Monthly Archives: January 2017

Casual Fridays

Grand Prix Preparations

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I’ve been planning for Grand Prix San Jose for about two months.

I have registered for the main event, I have arranged for a place to crash, I have made sure that the kids will be okay while I’m off drowning in Magic cards and events for a whole weekend.

There are some concrete, direct things you should do as part of the big event experience, and I’m here to share a few tips and tricks for what will make the event best for you.

#1: Sell Early!

I’ve got a box of cards that I’m going to buylist, mostly commons and uncommons from a collection I bought in December. Guy came into the shop with two boxes of loose cards asking $20, I snap bought, and got to work picking. (Luckily, I was in the midst of writing up older sets’ pickable commons and uncommons in my PucaPicks series on Thursdays, available to Protraders, so picking was quick for me.) I’ve also got a bunch of Commander 2011 cards that I’m ready to sell, and when I get to the event I’ll know if I want cash from a vendor or store credit, depending on what they have at what prices.

I’ve found that when bringing a lot of things to sell, I want to do that early in the weekend, when vendors have more cash and more time. I’ll have it sorted, unsleeved, and ready to work quickly. This isn’t #mtgblueprint stuff, just a general note about when to sell large amounts of cards.

Individual cards are different, and can be sold whenever. I’d sure be cashing out on Walking Ballista ASAP though.

#2: Pack Lightly!

I’m going to bring one, maybe two Commander decks, and one trade binder, and some sleeves for the main event. That’s it. I want to make sure that my bag isn’t overly full, and while I’d love to play a lot of Commander or Cube, there just won’t be time.

#3: Plan on the unique side events.

Selling a stack of cards is going to empower silly things for me, like Full-Box Sealed, an event which I was at first dismissive of but I have to admit that it sounds more and more awesome. Ridiculously overpowered Sealed, with the possibility of adding value to opening a single box? Sign me up.

Chaos drafts are appealing, or double-prize queues, Frontier events, or single-match drafts…the list goes on. Look at the event website and figure stuff out ahead of time.

I can Cube or Commander at other times, but this event has some stuff I can’t do at other times, and that’s the experience I want to maximize.

#4: Socialize as much or as little as you wish.

This one took me a while to figure out, because I didn’t notice what I was doing. If you can play events with friends, that’s really great and something you should do. Mainly, though, you should absolutely not take any time away from stuff you want to do in order to wait for someone, especially when dealing with food or breaks.

#5: Bring water, and pack food whenever possible.

Self-explanatory. Packing a sandwich and chips is pure value, both in terms of the money not spent at lunch and the time that is saved at the venue. Save your budget for breakfast, dinner, or cards instead.

#6: Sell your playmat, and don’t pick up extra life pads.

If I can get $5 or $10 for the mat at the event, I’ll usually take it. I realize that there’s the potential to make a few dollars more if I wait and eBay it, but unless the playmat is something special (truly awesome card, or double-sided, etc.) it’s not worth the hassle of storing the mat and carrying it around. I do the same thing with leftover cards. I keep rares and some uncommons, the commons I’ll leave for someone else that has the time, energy, and space to pack 5k boxes full of bulk commons. It’s just not worth it to me.

#7: Don’t over-plan!

I learned this lesson when planning vacations. If I plan on doing something every single day, then I won’t have time for appreciation or relaxation, and isn’t that the point? I want to leave time for variation in the things I want to do, or maybe I’m going to go on a tear in the Main Event and I won’t get to any of it. (Is the EV of two extra drafts on Sunday worth the stuff I’m missing out on? I hope to find out!)

Big events can be stressful, but they can be a lot of fun. If you are heading to the GP, use the hashtags and see who else pops up!

ProTrader

PROTRADER: PucaPicks for 1/26/2017

So, dear readers, there’s a big deal on PucaTrade that I want to address this week: Promoted Trades.

Here’s the official link and also worth a read is the FAQ.

What’s this mean for you, the dedicated PucaTrader? What’s it mean for the future of the site?

Read on, because there’s a lot to unpack and a lot to think about.

