Monthly Archives: September 2018

Casual Fridays

What Mythic Edition Means

1 Comment

If you listened to MTG Fast Finance last week (and you really ought to, it’s free money and scintillating conversation) then you heard James and I discussing the impact of the Mythic Edition of Guilds of Ravnica.

In the time since, I’ve been thinking about that set and what it means for players, and for collectors, and people who care about the financial aspects of this decision.

Come with me, and let’s talk about what they might be trying to do.

First, let’s talk about what the set is. From their page:

The product will be a Draft-sized (24 pack) box of Guilds of Ravnica, with the twist that eight packs (they’ll be clearly marked) will each come with one of these planeswalker cards inside the pack (plus the normal rare or mythic rare card). You will know which packs have these special planeswalkers, so this can make for an exciting Draft experience. Or just crack the whole box. You do you.

So you’re dropping $250 on a box, which is about double plus some for the average box. Maybe even triple, depending on the box and where it is in the price cycle.

The amazing part of this box is the eight packs which each has a different borderless Planeswalker, the first official ones of this kind, though there have been assorted borderless alterists and online artists who’ve made these ‘super-art’ styles for years and years. This is a lazy set of Masterpieces–This isn’t original. It’s not going somewhere new. I prefer Invocations  to these cards, and I don’t like Invocations much.

The art choices, aside, one thing is clear: If you can get this at the original MSRP, then you’re set. It’s a slam-dunk at that price, having 24 packs of Guilds of Ravnica, and 8 of those packs (they will be clearly marked, it seems) with the special Planeswalkers, so those packs will have an extra card. Shouldn’t be too much of a disruption, as you’ll still get a regular mythic or foil. It’s not clear if that’s replacing a common, or if the number is now one more.

If regular packs are $4, then this is $64 worth of packs. Even at $3 a pack, which is your price if you’re buying a box at $108, that’s $50 of value before we get to the main attraction.

You’re getting eight foil planeswalkers for $200. Only $25 each! Let’s look at these current foil prices before we get into anything else.

Name

Foil Price(s)

Teferi, Hero of Dominaria

Dominaria $95

Elspeth, Knight-Errant

Duel Deck $14

MM 2013 $35

Shards of Alara $43

Liliana, the Last Hope

Eldritch Moon $99

SDCC 2016 ‘Zombies!’ $125

Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker

Duel Deck $7

Magic 2013 $22

Conflux $27

Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast

Conspiracy 2 $59

Ral, Izzet Viceroy

No foil prices yet, but the regular is preselling around $15, so likely $30 or so.

Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas

Mirrodin Besieged $68

Vraska, Golgari Queen (presumably)

None listed yet, but preselling for ~$25, so the foil should be $40-$50 easily.

With these prices, there’s a LOT going on. Will these be as valuable as the pack foil? Possibly. The only time we’ve seen something close to this as been the assorted SDCC promo planeswalkers, and that printing consistently represents the most expensive versions of those cards, even if the cards aren’t that pricey.

So with this in mind, at ~$200 for the set of eight, you’re looking at about $470 worth of pack foils. That’s ridiculous value, quite frankly, and it’s guaranteed. You’re not hunting for an Expedition or the like, you’re simply going to have to brave the website and the inevitable crashes. You know exactly what you’re getting, and even the worst of these (Ral) is going to be a $30 card.

He’s got that maybe $30 face too.

There are variables at play, like the website’s terrible interface and the fact that these can’t be shipped outside the USA at this point, but the primary one is going to be the total number made. If there’s a lot, if everyone gets as many as they want, then I’d still have a hard time believing that it’s not at least a break-even. Teferi has a year left to warp Standard, and he’s popping up in other formats too. Liliana sees some play, but a lot of her price is due to small-set mythic supply. Tezzeret is from forever ago. Daretti doesn’t have much demand either.

I can see a world where the Teferi is $75, Liliana is $40, and the rest are hovering in the $20 range. That’s still $235 just from the eight planeswalkers, and that’s the worst-case, mega-overprinted scenario.

Yep, still a whole year in Standard.

Wizards’ track record is to underprint things, and they’re right to do so here. These foils are the definition of a luxury item, as you could collect this set in nonfoil for around $150. When you are hunting special versions, you’re in luxury-goods territory, and keeping those scarce is good.

