worth just $50? Is $85 – $90 too much for the blue ones when a foil Scalding Tarn is $182? If you are looking to assemble your foil playset of the Khans of Tarkir fetches, now is a good time to start.

However, if you are unwilling to pay so much for your Khans of Tarkir fetches, there is a way to get around it. Perfectly legal, I assure you.

Redemption

Yes, Magic Online is still bad. It still have a UX that harks back to the early 2000s. Besides being the sole place where you can get in as many reps on your deck as with bench-pressing at the gym (no way I can get 50 reps on my Jeskai Tokens playing four-round FNMs once per week) and where you can draft without wearing pants, Magic Online is useful to get foils on the cheap via redemption.

Magic Online allows you to manifest the intangible, digital cards you own into physical cardboard by putting in a redemption order when you have one of every card in the set you are redeeming. Basically if I have a non-foil copy of every 284 cards in Khans of Tarkir (284 is 269 plus fifteen basic lands as each version of the basic lands counts as a different card) and I purchase a normal Khans of Tarkir Redemption Request at the Magic Online Store, during the next downtime the 284 cards will be removed from my Magic Online account and physical copies of those cards will be sent to me. Pretty nifty isn’t it?

Redemption is available for both non-foils and foils. If I have a foil copy of each Khans of Tarkir card on Magic Online, I could purchase a Premium Khans of Tarkir Redemption  Request, have those cards removed from my Magic Online account and a bunch of shiny Khans of Tarkir singletons delivered to my doorstep.

The cost of redemption is:

Total value of the set on Magic Online + Handling Fee ($25) + Shipping ($2.99 for delivery within the United States, $29.99 for international delivery)

The handling and shipping costs are set in stone, so the only variable is the total value of the set on Magic Online. There are plenty of reliable bot chains to buy singles from on Magic Online, but the one I use the most is GoatBots as they have one of the most user-friendly website to check prices, good availability and very competitive pricing.  As of writing, GoatBots is selling a foil set of Khans of Tarkir mythics and rares for $341. The price of foil commons, uncommons and basic lands fluctuates, but they usually cost around $90 in total. That makes it $431 to assemble a foil set of Khans of Tarkir on Magic Online.

Cost of redeeming a foil set of Khans of Tarkir as of writing:

$431 + $25 + $29.99 (I live in Malaysia) = $485.99

Let’s compare the cost of redeeming a foil set of Khans of Tarkir with the cost to assemble a foil set of Khans of Tarkir in real life. MTGPrice.com has a useful Browse Sets feature (shameless plug) to view the price of all the cards in a set in a list, including foil sets. According to the foil Khans of Tarkir list, the price of a physical set of Khans of Tarkir is $860.34. Redeeming a set alone saves you a whooping $374.35 and that is with the extra $27 for international delivery.

The price of collecting a foil copy of each Khans of Tarkir fetchland in real life is $322.81. Let’s say you redeemed a foil Khans of Tarkir set at $485.99 just for the fetches  and you sold off all the other foils worth $5 or more according to the MTGPrice.com list for a total of $323.06 (the redeemed set includes high value foil mythics and foil Monastery Swiftspear and Treasure Cruise. Oh and also a foil Dig Through Time which I hear is worth quite a bit). That means you have acquired your foil fetches for a mere $162.93, or just $33 per foil fetch, which is a steal considering that foil Polluted Delta and foil Flooded Strand each costs around $85 and the rest $50. Beat that, eBay. Oh, the redeemed foils are about as near mint as they could be – the redeemed cards come in a factory-sealed box.

From my experience, I found that playable foils are generally in high demand and relatively easy to move. You would still be getting your foil fetches much cheaper than market price if you liquidate your foils worth $5 or more at 70% the MTGPrice.com fair trade price, which is already an aggregated price.

I hope you readers and fellow foil collectors have found this article informative, and a way to hoard more shimmering trinkets without breaking your bank. Or vault, if you’re a dragon.

---

 

By Guo Heng Chin

One of the perks of being a Magic player is getting multiple Christmases per year. Just as the official Muggle season of gifts came to an end, Magic players were spoiled with a slew of presents in the form of highly anticipated Fate Reforged spoilers.  As of writing, 86 out of the 185 new cards we would be getting in Fate Reforged have been unveiled. But of course, the ones most financially relevant would be the subset of ten mythic rares and a small portion of the thirty five rares. Today I will put the white and blue mythics under my financial microscope to evaluate their financial potential and whether you should pick them up now or stay far far away.

