Brainstorm Brewery #177 – 2005 Behind, 2016 Ahead

December 31, 2015 Jason Alt

The episode begins like all good episodes with a slip of the tongue that derails the cast for ten minutes. When you hear that, you know it’s going to be a good one and this is no exception. Oath spoilers, talk about past technology and resolutions for the new year are all on the docket. There’s a reason this is your favorite podcast.

2005?
Discussion of iTech
Oath Spoilers!
Marcel’s clarification on the Cease and Decease notification
New Year’s Resolutions
Support our Patreon! DO IT. You know this cast makes you more than $1 a week
We’re serious about the Patreon. Expect new perks.
Need to contact us? Hit up BrainstormBrew@gmail.com

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City of Traders

Yet Another 2015 Review Article

December 30, 2015 Travis Allen

By: Travis Allen

During this week, you’re going to see a lot of “best of” or “most memorable” type media, whether in print, on the radio, or in moving pictures. Introspection and review are useful processes for recognizing and internalizing important ideas and events, and the start of a new year is a convenient point to undertake this, if not perhaps a tad arbitrary. In addition to this, humans seek closure, and looking back at the last 365 days provides a sense of finality to one more chapter in our short, brutish lives. Still, it’s always surprising to be reminded of just how much occurred, especially early on. It’s easy to forget noteworthy events from earlier months. Hell, it doesn’t even feel like Grand Prix Modern Masters 2015 happened this year, and that didn’t occur until May. In any case, it’s fun to take one last moment to recognize time’s speedy passage.

“Year in review” pieces are also great because they’re a lot less work than generating new content.

As a result of MTGPrice’s evolution this year, not all my content has been free. This presents me with an opportunity to re-introduce what I feel were some of the best articles I wrote to a new audience. Even if you’ve been a subscriber all year, you may have missed some of these. Though I don’t know why you would miss them, because of course your life should revolve around reading finance articles about Magic cards. Jason’s especially. Truly, all of mankind’s labors have been divinely ordained such that they have all furiously labored towards one single brilliant point of light in the dark bleak existence of man: Jason E. Alt’s series about cheap Elder Dragon Highlander staples.

A Planeswalker Abroad

Over Christmas I traveled to Japan, and a major portion of my trip revolved around exploring shops that sold Magic cards, scouring for opportunities for profit. Rather than write another dry description of what I bought and why I bought it, I opted for a different tact. Looking back on it nearly a year later it doesn’t feel nearly as clever or well-written as I wanted it to be, though it still remains distinct among my personal tomes.

Lockbox

It’s hard to imagine I ever wrote so succinctly. At a mere 1,800 words, this is half the length of most of my recent material. The gist remains just as salient as ever though, laying out the economic forces that shape the prices of Standard-legal boxes and singles. Internalizing the lesson here—that any in-print set has a hard price ceiling—is vital for successfully navigating Standard markets.

**The Magic Market for the Rest of Us: Don’t**

Over the years I’ve had the privilege of seeing many new players get involved in the game and watching them progress through the stages of emotional and financial investment. There are a few habits that are common, especially amongst players that got into the competitive scene within the last six months to two years. These habits typically work against their greater goal of reducing the cost of playing the game they love. This article highlights several of those misguided behaviors and identifies why they’re not sustainable. If you’re still cutting your teeth in Magic finance, this is a quick and digestible list of things not to do.

Lost in Translation

This article details the fallout from my Magic purchases while over in Japan. It contains within it a single important trend in buying and selling foreign cards that any dedicated market grinder needs to be keenly aware of. Reading this could save you tens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars.

Authenticity

While not exactly my most popular article, it was an article that needed writing nonetheless. The crux of it is a simple concept: proxies and counterfeits are two sides of the same coin. You can imagine why this would ruffle no shortage of feathers. While not specifically an article that will save or make you money, it nonetheless opens up an issue that touches the wallets of nearly all Magic players, whether they realize it or not.

