Uncommonly Valuable

When you’re sitting there, sifting through those bulk collections that I know (almost) all of you are buying throughout the year, one of the key types of cards that you should be looking for are uncommons. Yes, commons are important too in these bulk searches for treasure, however the uncommons are going to be what surprises you most in terms of value when you go to cash out your findings to the highest paying buylist.

My goal today is twofold. First, I’m going to quickly review what the most valuable uncommons are that you should be looking for when sifting through the bulk of bought collections. Most of these cards will be obvious, but I’m betting that some of them might be a surprise.

Then, I’m going to take this a step further and point out which foils you should also be looking for. Foils, as you’ll find, are quite an interesting market, and the amount of a play a foil receives in Modern, Commander, Legacy, or even Vintage could drastically alter the price. Many of the uncommon foils that I’ve found are actually are individual buylist line items despite their rare use, and you want to make sure that they aren’t being accidentally thrown in with the rest of bulk foils. Albeit, not that many collections will have a large amount of foils, especially foils that are from older sets, however foil picking shouldn’t be discounted either. Now is as good a time as ever for checking to see which uncommon foils are demanding the highest buylist and eBay prices in the market.

With that out of the way, let’s review the nonfoil uncommons that are valuable to see if there might be any surprises in there.

Figure 1 – Most Valuable Recent Set Nonfoil Uncommons $2 or More eBay Sorted By Highest Buylist

 

No suprise that Aether Vial, Top, and Duel Deck Demonic Tutor are at the top of the list. Essential staples in their respective formats, they carry the highest eBay price and buylist prices. Arbitrage is particularly close on Aether Vial – I could see this one jumping in price in the near future, especially with the next wave of Modern tournaments coming up early next year.

Shardless Agent, Enlightened Tutor, and Cabal Coffers are all great uncommons with a ton of casual appeal. Shardless Sultai seems to come in and out of favor in Legacy, so there is demand there for the Agent but I think that is mainly coming from casual players. Enlightened Tutor and Cabal Coffers are still $10 even with reprints, which bodes well for their futures. I expect we’ll see reprints of these cards soon enough, but even with a reprint I could see them do a Ghostly Prison and still stubbornly maintain a price above $5 due to the “discovery” effect where newer players who just started playing the game see their power and move to pick them up for Commander.

Mishra’s Bauble still surprises me – where is this played again? If anyone picks up a collection with Coldsnap, look for these guys among the bulk. Sterling Grove is another uncommon that is valuable to vendors especially since the Daxos deck, though lacking green, could sway players to start creating enchantment based decks with green in them since Magic’s history is full of great green cards that support enchantments.

Mother of Runes has a high eBay but low buylist price, which indicates to me that the eBay price is going to start going down. Mom’s should be traded to players looking for them, as buylist is fine for this uncommon but you will get more bang for you buck if you move them over a medium like Pucatrade.

Ancient Ziggurat, Footsteps of the Goryo, and Guttural Response are the final uncommons I would like to mention. These uncommons are surprisingly valuable due casual and Modern appeal. Footseps and Response have their niche in Modern, while Ancient Ziggurat has a huge casual appeal and is an uncommon with only one nonfoil printing.

All in all, I don’t think you guys will find this uncommon list that surprising. Let’s move on to the foils, which are certainly more interesting.

Figure 2 – Most Valuable Recent Set Foil Uncommons $4 or More eBay Sorted by Highest Buylist

 

Right away, I’m sure you noticed that this list is waaaay longer than the previous list. Suffice to say, there are plenty of foil uncommons that have gained value over the years. We see that Goblin Matron is currently commanding the highest buylist price – even with Top being sold at $110 eBay, Matron still eeks it out by a margin of $6. Bare in mind, this is one vendor who is offering the noted buylist price, so for other vendors the buy on Matron could very well be lower. Still though, it shows that the demand for foils is a totally different market than nonfoils since Matron didn’t even show up on the nonfoil list!

So, apparently foil Choke is being sold at $80 on eBay! This is crazy to me, as it is a purely sideboard card that will almost certainly be reprinted at a future date. This indicates to me that unless you’re playing a totally Russian foiled Merfolk, maybe you should consider moving this foil…

Foil prices drastically reduce from there, where most are $30 each or lower on eBay. The obvious outliter here is 9th Ed. Urza’s Mine, but the eBay data is skewed since the buylist is only $25.

Aven Mindcensor is still a sought-after foil, being present in both Legacy and Modern in D&T and Hatebears builds. With only one printing in Future Sight, I don’t see this foil dropping until a reprint in a Modern Masters type set.

     

As we move down the list, we start seeing strange foils such as Boil, Crypt Rats, Serra Advocate, Reprisal, Mistveil Plains, and Breath of Life pop up. Did you guys even know these cards existed? Well, if you have foil copies then someone out there is looking for them, and finding stuff like this in collections is always a treat.

Some interesting eBay foil prices include Izzet Staticaster, Sustainer of the Realm, Blood Artist, and Victimize. All of these on eBay are being sold at a fairly high price for a foil uncommon yet buylists are quite low compared to eBay prices. This tells me that players are seeking them, but stores aren’t – probably because they are very hard to move. Cards like these should probably be sold at eBay or TCG since even after fees you are going to get more for them than you would just outing to a buylist. Something to keep in mind in case you come across a few of these types of uncommon foils.