Let’s start with the soon-to-be master of your wallet, master of potentially Standard and maybe even Modern (a big maybe, as I will explain in a bit):

Young Pyromancer got a big upgrade and discarded his impulsive red alignment. Monastery Mentor is the real deal and is highly likely to end up being one of the chase rares in Fate Reforged. As of writing, eBay completed listings have Monastery Mentor at $27 each and major stores like StarCityGames.com and ChannelFireball.com are preselling Monastery Mentor at $30.

It is pretty obvious that the Mentor is a solid card, but is the Mentor really worth that much? Is Monastery Mentor the next Voice of Resurgence, who broke $50 during the early stages of its existence? Like Voice of Resurgence, Monastery Mentor possesses a Modern-viable casting cost and is capable of generating insane card advantage. Heck, it even takes after Young Pyromancer, an already popular Modern mainstay.

My prediction is no. I do not think Monastery Mentor would become a Modern staple à la Voice of Resurgence and Young Pyromancer. And my arguments are as follows:

Monastery Mentor does not generate card advantage the turn you cast him unless you cast Monastery Mentor with open mana. That is a huge drawback in Modern for a card that costs three to play. Voice of Resurgence was scary because the plucky goat-like elemental assured you card advantage upon resolving and it costs one less. Baaaa.

Brimaz, King of Oreskos, an analog of Monastery Mentor requires two Lightning Bolts to take out (unlike their cat ancestors, leonin do not have nine lives), which is technically card advantage as he trades for two cards from your opponent. I would not consider getting my Brimaz or Voice of Resurgence Path to Exiled to be parity; Path propels your mana one turn ahead, a benefit for decks running Brimaz and Voice of Resurgence as you usually want to cast them on curve rather than hold out for open mana to be available like Monastery Mentor.

Nor does Monastery Mentor protect itself (I really can’t tell if Monastery Mentor is male or female from the low resolution card art, and the Vorthos in me demands that I get my card’s gender right. I am hedging by using it at the moment, at least until Wizards releases a Monastery Mentor wallpaper). I may not be an esteemed deck theorist or brewer, but I have the feeling that the current incarnations of Jeskai in Modern would prefer to run Geist of Saint Traft over Monastery Mentor.

In a format where Lighting Bolt is the most played card, being found in 49% of decks, I would be hard pressed to cast a three mana creature that is vulnerable to a single Lightning Bolt. It’s a huge tempo loss for me if my Monastery Mentor eats a Bolt without generating at least one token. The same applies to Young Pyromancer, but at two casting cost, Young Pyromancer is less of a tempo setback. I could cast Young Pyromancer on turn three with one mana open as opposed to casting Monastery Mentor on turn four. The difference of one mana is huge in a powerful format like Modern, and is amplified for tempo decks that do not run many lands; it is significantly easier to hit your third land drop than your fourth in these decks.

For all of Monastery Mentor’s drawbacks in Modern, Monastery Mentor is chock full of potential in Standard. I have been delving in Standard for the PPTQs and I am very excited to get my hands on my own playset of Mentors and witness new brews emerge from the existence of Monastery Mentor or current archetypes bolstered from some mentoring.

Fate Reforged may be a small set, but it will be drafted more than Dragon’s Maze. Fate Reforged seems choked full with powerful mythics to satiate Spikes and plenty of dragons (dragons at uncommon? It’s been a while) to whet the appetite of the casual crowd. I think Fate Reforged would be cracked in abundance, or at the very least more than Dragon’s Maze. More importantly, there would be more incentive to redeem Fate Reforged, which means that the Voice of Resurgence Effect would not apply to Monastery Mentor.

The Voice of Resurgence Effect is a phenomenon coined by the Brainstorm Brewery crew to describe a mythic spiking to unprecedented heights due to the fact that it is the only financially relevant card in the set. Magic Online redemption is one of the factor driving down card prices for new sets and with little incentive for retailers to redeem online sets, the market supply of Voice of Resurgence is lower than your usual chase mythic, thus its lofty price.