What I really don’t like is how this feels like a giant middle finger to local stores. The buy-a-box promos are an attempt to bring business to the stores that keep events and registration high, and this bypasses the stores entirely. This isn’t FTV, where stores got to have a markup that was pure profit for them. This is cutting out the middleman, and testing the waters of how much profit they can siphon away from those stores.

Using the local stores would have allowed for worldwide distribution, and it’s a shame that Wizards is neglecting the rest of the world this way.

Finally, I want to address resales. Should you buy this on eBay, if you can’t get through on the site? I’m going to lean in and say no unless you’re getting them for $300, but not as high as $350. Sure, these look fun, but aside from being borderless, they are the same cards with different art.

These are unlikely to spike, too. The planeswalker sets from SDCC show that their prices are super high early, and after the GIMMEGIMMEGIMME wave wears off, it tapers down. I bought an SDCC Liliana of the Dark Realms for $90 three years ago. She’s $87 now. There will be people making money on this set for a while if they got in at $250, but the best money is going to be in immediate flips. Don’t hang onto sealed sets of this product, if you happen to get your two.

Do you want your $90 now, or your $90 in three years?

I don’t mind Wizards doing this, selling the premium versions of this directly, except for how it takes potential profit away from local stores and hoses non-North Americans. These versions are lackluster Masterpieces to me, but I felt that way about Invocations too. For future releases of a product like this (and there’s very likely to be more of this) I’d expect them to slowly increase how many get sold, and hopefully figure out how to let international buyers get some too.

Please remember that these are promos of something that already exists for cheaper. Don’t freak out because there’s a more expensive version of a card. Get the one you need/want/can afford and move on.

 

Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for five years now, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Everything Old is New Again

Greetings!

I know in this series we like to use data in the weeks that it begins to trickle in to try and predict the future. It’s been working out pretty well for us and it makes us look particularly prescient when someone says “Did you realize Squandered Resources was  $25?” and you show them a big stack of them, or at least the Legacy duals you bought with the profits of your 10,000% gains. It doesn’t always work out like that, obviously. Sometimes this is way harder and the tea leaves are way tougher to read. Sometimes, though, stuff is way easier because sometimes we get a new commander for an entire deck archetype that already exists.

Why Would a Deck People Already Have Built Help Us?

It’s worth addressing this point because if I don’t, it threatens to fundamentally undermine the entire thesis of this piece (which, I guess, is “lol, look how easy it’s going to be to figure out all these cards that are going to pop by looking at what popped the last time this deck was a thing”). Are people going to run out and buy a bunch of cards when the thrust of the deck isn’t really all that new? Is someone who bought the cards for the deck going to buy new copies if they like this new commander better, or will they just change their old deck up a few cards, jam the new commander, put the old one in the 99 and call it a day?

I think there are a few things going on here. Obviously, yes, if someone is going to dust off an old deck with a new commander, they already have most of what they need and they aren’t likely to need to buy all new copies. The more similar the deck is (and we’re discussing very similar stuff today) the less likely it is that they need anything at all but that’s not that bad a thing for us, actually. If they sold the cards, they need to buy them again. If they didn’t sell the cards, they took them out of circulation.

When Nekusar decks first hit, they launched a ton of cards from the $0.50 range to the $5-$10 range by virtue of being the first deck to really incorporate them. I made a ton of money off of cards like Teferi’s Puzzle Box due to Nekusar decks and other cards like Forced Fruition, Windfall and Tolarian Winds became interesting. You could find $1 copies of Forced Fruition in dollar boxes, shops that didn’t update their prices often, trade binders, shoe boxes – what I call “the woodwork.” Copies aren’t coming out of the woodwork anymore meaning anyone who comes along and wants to build the deck is fighting for copies with the people who already have them. So while at first, we may think that the decks existing already means there isn’t as much demand for the cards as before, I think we’ll see more second spikes. The first spikes ferreted the copies out of the woodwork and now everyone who wants a Puzzle Box for a new deck can’t get one from a dollar bin – their only recourse is to pay retail. When everyone has to pay retail and buy from a small number of sources with finite copies rather than myriad sources all over, price go up quickly.

What New Card Is Doing Old Things?