First of all, I want to address the first thing that comes to my mind. This is an official bounty. It’s exactly what people have been doing for some time, and if you’re already offering a bounty (as I am) then this might seem silly.

However, if you are one of the surprisingly many people who’s been stiffed on bounties, then this is a really big deal.

I asked around for stories of people who have been promised bounties but they were never sent, and there’s a surprisingly large number of such people. There’s a factor at play in that there’s many times more successful bounty trades (for instance, all the ones I’ve ever sent and all the ones I’ve ever paid) who I didn’t ask for, but I thought the numbers would be much lower.

That’s the kind of experience that will turn someone off from PucaTrade, or any similar site, super quickly. Official bounties, now called promotions, offer users exactly this experience, only now it’s enforceable and official.

Before, there was no way to get the points promised, it was all on the honor system. You could reassure yourself a little by sending messages back and forth, but in the end, it was about trust and some people got burned.

PucaTrade is based on a trust system, because you have to trust that this imaginary currency is worth something. Other people will want these points, we hope. We trust that PucaTrade won’t just shut down and take our points with it. Trampling that trust is something that can ruin not just one user, but everyone who that user talks to.

It’s also worth considering how this has already taken 661k points out of the system, and this is with a relatively small number of cards available as promotions. I’m looking forward to the implementation of promotions for at least all Masterpiece-series cards, past, present, and future. Taking points out of the system is what needs to happen, because right now, Pucapoints aren’t worth much.

I am just a little worried that they are doing this so piecemeal. They aren’t implementing this for all versions of a given card, just certain ones. While that’s annoying, it does provide them a data point for comparing how many people are using this system so far.

I confess that I don’t like the fee. I get why they are doing it–they are always on the lookout for ways to remove points from the system–but it’s a fee on top of a bounty that must be paid, effectively increasing the bounty that much more. I think that PucaTrade would be better if it untethered from actual finance sites and built its own algorithm for what a card is worth. They are just too slow to adapt sometimes, and that’s problematic for me.

I also don’t like when there is a gap between a card’s value in Pucapoints and full retail. Big gaps represent a disparity in knowledge, and that smacks of trading like a shark to me. PucaTrade is giving us a graph, but like most of their data, it’s an incomplete one.

So far, we have a chart of what’s been promoted and traded the most, and their data shows that the promoted versions are trading much more briskly than their un-promotable counterparts, but that’s not really a surprise. I really wish we had data on the quantities of the promoted cards traded before and after the feature went live–that’s the thing I really want to see people doing, is trading high-value cards that they weren’t willing to trade before.

Saheeli Rai is not a shock as the most-traded promoted card. She’s spiked, so people that got her cheap are ready to unload her at a premium, but she offers a two-card infinite combo in Standard, and it’s been a while since that was a thing. Lots of people that have her plus lots who want her is going to result in a lot of trades anyway. Thought-Knot Seer, Windswept Heath, and Darkslick Shores are less than half Saheeli’s trades of 27, but are the only other ones over ten since the feature went live.

I think that promoted trades are a great idea. I don’t like the bonus fee, but if it is for a card I REALLY WANT then I don’t mind. I want more data too, but I’ll take what I can get.

I also want to add my recent experiences with PucaTrade. I’ve been carrying a balance of about 20,000 points for a few months now, and reciprocal trades in Discord didn’t really make a dent in that, and also were annoying to try and hustle for. So I stopped all that, and instead I have been sending out a small trade every 2-3 days, and I’ve gotten a rush of random sends.

I think that the sending of cards out has kept me in the ‘active traders’ setting, which has helped my visibility. I also think that my stated bounties are part of the reason why, but I’ve been at these bounties since Thanksgiving with no effect. (I was offering 20% on all, 40% on foils, and 75% on Inventions.) I’m going to revise my bounties, since I’m getting shipped an Invention Platinum Angel, and I am pretty much drained dry at the moment.

Right now, it seems like they are pushing hard to reward people who are either new (New Traders being the default on sending) and Active Traders (People who keep points flowing) while not giving a lot of benefit to those who have built up a lot of points.