I am aiming to get my playset of Monastery Mentor at $20 per piece at the maximum and that is just so I can grind the PPTQs shall the Mentor turns out to be a consensus upgrade in the Jeskai Tokens I am currently running. I would only reach for $25 if Monastery Mentor becomes a multi-archetype staple like Goblin Rabblemaster.

Everytime I take another look at Soulfire Grand Master my opinion of the card tanked a little. While she possess a unique ability to transfigure your burn spell into Lighting Helixes, I think she might be overrated due to the fact that its an ability that is seeing print for the first time and no one has really tested it out yet in real life. While it may be fun to transform my Lightning Strikes into Lightning Helixes, it comes at a cost of an extra cards that is the Soulfire Grand Master herself. Principle of equivalent exchange eh? I do not hit parity until I reaped the lifelink out of my second burn spell and that is assuming I am not playing against a deck like Abzan Reanimator that can grind me from 60 life to zero (true story) or UB Control where my life total is irrelevant most of the time so long it is not infinite (or one billion, as the competitive REL rules demand a set figure for infinite life gain loops).

Her activated ability is no better; having to pay an extra four mana to imbue a spell with buyback is too inefficient for competitive play and is a bit of a win more clause. The only decks I imagine that could abuse this clause are grindy Jeskai control decks, to cast a burn spell with buyback at the end of their opponent’s turn, three damage at a time to slowly finish off your opponent, or control decks seeking a soft lock with reusable counterspell in the late game. Or reusable Dig Through Time or Treasure Cruise. All those scenarios are enticing, but they spell out c-u-t-e.

Soulfire Grand Master has been closing at $20 – $23 apiece on eBay and $25 at StarCityGames. I am staying away from Soulfire Grand Master and I would be selling any copies I rip at the prerelease and the following weeks as fast as I can find a buyer.

Treasure Cruise may do a decent impression of Ancestral Recall but Temporal Trespass is definitely no Time Walk. At least Temporal Mastery has synergy with cards that manipulate the top of your library. At three blue, you have to be running a predominantly blue deck to be able to cast it, and outside of Commander, I do not see the card trespassing into any format. Temporal Trespass is going for $5 – $7 on eBay and other major retailers, but I would not be buying my Temporal Trespasses anytime soon. I really only need one for my Narset, the Enlightened Master 1v1 Commander deck, but I will wait until I pop one in the slew of Fate Reforged packs I would be opening.

Torrent Elemental is a contender for control finisher in Standard and is able to do a decent emulation of the mighty Thundermaw Hellkite sans haste and five to the face. The Elemental’s second clause is not easy to abuse in Standard unfortunately and as so, would have a hard time dethroning the temperamental Pearl Lake Ancient as the de facto control finisher. If only Torrent Elemental’s second clause can put it into the battlefield tapped from the bulk bin. If only.

That is all for today’s review. Stay tuned next week for more prodding at Fate Reforged mythics. In the mean time, I am really excited for Fate Reforged. As I was writing this piece, a common dragon was just spoiled!

#mtgfrf has the highest AS-FAN of dragons of any set ever. One way we’ve done this is my social media preview card. pic.twitter.com/ZRuZNk7DcR

— Mark Rosewater (@maro254) January 5, 2015

I am an avid fan of Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast and one of the recurring design concepts he discussed was that for a theme of a set to truly work, it has to be found in common rarity cards to ensure that even casual players who drafts the set once in a while have the opportunity to encounter the theme (Mark Rosewater put it more elegantly of course, I was just paraphrasing to the best of my memory. For the uninitiated, Mark Rosewater is the head designer of Magic and one of the most well-loved voices in the Magic community). Its no secret that I am a big fan of dragons and I am very excited to see Wizards going full throttle with the dragon theme.

ADVERTISEMENT: We are proud to announce the brand new 3rd Edition Grimoire Deck Box. Preorder period is scheduled to be in Jan. Sign up for their newsletter to get the latest updates and offers.

By Guo Heng Chin

There are a few topics I would like to write about, but neither had sufficient fodder to be expanded into a full-fledged article. So I combined them together into one article, a sort of holiday hodgepodge of an article. The first part deals with the shifting paradigm in Modern speculation. The second discusses the first trickle of spoilers in the Fate Reforged spoiler season.