One for Me, One for TCGP

Writing in this field, my goal is to educate my readers as best as possible. Giving people tools to expand their collections for cheap or free is an excellent way to meaningfully provide something useful. This article focused on doing just that: take a compact idea, explain it clearly, and illustrate how anybody can utilize it for immediate, obvious benefit. It can be difficult to find topics both digestible and useful, and I’d like to think I accomplished that here.

A Demanding Supply

Supply and demand is capitalism in a nutshell. While an approachable topic, the practical consequences yet remain elusive for many within the confines of Magic. These illustrative examples seek to clearly demonstrate how potent the interplay between the two factors are. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how it’s possible that Siege Rhino is $3 and Sedge Sliver is $10, this is for you.

The Thin Blue Line

My most recent work on this list, and an article that I feel sheds some light on the nitty gritty researched performed by practiced operators in the Magic market. In an abundance of data, it can be difficult to determine what’s meaningful and what isn’t. Using buylist values as an indicator of financial health is one of the many ways we fuel our decisions on what to buy, and more importantly, what not to buy. Learning to make use of this data can dramatically improve your purchasing decisions in the future.

Auld Lang Syne

Most of these articles sought to either bring to light a vital concept within Magic finance or provide a tool for readers to better manage their purchasing decisions. You’ll notice there’s not much “buy this” or “watch this market” type content. Those can be strong articles, but they rarely remain poignant weeks or months later. This is instead material that makes sense months after I initially wrote it, and will still make sense next year.

Did any of these help you? Were there specific points that you saw real utility in? Did I miss something you enjoyed reading?

Happy new year!

Jason Alt

What EDH Can and Can’t Do to Prices

December 30, 2015 Jason Alt 1 Comment

What up, nerds?

I wrote a lot this past year about what EDH can do to prices. With 2015 winding down, I’m looking back at what I’ve written so far and thinking about the series as a whole. We’ve talked a lot about the effect new printings can have on prices, but there are a few nuances I want to really solidify so we can head into 2016 swinging.

What I am going to do for a bit is revisit the basic thesis of this series, and that is:

“Cards that are coming out in new sets can serve as an event that can shift the prices of older cards. “

Is This Effect Real?

It’s a pretty simple thesis, and I think I’ve made a pretty good case for it. Not even that—it makes a good case for itself. It doesn’t take a ton of detective work to look at Teferi’s Puzzle Box, Winds of Change, Forced Fruition, Wheel and Deal, and Wheel of Fortune all spiking the same week, just after the Mind Seize deck with Nekusar, the Mindrazer came out, to figure out those things were related.

Nekusar came along and the card launched an entire deck archetype. It’s a very annoying one, but it’s a very good one. It’s easy and obvious to build, and it’s effective, popular, and everyone who had access to the precon had access to it. With financiers buying up every copy of Mind Seize they could get their mitts on to flip the copies of True-Name Nemesis, some people had an opportunity to get the rest of the cards for fairly cheap after the financiers culled the copies of Nemesis and Baleful Strix. These cards saw their prices affected to a huge extent and the spikes all occuring at the same time, a few weeks after the set was released and people began building with Nekusar and figuring out wheel effects were the gas that made the deck work, prices spiked accordingly.

What Can’t It Do?

That’s something I feel like I haven’t covered as well. It’s important to understand the limitations of this effect. EDH has a broad appeal, and that appeal is growing, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t limited in the effect new cards can have on prices of other cards. The more copies of a card there are, the more the deck will need to be played to affect the price at all. While Nekusar was able to move older cards like Puzzle Box and even a recent-ish card like Forced Fruition, cards that everyone has lying around, let’s re-examine some of these graphs and talk a bit about what happened with the cards’ prices.

This is the price of Forced Fruition over the last 3 years.

The arrow points to the point where people started to realize this card was nuts in Nekusar decks. This was a $2ish card—not selling briskly on TCGplayer or eBay or Cardshark, but not shipped in bulk, either. A $2 card isn’t worth putting in a store display case. It’s not worth having in a binder, because it’s too old for anyone to care and not valuable enough for anyone to be after. This card was total trash to all but the casualiest of casuals until it was suddenly the perfect card for a deck that just popped into existence.