It’s quite worrisome that in order to get my value in PucaTrade, I had to send out more cards. The value of my points did not change, but what changed was my visibility–a trait which has me concerned. If the only way I can get the cards I want is to send out cards, how can I ever get out of the system?

Beyond that, though, it’s the meddling and the impact that have me thinking. This is interference. It takes deliberate effort to send a regular user a card. Imagine if the default setting was to send to Gold members, and you had to choose to send to Silver or non-paying members.

I like promoted trades, to review, but I would love to hear from other people on the comments or on the forums. Can we replicate my experience? If you’re sitting on a significant amount of points, start sending a card every other day or so and let’s see if we can duplicate what happened to me.

Oh, and if you’re at GP San Jose this weekend, find me on Twitter (@wordofcommander ) and let’s play some games and make some trades!

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Jason Alt

I’mma Creep

Some cards went up because of Standard. One of them was a card I said I didn’t like. Did EDH make it go up? No. Could Standard have not made it go up? Yep. Was it easy to see coming if you had a grasp of the Standard metagame a few weeks before the pros solidified it? Yep. The point is, I feel like betting on Standard to make a card like Walking Ballista go up over the weekend seems risky. The longer I do this, the longer I like safer bets. Speculating is fun and sexy. I used to like making calls like Craterhoof Behemoth when it was a few bucks or Sphinx’s Revleation at $4, but even though those paid off, they were still risky. Risky bets are more fun when they pay off, but ever since I got into EDH finance, I’ve seen so many safe bets pay off that it’s hard to go back. But sometimes safe bets take a while to pay off. Today I want to talk about cards that didn’t spike in an afternoon but which creeped (I know that’s not a word) up without us noticing and what we can learn about cards currently at their floor.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll talk about cards that were printed in Commander 2013, 2014 and 2015, but we can certainly revisit this topic in the future. There are plenty of cards to talk about. Hopefully by looking at cards that were either new or reprinted in these sets, we can identify analogous cards just printed or reprinted in Commander 2016. Let’s take a look at what’s getting there.

In general, it’s hard to be surprised when a good wrath that draws a ton of cards goes up in price, but these were DIRT for a minute, and they got dirt cheap again about a year after they were printed. MTGPRICE graphs don’t go back far enough to get a good picture of what happened with Commander 2013 cards, but this one is worth looking at. This is a great card for EDH and it has managed to shrug off the reprinting, but it’s climbing so slowly no one has noticed that it tripled in price in an 18 month period. I got a ton of these for like nothing from people who cracked Mind Seize for Strix and True-Name Nemesis and threw the rest away. Sol Ring and Nekusar were obvious cards to glean from that pile, but I identified this card as a potential grower and forgot about it until I checked the price recently. Yowza. I am glad I have a lot of copies in a lot of decks and a lot more in a box.

The Commander 2016 analog for Decree of Pain is probably Blasphemous Act. I don’t know if it will recover as strongly from the Commander 2016 printing as it did from the Commander 2014 one since they’re basically signalling a willingness to print the card every few years, but I still think if you buy at the floor, there’s money to be made later on. I’m not as bullish about this as I am about some cards that made it a few years without a reprint, but this is the closest to Decree I could find. Not all of the analogs will bear fruit, but I am still mentioning them. I think this is a bad buy but if you trade for these, they’ll regain a lot of trade value, and if they cap out at $4, you still traded for them at $1 and you can either get out for $1.50 to $2 cash or quadruple up in trade value and either of those outcomes is dandy.

This seemed somewhat conspicuously absent from Commander 2016 given decks like Kydele and Breya. This was in the Derevi deck where it was great and it sort of crept up and crashed a few times despite never getting a reprint. This is a card I’m very confident in and while there is danger of a Commander 2017 reprint, you have a while for this to keep growing. I don’t know why it crashed in 2015, but this is a solid card and it has a good future. It can probably tells us bit about something from Commander 2016, also.