Modern Paradigm

Modern used to be a veritable speculator’s heaven. It was a relatively new format with plenty of unexplored deckbuilding space. Breakout cards spiked overnight by order of magnitudes when they received coverage during a major event. Bulk and near-bulk rares shot up to insane heights when a home was found for those once unloved pieces of cardboard wasting away in bulk bins. Modern staples resembled blue chip shares. However, that era is coming to an end.

Wizards stated over and over again that they are serious about supporting Modern as a Pro Tour format. Modern was a non-rotating format unshackled by the reserve list. We passed the era when the power level of the format was being tuned by frequent bannings, and the format has since evolved a distinctively unique flavor – midrange value grinds with a splash of combo – and a plethora of viable tier one decks in the format at any one time. Wizards is currently in the stage of keeping Modern’s entry barrier sufficiently affordable to be inclusive of the majority of the playerbase, while at the same time remain a premier non-rotating format.

From the reprint of in-demand, expensive staples like Remand and Wurmcoil Engine in supplementary products like Duel Decks and Commander decks to reprinting Thoughtseize and fetchlands in normal sets, Wizards made it abundantly clear that they are taking their promise to ensure that Modern staples remain affordable seriously. While Wizards’ dedication is great for the game and playerbase overall, it increased the risk for Magic financiers invested or planning to invest in Modern staples.

I would not have it any other way: I am a player first, a financier second. I got into Magic finance because Magic is an expensive habit. A little speculation here and there helped eased the financial pressure of grinding competitive Magic.  If Wizards goes gung-ho in reprinting Modern staples, that negates some of the cost associated with staying at the forefront of competitive Magic. Every wave of reprints help me get one step closer to completing my gauntlet of tier one Modern decks.

That does not mean I am jumping overboard from the invest-in-Modern ship. I still have a decent amount of vested interest in terms of Modern investment. That just means I have to change my outlook towards investing in Modern cards to fit the new paradigm. Adapt or die.

I. Shorter Hold Time

Thee Modern staples I bought at the inception of the format in 2011 just kept on going up and up. Those $8 Vendilion Cliques I bought on eBay doubled to $20, $40 and then $80. I bought my fourth non-foil Cryptic Command at $35 in January 2014 because I needed it for the Modern side event at Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur. $35 must be the ceiling for a Modern staple reprinted in Modern Masters as a rare, I consoled myself as I mentally punched myself for not completing my non-foil playset back when it was a $15 card. Cryptic Command is now at $60. Don’t even get me talking about the Liliana of the Veils and Scalding Tarns.

Most of my Modern investments remained with me today as I kept on convincing myself that they have more room to grow. The fact that my holdings got more expensive after Modern Masters emboldened the greedy me. My Modern stakes were invincible.

My approach to Modern speculation was untethered from the realities of Magic finance and investment in general. Even the mighty crude oil eventually fell in price. Earlier this year my Remands took a hit when it was reprinted in Jace vs. Vraska. Fine, Remand was still a double-digit uncommon and I dug them out from my bulk box anyway. But I still held on to them, hoping that they will return to their near-$20 price.

Late last year Birthing Pod was hovering around $6 – $8. I bought my second playset of Birthing Pods. And traded for a few more. In the post-Bloodbraid Elf era of Modern, Pod decks took down more Grand Prix than every other archetype in Modern. Surely $6 – $8 was way too low for the namesake piece of Pod decks. I was right. Birthing Pod spiked to $18 – $19 spring this year. Yet I was reluctant to liquidate my Birthing Pod holdings. Phyrexian mana cards must surely be hard to reprint. I am sure Birthing Pod has more room to grow as the centerpiece of one of the most important archetype in Modern! I told myself that even though I knew they were printed in the New Phyrexia event deck. The spike did not last long; Birthing Pod dropped to $10 over the summer and with Modern Masters 2015 coming up, I doubt Birthing Pod will be able to break $15 again. Let alone the lofty heights I had hoped for previously.

Modern is no longer a hold and wait game. If you are interested to invest in Modern staples, you must be willing to liquidate them rather than holding onto them like blue chip stocks. Some time ago, Corbin Hosler wrote about liquidating his fetchlands when the blue ones hit $35. When Scalding Tarns broke $100 during spring this year, I thought to myself Corbin could’ve made so much more had he held them just for another year. Every time I considered liquidating my Modern holdings that are already in the profit, I hark back to Corbin’s article and told myself to wait just a little bit more.