Niv-Mizzet looks pretty similar to older Niv Mizzets but he also seems to be the most popular. He’s a bit of a combination of the Old Niv-Mizzet Curiosity decks and Nekusar. The spellslinger clause is interesting because it helps mete out even more damage when you do what I assume you want to do, which is cast wheels and recycle your deck. Here’s what I am looking at based on the following EDHREC pages.

Nekusar

The Locust God

Niv-Mizzet, The Firemind

Arjun. The Shifting Flame

Puzzle Box is the queen of all kittycats here and while the overall price trend is up and up, I have had a few opportunities to buy cheaper copies of these when the demand seemed to have died down a bit. Nekusar into Leovold (briefly) into The Locust God into the new Niv-Mizzet, though, has given us a lot of chances to make money here and I think this new Niv-Mizzet is another chance.

Arjun seems like a low-risk buy-in with some decent upside. Mindmoil effects in general are good right now because rather than deck yourself you’re just shuffling your cards back in so you can tutor for them (except not Mystical or Personal, I guess) or just draw into them again rather than throw them in the bin so you can keep the pain going longer. Arjun is good as the commander of a deck and also as an inclusion and Psychic Corrosion may be a good inclusion for it but with Niv-Mizzet, we want to just keep pinging them a ton. There are hundreds of $1.50 copies on TCG Player to slog through but once that happens, I think this could get there and at least getting these when you’re $1 off in a trade and socking a few away for when we’re another year removed from the Mizzix deck’s printing and we hit a tipping point on Arjun, I think you won’t be disappointed. It may take a few more Niv-Mizzets to push this but I am patient.

 Moileyboi on the other hand has demonstrated a willingness to flirt with $7 on the basis of other factors and this second spike which could be incoming is likely to stick. This is a Ravnica rare and while its inclusion in 1984 decks hardly makes it a staple, it’s in over half of the registered Arjun decks and it’s a good bet that if either card catches on they both will. This is going to dome people for significant damage with a Niv-Mizzet deck and also find you the Curiosity or whatever you need to win the game on the spot. This deck isn’t fun but that hasn’t stopped it, ever.

Magus really took a bath when a Masters 25 printing cut it down from $12 to $2, which really nerfed all the RW precons I bought because I could flip them for basically double. Magus has demonstrated it can be $12 with the huge supply from a Commander deck and while there were a lot more copies injected from Masters 25, that’s still a $10 booster pack set that isn’t being opened anymore and Magus likely claws its way back up. It’s a good idea to buy Masters set stuff at its floor anyway so I think this would make sense even if they hadn’t printed another juicy commander for it.

What is taking meltyboi so long to pop? It may not be super apparent from the graph, but do you see that little region of daylight below the blue line in the middle there? That’s an arbitrage opportunity – for a brief period of time, buylist was actually above retail. The price went up after so the dealers were clearly right. This is a rare I still get for a dime when I buy bulk rares from people, which is a surprise. I think a second spike on this goes to $5 but I don’t know if Niv-Mizzet does it. Still, this is hard to reprint given its metalcraft ability and while it feels like the 8th, uncecessary wheel in the deck, it’s actually pretty savage if you get the metalcraft boost and you plan to wheel some more. You even get to draw another card when you play this off of Niv-Mizzet.

In conclusion, I think while Niv-Mizzet is sort of boring like the other one where you just slapped a Curiosity on him and won , I still expect there to be building around him and if there is, a lot of stuff that is in low supply goes to no supply. I think there are a bunch of kittycats that you buy before people get wise and sell on the basis of hype and if a sexier-looking commander gets spoiled next week, you best believe I’ll talk about it. Until then, keep buying cards, keep asking me questions and see if you can help me buy all of the Mindmoils on TCG Player. That’s a big domino and if it falls, so do a lot of other sites. I think if you scrutinize the pages of the commanders I linked, you may find a few more cards that pair nicely with the new Niv-Mizzet. If not, I’ll be back next week, probably with an article called “Everything Old is New Again Again.” Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 9/10/18 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

1 Comment

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.