Cauldron of Souls seems like the best Commander 2016 analog for Elixir. While potentially not as useful in as many decks, this is very, very useful in the decks where it’s good. Juniper Order Ranger and other cards that can erase the -1/-1 counters are always climbing after reprints and persist cards are good with popular commanders like Marchesa. Cauldron isn’t done crashing and I don’t hate these at under $1 cash since they demonstrated that they can cap at $8 in a favorable climate. We’re going to get a ton of copies from Commander 2016 but the price is bound to recover. Isn’t it fun to talk about cards before they go up instead of after? It’s like the opposite of reddit.

I’ve been bullish on this card since before I even liked EDH. This card was under $1 when it first came out and people only cared or talked about Standard. I bought a lot of these for cash and sold probably too early, but that’s OK. What I didn’t do was buy a ton of these for $2 and I really wish I would have. The reprint pulled the rug out from under this card but it’s recovered nicely. I don’t know if we’ll find a Commander 2016 card as likely to recover this strongly, but we can try. It’s going to be a minute before they do another mono-colored EDH set so it may be tougher than you’d think to reprint this.

This isn’t a great analog for Caged Sun on Caged Sun’s merits, but I think this has the same growth potential. The only wrinkle is that this card has already established it’s much easier to reprint than is Caged Sun. While Sun lends itself to mono-colored decks, this has been in dual decks and the like. I still think this is going to recover from Commander 2016 and clearly the market does, too, because the price hasn’t gone down as low as I’d like. It’s gone down by an amount that rivals almost all of the other reprints from Commander 2016 (something almost no one seems to think is significant enough to mention) but I don’t think it’s gone down to a low enough amount to be jazzed about buying in. It could still go lower and I’m going to wait for that to happen, but I am seeing indications that its current price for Commander 2016 versions, $3 on Strike Zone, could be the floor. $3 for a card that has flirted with $20 after multiple reprintings is worth at least watching, right? HAS to be.  I don’t know if this can get cheaper than $3 but we all know it’s going to get more expensive than that. The question is how long are you willing to wait and how often will you keep checking the price?

The black deck is pretty bad. Ob Nixilis is a pretty garbage planeswalker commander and it’s worth some money just because the value has to come from somewhere. Seriously, that deck is lousy with bulk rares. Big, stupid demons, too-expensive spells. Crypt Ghast is one of the only bright spots there, but we have already discussed how that already recovered. The Blue Commander 2014 deck has a lot of cards creeping up and that inspired me to write this article. Not much is creeping up in the black deck. Bojuka Bog is higher than a lot of the rares. Growth on the better cards like Abyssal Persecutor is anemic at best. Perhaps in looking for an analog we need to look for cards in bad decks. Unfortunately, none of the Commander 2016 decks are bad. There is one that is less popular than the rest, though.

There’s a problem, there.

Stalwart Unity (Kynaois and Tiro) is JAMMED with good cards. It’s not the most popular to build around and it’s the only one left on shelves of Walmart and Target when I poke around looking for Breed Lethality decks (Don’t laugh, I found a copy at a Walmart in Pennsylvania when I was there for a funeral this weekend) so it’s going to be the least-bought deck. This puts less downward pressure on prices because no one is willing to pop the decks and get some singles into the market. Any benefit from this is spread out over a ton of cards that are reprints – Swords to Plowshares, Propaganda, Ghostly Prison, Best Within, Progenitor Mimic, Minds Aglow, Homeward Path – the pre-reprint value of the deck was like $70. It’s going to be tough to find anything that’s going to go down enough that we’ll like it as a buy.  I will sure try, though.