Gone are those days when we laughed at the idea of predicting a ceiling for Modern staples. Today, as I write this, I looked back at Corbin’s article as a good paradigm to follow for investing in Modern staples: liquidate once you have made your profit.

Be willing to liquidate your holdings that have grown into profit instead of waiting and hoping for another spike. It took a while for Wizards to go full steam ahead with their promise on reprinting Modern staples due to their multi-year-long development cycle and a conservative approach to prevent Chronicles 2.0, but Wizards seem to have grasped the pace for Modern reprints now. This year alone saw Modern staples like Wurmcoil Engine, Remand, Chord of Calling, Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and fetchlands fall in price.

In Bayesian terms,  it is better to liquidate at 130% profit rather than stake out for a 200% profit and risk making a loss instead in the current climate of Modern reprints. As Corbin said, leave the last 10% to others. Expanding on that for contemporary Modern speculation, I would say you have to be willing to even leave the next 20% – 30%.

Set a reasonable exit price for your Modern speculations and adjust existing exit targets. I am no longer holding onto my Snapcaster Mages until they hit Dark Confidant price; I am happy to liquidate them once they hit $50 and take home the $30 in profit rather than risk a reprint while I am gunning for a $60 paycheck.

II. Every Product Spoiler is Relevant.

I used to ignore supplementary product spoilers as they were not relevant to the competitive metagame. I prefer to discover those items at my own pace like shuffling up freshly-unboxed Commander decks with no knowledge of the decklist and finding out myself the surprises R & D had in store for me as I play that deck. It was a pleasant surprise to discover the dragons subtheme in the Daretti Commander deck as I drew dragon after dragon.

Wizards is now willing to reprint expensive Modern mythics in supplementary products like Wurmcoil Engine in the red Commander 2014 deck, Built from Scratch. Keep a close finger on the pulse for Modern reprints.

III. Hit it Low

Look for obviously underpriced Modern staples rather than buying already expensive Modern staples and hope for the next bump. It is harder to predict if another bump would happen with Wizards churning out so many reprints. The increased risk is not worth it.

Hunt for Modern cards no one is looking at because it is not seeing much playing  at the moment or a recent reprint crashed its price. $3.58 Chord of Calling is a good example. You are unlikely to regret buying a Modern staple at this price.

That Time of the Year

One nice thing about being in charge of the column that goes up slightly after midnight on Tuesday is getting to write about the spoilers right away.

The first spoiler that manifested itself was:

Whisperwood Elemental was Mark Rosewater’s preview card on the first day of spoiler season. When I first read through the essay of a card, I was underwhelmed. Mark Rosewater’s spoilers were usually the cream of the crop for the set, the marquee cards of the block designed to whet our appetites and rev up the engines of the hype train. A five mana for 4/4 with no enter the battlefield ability felt a little disappointing.

While Whisperwood Elemental’s triggered-at-your-end-step ability may not always net you the extra value with Hero’s Downfall, Murderous Cut, and Stoke the Flames being popular removals in the format, Whisperwood Elemental rewards you with a snowballing board state if it is left unanswered. Sticking a Whisperwood Elemental on board for a few turns might just put you too far ahead for your opponent to catch up, especially with its second clause that acts as an insurance against board wipes. Financially, I am not (yet) sold on Whisperwood Elemental as it feels fragile in the current state of Standard. It has the making of an expensive rare, but I think Whisperwood Elemental might be more Duskmantle Seer than Wingmate Roc. Okay, maybe better than Duskmantle Seer, but definitely not as good as Wingmate Roc.

Ah dragons. I missed them. Competitively costed? Check. Solid stats? Check. @rezaaba reminded me during our usual flurry of spoiler season discussion that Kolaghan is actually a 5/5 when attacking. I am not sure how relevant Kolaghan’s anthem trigger would be at five mana: Kolaghan could see play as a top-of-the-curve alpha striker in aggressive RB shells. Or perhaps a midrangey Mardu deck that relies on token-makers to create an overwhelming number of creatures to make Kolaghan’s anthem worth the five mana you tap for it. Note that Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker, another key-piece of Mardu midrange tokens,  triggers Kolaghan’s anthem too.