Final Thoughts

I’ll be using these lists in the future when looking through collections, to try and maximize the amount I can get out of them. I hope you guys find the lists useful as well, since there are plenty of eye popping numbers in the data especially concerning uncommon foils.

Let me know if I missed any uncommons from recent sets, nonfoil or foil, that you have your eyes on for value moving forward. I used the MTGPrice ProTrader data collection methods to aggregate this data, so if you become a ProTrader you too can get easy, current access to this data at your fingertips.

PROTRADER: The Slow Death of Khans

While browsing last week’s “Interests” over at mtgstocks.com I discovered two trends that immediately caught my eye. The first was rather obvious and has been so for weeks now. The other was perhaps more subtle – it’s this latter observation that I wish to spend more time on today.

But before I dive in to the subtle observation, have you noticed how many old cards are in high demand lately? I count 15 cards in the past week that have risen by at least 5% according to mtgstocks.com. While that site does contain heavy bias towards TCG Player volume, the trend is nonetheless too strong to be simple website manipulation. There is real demand for older cards such as Su-Chi and Erhnam Djinn, both staples of the Old School MTG format.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

PROTRADER: Opportunity (Not the Urza’s Legacy One)

Today is going to be a no-nonsense look at what is very potentially the softest sub-market in Magic for the present and immediate future. The cards that we are going to discuss today are not the only ones worth discussing; this is rather a “teach a person how to fish”approach, where you are able to take the parameters (as well as apply your own!) in order to make informed decisions for yourself. There will be a complementary thread in the forums for you to share your own thoughts and targets, so as to be a more long-lasting (and more secure!) discussion than the comment section (which is typically reserved for you people to tell me how great I am).

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Pressing Pause On Puca

By: Cliff Daigle

I am pausing in the quest for another Gaea’s Cradle.

Like many people on PucaTrade, I’m a big fan of trading my current Standard cards at full value in order to work towards a larger-value card.

I’ve sent off random stuff that no one in their right mind would ever take in full value towards the Cradle. A playset of Kabira Evangel? New Drana, Liberator of Malakir back when it was at $17? Solid all the way around.

I was about to start sending off my leftover fetch lands when I saw on Twitter that people are buying PucaPoints at the rate of $0.67 per 100 points, or $67 for 10,000 points.

Now I’m quite concerned and I don’t think I am going to be a part of this economy for a little while.

PucaTrade has always allowed people to buy points from them, at the cost of $1 for 100 points, a very easy and direct conversion rate. Their card prices are usually within a few percentage points of MTGPrice’s Fair Trade Price, though they have their own system for establishing that value.

For example, Flooded Strand has a price here of $22.54, while it’s 2156 points on Puca. Seems legit enough, right?

If you have an Uncommon or Rare-level account, you can transfer PucaPoints to other users. This is useful if you want to advertise a bonus for Expeditions lands, or something along those lines. It also allows you to post on assorted social media that your points can be bought, and that is where I start getting concerned.

Let’s go back to Gaea’s Cradle, as it’s been a target of mine for a while.

It’s currently got a FTP of $182, and is worth 17336 PucaPoints. This is the magic and the promise of PucaTrade, because I could trade about 8 Flooded Strands from Khans of Tarkir for one Cradle and I would do that in a heartbeat. Puca has an issue of needing to wait for someone to decide to mail out that Cradle, but that’s not the focus today.

The possible trade of eight Strands for the Cradle presumes that everything is of equal value, but when cash is introduced, the values start to skew.

Let’s look deeper at the Cradle. It’s buylisting for $118 at best, and eBay auctions are closing at about $120, with some variation on condition or bidding wars. That’s very close to 66% of the card’s value when it comes to cash, and that’s in line with expectations. We accept that retail value in a trade is not the same as cash value, and it’s why you should generally run away from people who want to price your cards at buylist.

To a casual player, Puca’s philosophy is that you are getting full value, but if you can buy points at this rate (and it may have farther to fall!) then you won’t be getting the full return. This level of availability for points makes me very nervous. It’s inflationary, and I’m going to leave it to people more versed in economics to explain the cycle and the problems.

The short version is this: If I’m paying full price in trade, I am worried that someone is swooping in and paying two-thirds of its value. I don’t want to be part of this economy, especially if the points start to lower further in cash value.

I’m not calling for the end of PucaTrade. I’m saying that this trend of cash affecting the Puca economy as something that makes me very worried.

It’s true that this is more about my perception, my feelings, my concerns. Cash has always had a warping effect on the Magic economy, and points being sold for two-thirds of their value makes the Puca economy the same as eBay or TCGPlayer or buylists.

From the other end, though, I can’t argue with the value. If you want to acquire cards for less than retail, you’re going to have to pay cash. Buying points is a very easy way to get the points you want without a lot of the legwork.

It seems like such a hassle to me, though. Going back to the Cradle example, I’d need to spend about $120 to get the points I need, and then I have to wait. There’s only three people who want the nonfoil as of this writing, and only one person has the points and the desire for the judge foil version.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just hit up eBay at that point? If I want to spend the cash, then I should be able to get what I want that much faster.

I’ve never pretended to be a big-dollar spender. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. I try hard not to buy singles. It’s not hard for me to think that I spend less on Magic that any of the writers here. I have to say that PucaTrade’s model has been a great one for me, and I would hate to see it be warped and changed.

It’s entirely possible that I’m overthinking this. The sky isn’t falling, but I don’t like the look of the clouds. Please, add a comment below and tell me why I’m right or why I’m wrong.


 

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