I sure like the growth of this card. The Commander 2016 copies being available for like $1.25 in a deck where there are plenty of cards to spread value increases over means that this card doesn’t have to bear the entire financial brunt of the deck and it can grow on its own merit. There is an issue with cards going up too fast and MSRP artificially capping how much everything can grow. Say Ghostly Prison went to $30 overnight. It won’t, but say it did. That means every other card combined can’t be more than $8 or the price of the deck has to go up and MSRP in most places (and the loose copies everywhere) means that the price of the other cards have to stay cheap because the market can’t correct that quickly. What I think is more likely to happen is that the rest of the cards take a few years to go back to where they were but also some cards people expect to go up won’t. I don’t think the lack of Legacy events bodes well for Commander 2016 copies of Swords to Plowshares, for example. I don’t think the banning of Splinter Twin is good for Ghostly Prison’s price. I don’t think Oath of Druids is going to go back up considering it was basically played in Cube and Vintage and no Cube or Vintage player wants a C16 copy of a card they could get in Korean or judge foil. What I think is that the financial growth could be soaked up by cards EDH players want to play. I think Lurking Predators won’t be held back by there being a ton of good cards in its deck because it’s not 2014 anymore and some things that were obvious then aren’t true anymore. Lurking Predators is so good that I liked Aid From the Cowl when I first saw it. Lurking Predators is so good that I didn’t get to buy Mind’s Dilation for as cheaply as I would have liked. Lurking Predators is so good that also a third thing. I feel like I don’t want to live in a world where you get blown out paying $1 for Lurking Predators.

My suspicion is that the price crashes are a result of the card selling out and dealers having the oversized copy named the same thing, tripping our price scraping algorithm. “Meren of Clan Nel Toth” from the set “Oversized” is obvious to a person but not a computer. This means Meren is selling out a lot at $8. I think it has a chance to go for even more over the next year. There is certainly a very low spread in a lot of places.

It’s hard to know what’s going to pop in Commander 2016. Vial Smasher already hit $5 and that limits how much Kydele and Thraisos can go up in the short term. Commander 2015 commander prices haven’t stabilized yet so it’s going to be a while on Commander 2016 stuff for sure. I will say Atraxa likely can’t maintain $20. I will say that the good partners are going to go up based on EDH (Vial Smasher has gone up because of dual commander and the fact that spikey players don’t wait around to buy cards the way others do. I think if I had to pick a commander that could go up, I’d say Kydele. Have you read it? If Vial Smasher can be $5 (and the rest of that Yidris deck isn’t great, which is great for Curtain’s Call, a card that has already quadrupled since I started harping on it incessantly. I think Kydele and Thraisos can soak up some value that the rest of the deck can’t help with and those are potentially good buys.

That’s it for this week. I am not sure what to talk about next week, but this seems like a well worth plumbing for now. Hit me up in the comments, nerds. Until next time!

 

Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower: 1/23/17

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy. And watch this YouTube channel to keep up to date with Cartel Aristocrats, a fun and informative webcast with several other finance personalities!

Aether Revolt’s official release weekend brought us the first SCG Open of the new Standard format, and it came out…cats blazing? The crazy cat lady combo that we all feared, that is Saheeli Rai and Felidar Guardian, showed up but didn’t dominate. It had a reasonable showing, with three in the top eight, but all lost in the quarterfinals. The top three decks of the event were various flavors of GB aggro, with a GW build rounding out the top four that’s likely to become hybridized with GB in the future. Looking through the top 64 and conversion rates, GB Aggro and Saheeli are two of the pillars, with Mardu Vehicles, GW Tokens, and a smattering of other strategies rounding things out.

Key cards in GB began spiking Saturday morning, and as of today, Walking Ballista is up well over $10. Verdurous Gearhulk doubled, and Rishkar, Peema Renegade is in the $5 range. The GB well is already pretty dry with these jumps, but remember that the first weekend of Standard is often not the same metagame as the Pro Tour.

Mindwrack Demon

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $10+

GB Aggro was inarguably the success story of the weekend. As is often the case with GB decks, it’s a suite of efficient, flexible removal paired with creatures that provide excellent value. There were a variety of builds, though most contained the core of Verdurous Gearhulk, Walking Ballista, Winding Constrictor, and Rishkar, Peema Renegade. Verdurous and Ballista already spiked hard, Winding Constrictor is an uncommon, and Rishkar is up to $5 with perhaps a bit more life left in it.

Grim Flayer and Mindwrack Demon were also popping up, though not quite as frequently as the above cards. Given that this is the very first weekend, there’s likely a good amount of room for growth and evolution in the archetype. If the deck pushes towards leaning on delirium, Flayer and Mindwrack should play a part in those lists. Flayer is an intensely powerful two-drop that was heavily played last season and has been breaking into Modern Jund since release. Mindwrack Demon has been much quieter so far, but the power level is indisputable. A flying trample 4/5 for four is no joke. While the GB Aggro lists abused counters and had more explosive draws, the stronger late game and hard removal of the delirium lists may have the edge in time.