What happens when something like that occurs is a weird process. First, the internet gets bought out very quickly, causing a very sharp price increase as the cheap copies are bought out and the people hoping to cash in post their copies for as much as they think they can get.

Then, people start to dig the cards out of boxes and the supply begins to catch up as copies come out of the woodwork.

Organic demand takes over and people start to realize they don’t mind paying more than they used to be able to for the card because it’s quite good in the deck, but slowly, increased supply catches up and satisfies the demand. Finally, the race to the bottom begins and the copies sell at a slower rate and prices plateau.

The price ends up higher than it was before, lower than its peak, and at a place where people are comfortable both buying and selling. The price has a tendency to equilibrate here. But this is pretty unique to cards that are spread out and not concentrated in the hands of dealers.

What would happen if Wizards printed another card like Nekusar, and people who had Nekusar decks built already decided they wanted a second copy of Forced Fruition? Well, we’d see the price basically track to its new equilibrium point. It would fluctuate a bit, overcorrecting at first, but not as drastically. The copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers who paid a fair price for Forced Fruition and overpaid a bit when the price was beginning to equilibrate as supply caught up to demand. Those dealers who overpaid aren’t in a hurry to sell at a small gain, so they are hanging onto their copies and selling one at a rate of one per new Nekusar deck.

That’s a slow rate. That rate would increase if there were a new Nekusar, possibly in different colors and people built the new deck as an addition instead of taking the old one apart. When there are a lot of copies out there in the hands of dealers, the prices don’t go quite as nuts. We are seeing a high percentage of copies of Forced Fruition out of collections, shoe boxes, rubber bands, and dollar boxes, because when the card initially spiked, everyone and their cousin hit their LGS and their closets and binders looking for copies of the card to ship into the frenzy.

This effect is going to be attenuated greatly for a newer card. How do I know? Let’s look at a card that’s played in a much greater percentage of Nekusar decks. This is a card that, according to EDHREC, 61 percent of Nekusar decks play compared to the 49 percent (can that be right?) that play Forced Fruition.

There was some initial hype surrounding Whispering Madness when people tried to couple it with unblockable creatures in an attempt to mill opponents to death. Casuals are always going to try to play Dimir mill; they just are. When this card proved that it couldn’t carry a whole archetype on its back and the supply began to overwhelm the dwindling demand, the price suffered. Want to see something really interesting? Let’s look at what the graph did when Mind Seize was released.

That little dip may or may not have been caused by the Nekusar frenzy. There’s not much of a mechanism for new demand to cause the price to go down, but if you ignore the dip and just look at the average price since the deck was being built, you’ll see it’s on a decline, on average—pretty similar to the slope of the buylist price.

Why would we see such a profound effect for one card and such a different one for another card? The answer seems pretty simple to me: recency.

Whispering Madness is in every bulk bin, every binder, every shoe box. It was less than a year old when the Commander 2013 decks came out, and copies were everywhere. Anyone who wanted a copy of Whispering Madness to jam in their Nekusar deck probably had one already, or had a friend who would give them one for free. It was a bulk rare, and therefore, it was everywhere. The card wasn’t concentrated in the hands of dealers, but dealers still had more copies of Whispering Madness than they likely had of Forced Fruition, despite having a smaller percentage of the total number of the available copies.

A new event can clearly move the needle on older cards with relatively fewer copies printed. Magic has gotten continually more popular, so the further back you go, the fewer copies of a card there are. With fewer copies of old cards in the hands of dealers and more scattered to the four winds, cards have time to spike in price as people slowly unearth their buried copies and gradually feed them into the machine. Are there ways we can mitigate this and make some smart buys in more recent cards?

Can Recent Cards Move?

They can, and there are a few things we can do if we correctly predict a new card is going to make a new archetype that people will want to play.

Sage of Hours is pretty busted with the new Ezuri. Once you get him up to five experience counters, he can dump five +1/+1 counters on your Sage of Hours, allowing you to remove said counters and take an extra turn. If your opponent(s) can’t interrupt this with an instant, you take every turn and kill them with your creatures and win the game.