PAX brought with it a tasty bag of Ravnica spoilers, which held us over until today, when they begin in earnest. I suspect we’ll get another Planeswalker, or one of the banner mythics, as Rosewater typically gets to show those off. I’m not anticipating anything that’s going to send me to TCGPlayer to pick up Standard cards, as that’s a market that’s felt like a fool’s game for years now. Those possibilities exist, but the more likely result is that I go looking for Modern cards. Some new rare or mythic that turns on a long-forgotten Kamigawa rare for a two-card combo is basically the dream scenario in spoiler season. A spell that creates an infinite loop with One With Nothing? I’m in.

World Shaper (Foil)

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $15

This year’s slate of Commander decks continues to provide opportunities for growth. They’re holding consistent popularity week after week, having pushed Atraxa out of the top slot for the longest period of time since she was released, I believe. They’re doing far better than the tribal decks from last year, that’s for sure.

Of them, Lord Windgrace appears to be the most popular. Aminatou is close, but “lands matter” is just a theme too tempting for most. All the usual suspects are there — Gitrog Monster, Oracle of Mul Daya, Courser of Kruphix, Ramunap Excavator, etc. Joining the crew is relative newcomer World Shaper.

World Shaper came to us in Rivals of Ixalan, so he’s only been around since January. That hasn’t slowed his adoption rate though. He’s up to nearly 2,000 EDHREC lists, which is a respectable number for a card that’s only been around a few months. More impressively is that his stock numbers are depleting rapidly. There’s a handful of foils on TCG right now, and other than that? Basically nada. A card that can easily return five to fifteen permanents from your graveyard to your battlefield at instant speed (assuming you have a sac outlet) is absurd in decks that can abuse it, and solidly reasonable everywhere else. Grab copies at $4 and $5 now before they’re over $10 in 2019.

Blighted Woodland (Foil)

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $8

Long-time EDH players will remember Krosan Verge, a dumb land that lets you tutor for a forest and a plains, which most noteworthy did not need to be basic. Go find a Tropical Island and a Scrubland! Then get the Verge back and do it again! EDH is a great format. Blighted Woodland continues that tradition, just more reasonably.

Krosan Verge foils cost about $30, if you can manage to find one. I see one hiding out at SCG right now, but TCG has none. Where you will find Krosan Verge is roughly 11,000 EHREC lists. Meanwhile, you’ll find Blighted Woodland in nearly 15,000 lists. Yep. Despite something like 8 reprints on Krosan Verge, Blighted Woodland has found its way into more lists. Wild.

Of course, that raises the question of why a single-printed foil land in 15,000 lists is still $2. The obvious answer is “it shouldn’t be.” Plan accordingly.


Grim Backwoods (Foil)

Price Today: $1
Possible Price: $10

Remember about forty seconds ago, when you were reading about having an instant way to kill your World Shaper? Hey, look at that! A good instant-speed way to kill your World Shaper with no opportunity cost!

In the same way that Blighted Woodland is a revisited and “fixed” Krosan Verge, Grim Backwoods is a revisited and I guess “adjusted” Miren, the Moaning Well. Sure, Greater Good gives you as many activations as you want for the same mana cost, and can also draw you a lot more cards depending on the creature, but that’s not the whole story. The rest of that story is that there is a boatload of enchantment destruction in EDH and it’s easy for Greater Good to get wiped out. It’s much less likely (although certainly not impossible, depending on how rude your playgroup is vis a vis Strip Mine and Crucible of Worlds) that your Grim Backwoods is going to get wiped out. Also, just run both.

Grim Backwoods has a single foil printing, and like Blighted Woodland, has gotten several reprints — including in Lord Windgrace. If Krosan Verge tells us anything, it’s that Wizards will be happy to reprint utility lands like this until there’s no paper left on planet Earth, but they’re going to be non-foil every time. That leaves a humongous opportunity for grabbing cheap foils. This could see an honest to god ten times multiplier within several months to a year.

Travis Allen has  been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.

 

[/hide]

Casual Fridays

Previews and Shocklands

Guilds of Ravnica previews officially start next week, and while we have a smattering of cards, we also know that the shocklands are back.

Again.

I got this question three times over the weekend, in some form or another: “What should I do about shocklands?”

I’m here to answer that for you, along with a couple of cards that have potential to do very well in the new Standard.

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

To learn how ProTrader can benefit YOU, click here to watch our short video.

expensive cards

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for five years now, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.