Last Saturday, numerous Magic players woke up to surprising news: the sudden release of the latest Banned & Restricted announcements. The story goes that the MTGO Beta team enforced these updates, yet they hadn’t been announced yet on the Mothership. With the internet being what it is these days, it took all of a few milliseconds for this information to hit Reddit, then Twitter, and then the world.
Wizards had no choice but to acknowledge the mishap by reporting the changes. Talk about impactful!
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Yeah, Splinter Twin was harsh. I managed to get rid of 2 but got stuck with 7 more and a foil one. Hardly the worst case out there – I guess – but still hard to tackle.
As for it being unexpected, I’m pretty sure someone here in Price wrote about being rather apprehensive regarding the attention Splinter got right after del Moral León won the PT. And then it went under the radar, still performing well (as the de facto deck to beat) but with people getting used to it…
Anyway, I want to thank you for this article Sigmund. Yours is the philosophy I’ll apply to card finance going forward. Greed is a bad thing and profit is always profit (as you said numerous times before). Just got to keep that in mind!
Carlos,
Sorry to hear you were stuck holding the bag on some Splinter Twins. I always respected the deck as Tier 1 in Modern, I never considered the possibility it would get wiped off the map altogether. I guess people can try Kiki Jiki versions of the deck, but I can’t imagine it’ll be as robust and consistent. I suppose time will tell.
Glad you saw some of my cautionary approaches as helpful. I try to maintain a conservative approach to MTG Finance and taking profits when available is usually a good thing. Even reserve list cards aren’t immune to drops on occasion – I held onto some dual lands way too long and lost a little bit on them simply because Legacy has fallen out of favor a bit. Show and Tell and Sneak Attack have also been hurt due to a fluctuating Legacy metagame. Nothing is purely immune unless you’re looking at iconic cards in the game’s history – and even then, you never know when people will just stop wanting to pay more for silly cards like Eureka :).
Thanks again!
Sig
Good read. Was sitting on 2 MM15 twins but dug for gold in my waiting to be listed modern masters 2015 repack when I pulled out a Kiki and a foil eldrazi temple.
Also have a LGS whose auto update buy list system was reacting weird to the spikes on random cards and was able to move 4 foil Glen Elendra’s and 1 foil Keranos for about double each.
Also quickly sold off my 2 titans before the buylist dropped to pennies.
Well played. This time of year, there is HUGE reward to those who are willing to dedicate time to staying on top of this market. Probably merits a whole separate column because it’s so crucial for both buyers and sellers.
If anything cards like Eureka and Scapeshift drive home that if you like a card you should probably purchase it straight away. Personally I got my playset of Eurekas for $100 total when the card spiked first in the US (as referenced in the article, it was a deck doing well at an SCG tournament where Eurekas acted as extra Show and Tells). My Scapeshifts probably totaled less than $20 as I got them when they were still new.
I’m trying to maintain a collection on the cheap, keeping track of spikes and quickly buying sets from slow to respond shops definitely pays off.