Would Kolaghan be the Thundermaw Hellkite to the contemporary Thragtusk, Siege Rhino? I highly doubt so. The prevalence of reanimator strategies in the current Standard metagame is a twofold obstacle for Kolaghan. The amount of life gained by reanimator decks over the course of a game is too much for aggressive decks to handle, even if they have access to top of the curve beaters like Kolaghan. Second, the number of 1/1 deathtouch bees in the meta is too damn high. Slamming hasty five mana fliers is not something you want to be doing unless its called Thundermaw Hellkite.

I am happy to see a new, potentially competitive dragon being printed, but I doubt its financial potential. Even if Kolaghan sees play, small set rares have a low ceiling unless it is a ubiquitous linchpin of the format. Kolaghan is not a card I am inclined to preorder.

Manifest Destiny

I stole that pun off Twitter.

I guess it’s too much to ask for a card to be called “Manifest Destiny”, so maybe a deck can be called that. #MTGFRF

— MTG Color Pie (@mtgcolorpie) December 29, 2014

At first glance, manifest seemed like an underwhelming mechanic designed with limited in mind. For once I was actually excited for limited. Morph is already pretty fun by itself and manifest is going to push limited dynamics to a whole new level. Playing around face-down cards just got a whole lot more complicated (and fun)!

Upon closer inspection, manifest is a form of card advantage. It takes a card from the top of your library and turns it into a 2/2 creature, regardless of the card type. That extra land on top of your library could be conscripted to bolster your board presence, saving you one dead draw phase. Manifesting a creature from the top of your library is sort of like drawing it, except you do not use up your draw phase.

But enough about strategy, I am writing about Magic finance and there would be plenty of discussion regarding the pros and cons of manifest by other more esteemed Magic strategy writers. What I am concerned about is the financial impact of the mechanic on existing cards, and a card that stands to abuse the manifest mechanic in Standard is no other than:

Manifesting a Hooded Hydra allows you to turn it face up for just GG to become a 5/5 creature that leaves behind five snake tokens. That is a trip to valueland.

Of course that scenario assumes that Hooded Hydra is on the top of your library when the manifest trigger resolves. Working with the manifest cards spoiled so far, we can assume that manifest will draw from the top card of your library. Barring convoluted ways to get Hooded Hydra onto the top of your library (thereby negating the advantage from manifesting it) your best shot at manifesting a Hooded Hydra would be to run four copies of it and/or manipulate the top of your library with Courser of Kruphix and scry.

I am not saying that Hooded Hydra will shine with the new manifest mechanic. It just has a better chance of finding a home. Hooded Hydra is a card to keep an eye on as the spoilers are rolled out within the next few weeks. If Fate Reforged grants enough tools to build  decks revolving around the manifest mechanic, getting in on Hooded Hydra at under $2 would have a nice payoff as it is one of the prime candidates to be a four-of in manifest decks.

Another card that works well with manifest is Ashcloud Phoenix, which @rezaaba pointed out during our discussion. You get to unmorph the Phoenix at two mana less than its morph cost and still reap the benefits of turning it face up. Ashcloud Phoenix already proved to be a solid, difficult-to-remove card even at a morph cost of six; manifest decks would be inclined to run multiple copies of Ashcloud Phoenix shall those decks exist. Do not buy Ashcloud Phoenix right now, its current price of $4.33 is not a great buy-in. Keep an eye on upcoming spoilers for manifest enablers and just trade for your Phoenices at the moment.

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By Guo Heng Chin

As I mentioned in last week’s article, I was in Tokyo for a week. Seeing that the holiday season is just around the corner, let me regale you with some holiday tales of my little pilgrimage to the Magic stores in Tokyo and the wonders I saw and experienced throughout my journey. Readers interested in actionable finance-related stuff can skip straight to the Trends segment at the bottom of this article for the card I am examining this week with my financial monocles.

While my trip was not Magic-related (that one comes next May for Grand Prix Chiba featuring Modern Masters Two, I mean 2015), I tried to squeeze in as much time as my girlfriend would allow to drop by Tokyo’s Magic stores. In a way, Japan is the hallowed land of Magic: the Gathering in Asia. It is the Asian country with the largest number of Grand Prix allocation each year. For comparison, there will be five Grand Prix in Japan in 2015 while China and Southeast Asia only got three each. Japanese players are among some of the most accomplished Asian players in the pro circuit, a testament to the thriving Magic scene in Japan. However the part about Japanese Magic stores that excited me the most was the fact that they are home to Japanese foils and various other peculiarities unique to Japan.