Despite it being a mythic, there are quite a few copies of Sage of Hours out there because it’s recent and not in high demand from Standard players. Most of the copies of this card are just sitting in store inventories, and the new Ezuri deck hasn’t been built enough to move the needle. The threat of a reprint is always present, also, and no one seems super willing to gamble on this card. Store inventories haven’t moved much, either. There wasn’t really money to be made predicting this would pair well with Ezuri as soon as he was spoiled. Or was there?

This went from a Vorel of the Hull Clade spec to a bit of a bust to an Ezuri staple, in foil. Foil copies are less prone to a reprint, especially in a Commander-series deck which doesn’t have any regular-sized foils. Foil copies have higher upside, since there is usually a multiplier that will drive the two prices apart as the non-foil increases. There are fewer copies of the foil, and for cards that are printed in event decks and such, the set foil is even scarcer compared to the non-foil. The relatively few numbers of copies make it easier for buying behavior on a small scale to signal the market that the price is moving, and when the card is merely twice as expensive as the non-foil like we saw here during Sage’s lull, you can still buy effectively, getting half as many copies but experiencing four times the upside. Currently sitting pretty around $13, this card could go back down, but with Ezuri’s current popularity (it was the second most-built deck last week according to EDHREC), that may take a while.

Moving very nicely up in price for years, Contagion Engine seemed like a good way to proliferate experience counters with the new commanders in Commander 2015. It’s colorless, allowing it to go in any of the five decks, and it serves as removal, something that is important in decks like Simic that lack a ton of ways to kill things without bouncing them or turning them into tokens. Still, the slope of the graph doesn’t really increase with the printing of Commander 2015. It seemed almost a shoo-in in one or more of the decks, and while it’s getting up there, it’s nowhere near the popularity of a card like Darksteel Plate, a card from the same block whose price is higher than you might think. Was there any money to be made on Engine?

Apparently there was money to be made on the card in foil, where the price tripled overnight, and while it’s returning to equilibrium, it’s equilibrating much higher than the price was before experience counters made us pay attention.

The Future of This Series

I plan to continue identifying upcoming archetypes made possible by new printings as well as identifying staples that don’t necessarily need events to drive the price up. There was no real event other than EDH being a fun format that caused Chromatic Lantern to climb like it has, but every once in a while, the price corrects higher due to adjustments in dealer buying behavior and player buying behavior.

This was a card everyone knew was good basically just in EDH, but which no one really talked about. This went up calmly, behind the scenes, and keeps surprising everyone with how high it continues to go. I plan to spend a lot of time talking about event-driven upcoming price increases next year, but I also want to spend some time identifying staples that are going to march solidly up in price and which will be great cards to stock a binder with.

Remember, EDH players are who we want to trade with. They want a much larger range of cards from us, and they’re more likely to undervalue (maybe not money-wise, but to just generally care less about) Standard staples and other cards we can instantly sell on TCGplayer, much faster than we can sell EDH cards. I hope you’ll join me next year, where we’ll keep looking at the fascinating world of EDH finance and chart some uncharted territory while we do. See you in 2016.

Going Mad

Going Mad – A Magical Year, 2015

December 30, 2015 Derek Madlem 5 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

No matter how you look at it, 2015 has been a big year for Magic. From a personal standpoint, 2015 has brought about the biggest changes for my personal connection to Magic in all of the years of playing. Seeing as it’s the end of the year and I’m not really interested in forcing an article about the rares featured in the Oath of the Gatewatch intro packs, how about a year in review? Glad you’re as excited as I am.

Khans of Tarkir

Yeah, technically this was released in 2014, but who are we kidding? Khans of Tarkir rang in the new year as the second coming of Christ and that momentum is carrying through to this day. From an #mtgfinance standpoint, Khans was very important lesson in aggregate pricing in modern Magic releases. When a single cycle of cards soaks up so much of the expected value from a box, the price of everything else collapses. Even Siege Rhino, one of the most powerful and most played creatures of all time, couldn’t maintain a price above $5 thanks to the fetch lands soaking up so much of the set’s value.