Grim Flayer is already over $15, so I’m not eager about him. (Though foil copies at $30 or so should still look good in the long run.) Mindwrack Demon copies are round about $2 so far. Heavy inclusion in a format pillar will begin pushing the SOI mythic upwards pretty quick. Remember that SOI is the only block in Standard to lack a Masterpiece series, which opens up the ceiling on cards from that set as well. Between Verdurous Gearhulk and Walking Ballista I’m not sure how high the price can reasonably get — I doubt we’ll see $20 Demons — but this could easily double or quintuple up from a buy-in of $2.


Glint-Sleeve Siphoner

Price Today: $1.50
Possible Price: $10+

People that have been involved in this scene for awhile are all too familiar with the “the next Dark Confidant” cycle. Wizards prints a cheap black card, typically a creature, that draws cards. People flip out that it’s the next Dark Confidant. Prices rise considerably during pre-release season. The card utterly fails as a card possibly can. Everyone forgets about it while the guys selling the pre-orders laugh all the way to the bank. Dark Tutelage. Blood Scrivener. Pain Seer. Asylum Visitor. And now Glint-Sleeve Siphoner. Perhaps.

So far, Glint-Sleeve has actually managed more competitive success than any of her predecessors. There were four in the second place GB deck. She’s a bit slow to get going, as she can’t draw cards until turn four unless you played an energy producer on turn one. Still, she represents a lot of potential card drawing over the course of the game, with menace helping to generate energy and get in for damage here and there.

My biggest concern with Glint-Sleeve is how popular Walking Ballista is. There are at least two lines out of GB that kill it without costing a card on turn three; Ballista into Rishkar or Constrictor into Ballista. “Dies to removal” isn’t a valid argument for dismissing a creature, but a metagame being particularly hostile to X/1s is another story.

At $1.50 I’m not encouraging you to race out and buy these. After all, with the pedigree of False Confidants, that would be criminally negligent of me. Yet I bring your attention to it because it has already performed better than other iterations, and the price is low enough that if it somehow became A Thing, there would be some serious profit to be made. Who knows, maybe WotC will ban Walking Ballista with the new post-PT B&R update and Glint-Sleeve will explode.


Oath of Nissa

Price Today: $2.50
Possible Price: $8

Everyone with a heart loved Oath of Nissa when it was spoiled a year ago. So much so that I’m far from the only one to try and make it work in Modern. (I tried it in Mono-Green Nykthos.) It’s been popping up here and there in the format since release, usually in GW Tokens decks pre-Kaladesh with Nissa, Voice of Zendikar and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar. The deck had faded a bit after Kaladesh’s release, but GW Tokens is back in the metagame these days after the banning of Emrakul, the Promised End and an enabler in Rishkar was printed.

This weekend we saw a fair bit of GW Tokens pop up, with four Oaths a mainstay. That isn’t the end of the story though. The most popular Saheeli Rai build was four-color, with green the fourth color. The ol’ “splash green for mana fixing” plan is alive and well. Oath of Nissa’s other line of text, the one that doesn’t draw you a card, lets you cast Saheeli Rai with any color mana. Between that and Servant of the Conduit, I wonder how often Saheeli was cast without a blue or red source in play. Don’t forget you can also blink Oath with Felidar Guardian for a little extra card draw when necessary.

If we’ve got two major pillars in Standard playing Oath of Nissa, GW Tokens and 4c Saheeli, that bodes well for the playset in each archetype. Copies are well above the bulk rare price tag of $.50, and are instead in the $2.50 range. That means there’s an existing baseline of demand today, right now, without any extra pushing from Standard. As the card grows in popularity in Standard, there won’t be a surplus of bulk copies to burn through before prices climb. I doubt we’re looking at a $15 card here, but $6+ isn’t out of the question, especially if it’s a key component of two major strategies.