The Rarest of Them All

The first place I went to search for magic stores was Akihabara, the epicenter of geekery in Tokyo. Akihabara is home to not just one, nor two, but a cluster of Magic stores, with at least four of them being major purveyor of singles. The first store I dropped by was Big Magic located on the top floor of Radio Kaikan, a shopping mall dedicated to anime and manga, figurines, collectibles and TCGs . As Big Magic’s name implied, the store showcased a big inventory of big money singles.

It felt surreal to be in the vicinity of so many singles worth more than my monthly salary just sitting behind the glass display, like museum exhibits. I have played in a plethora of Magic stores in Malaysia and England, but I have never encountered such brazen display of Powers and high end cards within a two meter radius. I grind competitive Magic and write about Magic finance, but I am also a collector at heart. I have a fascination with the rare and unique, a trait I imagine I share with most collectors, be they collectors of cardboards, stamps, or bottle caps. And nothing excites a collector like witnessing with his or her own eyes an object so rare it possessed a near-mythical status:

The Adarkar Wastes above was one of the test print cards done in a different frame. Though the card has an Unglued symbol, it was part of the test print for 8th Edition that leaked out. There is only one copy of the card above as only four of each card were printed, with two of them featuring different styles of foiling.  The copy above should be the dark hue-with-foiling-all-over-the-card version.

Wow. Just wow. I recall reading an old piece about high end foils by no other than the godfather of Magic finance, Jonathan Medina. The article concluded with a segment aptly titled ‘Foils You’ll Never See’  where Medina wrote about certain foils where ” chances are that you won’t run into these, but you should be aware that cards like this exist”. They are so rare that most of the time you can only see them at Magic Librarities, a website dedicated to archiving all the rarities that exist throughout the two decades of Magic’s existence, and one of my favorite procrastination site (I have some boring task at hand, oh wait lets have a look at all these rarities). There was a sense of awe in seeing those cards in real life, akin to witnessing in person an old painting in which you have only saw low resolution pictures of in a textbook or Wikipedia.

I also had the chance to see one of these beauties physically. I have always wondered how would a shiny bronze symbol would look like on a card:

Cream of high-end rarities aside, the other cool thing about Big Magic in Akihabara is their order-taking system where you can browse and select the singles you want on a tablet and pick them up on their counter. I read that Hareruya, Tomoharu Saito’s megastore also employs a similar system using desktops.

Speaking of machines, I stumbled upon one of these in front of another Magic store a few floors below Big Magic:

The Taste of Brainstorm

I visited nearly all the stores in the two clusters of Magic stores in Tokyo, Akihabara and Ikebukuro. There are plenty of articles and forum posts written about how the stores are like, so rather than repeat what others wrote (go read them, they deserve the hits), I am going to share the things that fascinated me during my visit to those stores. Witnessing rarities in person was one of them, and the other was finding out how Brainstorm tastes.

I made the trip to Shibuya, partially to accompany my girlfriend for her shopping, and partially to check out Mint, the magic store sponsoring Yuuya Watanabe (I am sure most of you who watched the World Championship semifinals caught a glimpse of Mint’s logo on Yuuya’s sweater). Opened in February 2012, Mint is a relatively new store compared with the incumbents in Akihabara and Ikebukoro but it boasts a unique edge: it is both a bar and a card store.

Mint Shibuya definitely leveraged the fact that they are a both a bar and a Magic store by concocting their own cocktails inspired by and named after iconic Magic cards with like Brainstorm and Voice of Resurgence. I relished the opportunity to finally experience a Brainstorm with my taste buds. I am no expert on cocktails, but the Brainstorm cocktail was sweet and zesty, just like casting the spell itself (or maybe I am just biased, being a lifelong blue mage).

Wait a minute. Aren’t you asking for trouble putting a drink right beside your deck?

Mint Shibuya came up with a great answer: two-tiered tables with a transparent glass upper tier to put your drink and a spacious bottom tier for you to sling cards.

There were no one playing in the shop as I visited it on an weekday afternoon, but I could not resist the urge to test out such an ingenious solution. I can now claim from experience that it was pretty comfortable to use!

Tokyo Hauls

Being the guy who writes about undervalued cards, I can not help but search for undervalued Magic in Tokyo. The first haul from my trip was Japanese Khans of Tarkir booster boxes.