Fate Reforged

Fate Reforged was ultimately a gimmick set. It was a small set that was meant as a pivot point to be drafted with two separate large sets and is likely to be the first and last time we ever see that gimmick play out. The overall reception for Fate Reforged was not incredible despite having a decent concentration of powerful and expensive cards including Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, Tasigur, the Golden Fang, and Monastery Mentor. Even the bonus inclusion of a fetchland in every box wasn’t enough to keep this set from falling to the wayside in short order.

Vending

It wasn’t long after the release of Fate Reforged that I got my first shot working as an MTG buyer. Two Headed Games needed help for the SCG Regionals in Columbus and gave me a shot at helping out. Buying seemed to come naturally to me as I understood both the player and the business side of the transaction. I knew which cards players wanted and I knew how much the store had to buy them for to run a profitable business. At first I was meant to just be an extra set of hands, but a smoke break combined with a rush of players looking to sell cards put me in the buyer’s chair and my foray into MTG buying had begun.

MTGPrice and Dragons of Tarkir

Going back and looking for my first article published on MTGPrice, it seems fitting that my words first graced this website on April Fool’s Day…a coincidence that explains why nobody takes me seriously to this day. When the opportunity to write for MTGPrice presented itself, I was already writing for Quiet Speculation but was excited about the prospect of reaching a larger audience so I asked that none of my articles ever appear behind a paywall.

Meanwhile Dragons of Tarkir had just been released and I made some predictions that turned out to be mostly bad. You can go back and take a look here if you need fodder for mocking. Dragons of Tarkir did something that previously hadn’t been accomplished in quite some time – made the spring set relevant to constructed. Dragons of Tarkir managed to strike a chord with the casual crowd while still giving the constructed format a good shakeup and in general did better than previous spring sets according to a number of retailers that I talked to at the time.

The Big Stage

In May I began working as a buyer for Aether Games and my big debut was at Grand Prix Atlantic City. I learned a very valuable lesson on this trip: traveling for Magic is a lot less glamorous when the destination is a complete dump. Atlantic City is a place that everyone should visit at least once, if only to learn that such a terrible place exists in the world.

The event itself was alright, nothing too exciting or too terrible outside of a fire alarm going off mere minutes before the doors were set to open. I can attest that the last thing you want to hear after carefully placing cards in a display case is “scoop them up, we have to leave”.

Modern Masters 2015

As spoilers for this set came to completion, it became clear that this set was stuffed to the brim with Modern’s most expensive cards and featured a number of rares that suffered extreme prices based mostly on casual demand and small print runs. With larger print runs (and higher MSRP) making this set available to everyone, we were able to see the effect of aggregate pricing in action; a number of rares that were previously worth $10+ were suddenly available under $2…call it the Creakwood Liege effect.

Ultimately anything that wasn’t reprinted saw a surge in price thanks in part to the #mtgfinance hive mind and the realization that a flood of cheap Mox Opals hitting the market meant that more people would need Inkmoth Nexus and Arcbound Ravager. While much of this felt like market manipulation, much of it was more likely do to cards being frozen in price leading up to a potential reprint…after all, no vendor wanted to be buying cards for more than they would be able to sell them for in just a few short weeks. Either way, we won’t be making that mistake again…right?

Grand Prix Vegas

Grand Prix Vegas was billed as the biggest Magic event of all time and it definitely delivered. I had attended the previous Modern Masters Grand Prix in Las Vegas, thanks to my wife using it as bait to get me to agree to a Vegas vacation, so I thought I had a decent idea of what to expect going into this event, but it exceeded all expectations and set the bar pretty high going forward.

This was my second event working with Aether Games and I had front row seats to one of the greatest lessons of all time in #mtgfinance. Aether decided they were going to pay extremely well on a few cards when the rest of the room had intended to capitalize on the perception that everything was going to be worth much less. One vendor making an informed stand slowed the plummeting prices of cards like Dark Confidant, Vendilion Clique, and Tarmogoyf. While these cards eventually dipped in price, it was much more gradual and a lot less brutal.

Magic Origins

“The best core set since Magic 2010” – everyone
“I’ll take a pack of Khans” – everyone

Magic Origins and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy reminded us of an age old #mtgfinance proverb: if a card is printed in a set and nobody buys it, shouldn’t it be $80? We were reminded again by Magic Origins that good cards in unpopular sets will climb in price. We saw a similar thing happen with Nissa, Worldwaker and Chandra, Pyromaster in the previous core sets. The last core set–good riddance.

The Ending of Vending

It wasn’t too long after Magic Origins that I realized vending probably wasn’t for me. After trying my hand with a few different vendors I realized it’s really a young man’s game. While I’m far from old man status, the prospect of sharing beds, sleeping on floors, hours and hours crammed in cars, the time away from home, and eating nothing but garbage for every meal just wasn’t worth the pay. Overall it was a good experience and I learned a lot in a very short amount of time; some of which you can (re)read here, easily one of the most (only) useful articles I’ve ever written.

SCG, PTQ, & Grand Prix Changes

This year also brought us a number of changes to PTQs and Grand Prix level events. PTQs as we knew them are wiped off the face of the Earth and with them so is low level vending. Grand Prixs are more expensive than ever for both players and vendors. Oh yeah, don’t forget that Star City Games killed Legacy–again. The sheer number of tournament changes this year has left the player base a little dizzy and many are still trying to figure out what the best path going forward is.

Battle for Zendikar

We learned with much certainty that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. Battle for Zendikar is just the latest installment of increasingly worse “return to ______” expansions that somehow continue to get worse and worse with each iteration. The set would have probably been a total loss if not for the inclusion of randomly inserted 2/3rd art promo versions of the shock and fetch lands. The mediocre feel of Battle for Zendikar does little to make us excited for a return to Innistrad this spring, but there’s still hope…right?

Ultimately the roll out of BFZ was pretty rough, it did little to shake up Standard, more or less causing the format to go into hibernation at the local level while players patiently pray that Oath of the Gatewatch will bring us the change we need to make Standard fresh again.

The expeditions were enough to break me as a collector of Magic. For the first time I had to look at a set of new cards and acknowledge that they were simply unattainable for me, something that really took the wind out of my sails going forward.

The Rise of Massdrop

I don’t know if you’ve heard this yet, but massdrop.com is the place to buy older boxes of Magic at ridiculously low prices. With boxes of sets like Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash selling for as low as $80, it’s pretty much a fool’s errand to speculate on sealed booster boxes going forward. While this is great news for drafters, it’s terrible news for the couple dozen sealed booster boxes I have tucked away in my vault.

But really this isn’t just about Massdrop, it’s the internetification of all things. Amazon is especially guilty of this, but we’re seeing it more and more – volume without margins. Why sell ten of something for $20 profit each when you can sell a hundred at $2 profit each? This race to the bottom has grown more and more prevalent across the singles market just as much as it has the sealed product market. We now live in a world where the price of things goes down drastically if you’re just willing to wait a couple weeks.

Spoilers

If you listened to Wizards’ employees, this was a goddamn Greek tragedy. Somebody somewhere leaked photos of some damaged Expeditions and spoiled the big surprise that wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone that had given the topic much thought. We were given a heavy handed guilt trip about the leak ruining their marketing plan and blah blah blah, but that wasn’t enough. Wizards took it a step further when they suspended a number of judges simply for failing to report that said leak existed. This scandal is far from over, but it really became the cherry on top of the turd sundae we’ve been munching on all year.

A New Job

The end of the year took an interesting twist in my personal life as well. I was offered a job managing a local game store seemingly out of no where. It’s an awesome opportunity to test my mettle at something I am passionate about. But the drawback is that I’m forced to test the words that I’ve been told time and time again: once you start running a game store, you lose all interest in playing. Time’s going to tell on this one.

May your 2016 be filled with Expeditions in your packs, power in your bulk, and no lands in your opponents’ starting hands.

MTGPrice Blog