It comes without saying that Japanese booster boxes are going to be cheaper in Japan. I bought my three Khans of Tarkir boxes from different shops, and they all averaged out at ¥10, 500, about $87 each. Throughout December 2014, Japanese Khans of Tarkir booster boxes sold on eBay for $130 – $160, with a single outlier of $119 and some fetching up to $175. Japanese Conspiracy boxes sold for around $140 each during the same time frame.

The Japanese stores are well aware that their eternal staple foils command an insane multiplier compared to English foils and price them accordingly. The foil Japanese Khans of Tarkir fetchlands were on par with eBay completed sales prices. But nowhere else could you find Japanese booster boxes for the price it was sold at inside Japan. I opted to buy booster boxes rather than Japanese foils as I figured that would give me the best value with my limited funds.

Intriguingly, shops in Tokyo sell English Khans of Tarkir booster boxes at a higher price than Japanese boosters. English Khans of Tarkir were going for ¥13, 000, around $1, 500 more expensive than the Japanese ones. The shopkeepers I spoke to, with the assistance of Google’s Translate app, cited the fact that in Japan, English boxes come in a significantly lower supply than Japanese boxes. No surprise there. While they agree that Japanese cards reins in a higher price due to the cards’ cool typeface, their opinions differ on how much Japanese players value English cards. One claimed that Japanese players generally prefer Japanese cards, a statement I can agree with. The other mentioned how some Japanese players seek out English cards to play in tournaments abroad, something I find peculiar as it is technically legal to play Japanese cards anywhere English cards could be played.

Nevertheless, it remains the fact that English booster boxes were sold at a higher price than Japanese booster boxes in the stores I visited. It makes little sense economically to sell a product at a higher price when it has low demand, even though the product’s supply is lower. I guess I will find out more about  the value Japanese players place on English cards when I have the chance to do some trading at Grand Prix Chiba come May next year.

Unfortunately, player-to-player trading is not allowed in most Tokyo stores. While I sympathise with their reason for implementing the rule,  it nevertheless disappointed me  as I lugged along my trade binder for the trip with high hopes of trading for Japanese foils. I guess I should have dug deeper while researching my trip.

The other Japanese MTG object you could get much cheaper in Japan than anywhere else are these:

APAC (Asia-Pacific) lands is a series of fifteen basic lands given out to Asia-Pacific players as promotional cards back in 1998. The APAC lands are unique in a sense that their art each refer to a specific real world setting in Asia-Pacific. They came in three sets distinguished by their color-coded packaging – clear, red and blue and each pack contained different arts for each basic land type. APAC lands are highly sought after for their gorgeous and unconventional art (land art do not usually refer to real world locations) and their rarity.

The cheapest APAC lands go for $6 – $7 apiece while the most expensive ones go up to $25. Unopened packs go for anywhere between $25 – $60 on eBay and online retailers sell them for least $45 for the clear pack and up to $70 for the red pack, and that is if they stock them. My only regret was not getting more unopened APAC lands during my trip.

I hope my tale amused you a little, and if you ever go to Japan, you know what to spend your money on. APAC lands and lots of ramen.

Trends

A good indicator of an undervalued card about to spike is a spike on Magic Online. As of writing, Pharika, God of Affliction is demanding 12 tix online, while paper copies are only $4.32. Pharika has been seeing play as a two-of in the mainboard of Sultai Reanimator, Abzan Reanimator, GB Constellation and the occasional Abzan Midrange. Pharika is the ultimate value engine, churning out a stream of deathtouch blockers from your fallen or milled creatures, with the potential to become a 5/5 body. As her snakes are enchantment creatures, Pharika combos with Doomwake Giant to give you an asymmetrical Drown in Sorrow each turn.

Pharika was one of the cards I thought would be one of the breakout card in Journey into Nyx but it has never even went as high as $10. Pharika is a mythic rare from a little-opened spring set, is competitively costed in a popular competitive color combination and is a card that generates value turn-by-turn and is hard to get rid of. I would consider her on par with Keranos, God of Storms who was nearly $20 at his height and is now $13. I do not expect Pharika to emulate Keranos pricewise as Keranos sees play as a one-of in Modern and Legacy decks as a way to grind out long games, but Pharika at under $5 seemed to be way undervalued.

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