All posts by Danny Brown

Danny doesn’t want to pay to play Magic, and he doesn’t think you should, either. By using common sense, applying basic truisms, and exercising a modicum of patience, he will show you how to maximize every dollar you spend on Magic: The Gathering. Even if you don’t have a huge budget for gaming, with some smart decision making and a little time, you too can afford to build top-tier decks or draft on a regular basis. Danny’s resume includes writing for Quiet Speculation and serving as editor-in-chief for Brainstorm Brewery. He’s a Limited enthusiast with a special fondness for Cube, and has an earnest belief in the inherent superiority of 40-card decks (it’s okay, Constructed players. You’re special, too). Have a question or comment? Reach out on Twitter at @dbro37.

Danny Brown, ProTrader

UNLOCKED: On Hobbies and Their Monetization

June 9, 2015 Danny Brown 6 Comments

Editor’s Note: Danny’s ProTrader article this week is a great piece for anyone looking to turn their Magic hobby into a money-making enterprise, or at least using it to offset costs. We wanted to share this excellent piece with everyone, so it has been unlocked early for your enjoyment! If you enjoy this piece, we hope you’ll consider signing up for a ProTrader account, where you’ll have access to more high-quality pieces like this every day of the week.

By: Danny Brown

Hobbies are important. They’re good for the psyche and for the soul. I have several myself, and without them, I would be bored more often than not.

Hobbies also cost money, and that’s okay. Yes, frugality is a virtue many of us could probably use a bit more of to varying levels, but it’s also possible to overdo it. I have some friends that absolutely refuse to spend any money at all, and it’s very frustrating. Yes, game nights, Netflix, and home-cooked dinners are great, but not when they’re the only things you ever do for fun. Setting aside some monthly entertainment dollars for eating out, events, concerts, and other purely-for-fun activities shouldn’t be guilt-inducing, at least in moderation.

Then again, I do understand where these friends are coming from. I hate spending more money than I have to for a given experience. For example, I’ve spent $60 on a videogame exactly twice in my entire life (Dark Souls and Bloodborne, in case you’re wondering), and this is no coincidence. I’ve previously discussed patience in making purchases, and that doesn’t just apply to Magic cards. Waiting a few months to buy a videogame will save someone $20 to $40 every single time, and I have taken that path in all but two cases in the last ten years (and by the way, I have no regrets on those two cases. It’s important to realize when you’re willing to pay more for a better/sooner experience).

The importance of patience, though, is something I’ve covered before, and besides, it’s more related to minimizing one’s costs in a hobby than it is to today’s actual topic.

Monetizing Your Hobbies

In case you didn’t get it from the not-so-subtle title you presumably clicked on to end up on this page, there is today’s topic in all of its Heading 2 glory.

There are things you have been doing presumably for fun, for free even, and I’m here to tell you: there is little more satisfying than turning the time and effort sunk into those pursuits into actual, real-life currency.

Being that we’re here on MTGPrice, a Magic: The Gathering-focused website, I’ll be focusing most of today’s discussion on monetizing that particular hobby, but for illustration purposes, here’s a few ways one could monetize several common non-Magic hobbies:

Reading: write critical reviews for a publication; buy, sell, and trade used books for profit.
Gardening: sell your produce at a local farmer’s market; teach classes to fledgling gardeners.
Weight lifting and other exercise: try dabbling in personal training; start a YouTube fitness channel.
Individual sports (biking, bowling, golf, tennis, etc.): enter tournaments of the appropriate level and crush the competition; coach novices to do the same.
Crafts: sell what you make; teach others to make cool stuff.

Are you seeing a pattern? Maybe I’m just unimaginative, but with few exceptions, there are two basic categories of actions to monetize a hobby:

Creating items or services to sell (or buying and selling for profit).
Teaching or entertaining through content creation or classes.

(If you can think of ways to monetize hobbies that don’t fall into these two basic categories, I’d love to hear them.)

In both cases, one requires a certain level of expertise in the hobby in question. That means that you probably won’t be able to monetize new hobbies right away, and if you have a lot of leisurely pursuits, you may not be able to monetize all of them. So focus on the ones that you know best and that cost the most amount of money to maintain.

The Danger

The main danger of monetizing one’s hobbies is that all of a sudden that thing you used to do for fun has become a job. Jobs are not fun—that’s why employers have to pay us money to do them.

So how do you make money from your hobbies without them devolving into drudgery that is no longer fun? My biggest tip in this regard is to not allow yourself to be dependent on the income you’re producing. Yes, it’s nice to make money from Magic, but the moment I am depending on Magic to pay my bills is the moment that I add a serious amount of stress to the hobby. Therefore, I balance my finances by assuming I will make no money from Magic. Anything I do make I see as a bonus.

Another great part about not depending on income from a monetized hobby is that if it does become tedious at any point, there’s nothing keeping you from taking a step back for some time. Once you extend your financial balance to include income from your monetized hobby, you give up a lot of the ability to take a break on occasion. It’s much better to keep one’s options open.

Monetizing Magic

Chances are that as an MTGPrice ProTrader, you have already monetized the game to some extent. Maybe this means you’re making profit, or maybe it just means you’re playing with cards that are worth much more money than you’ve actually spent on the game.

Let’s do some more brainstorming. Here’s a non-comprehensive list of ways to monetize your MTG habit:

Win one or more tournaments with large prizes (e.g., the Pro Tour or a Grand Prix).
Win lots of tournaments with small prizes (e.g., FNM).
Backpack grind: trade every chance you get, making extra value in more trades than not. Maybe you’ll sell your cards every once in a while, or maybe you’ll just end up with a sweet Legacy deck for the price of a Standard deck.
Buy cards at their low points and sell at their high points to buylists, or through eBay or TCGplayer.
Take #4 a step further and open your own webstore for buying and selling cards.
Take #4 and #5 a step further and open your own brick-and-mortar store for buying and selling cards and running tournaments (once you get to this point, you’re probably past the point of monetizing your hobby to the point of opening a business, but this is the end-game for many value-minded players).
Buy collections and large bulk lots and pick out the value cards, á la Ryan Bushard.
Become a judge and get compensated for attending and officiating events.
Write Magic articles! There’s a ton of niches: finance, competitive strategy across a number of formats, community issues, theory, flavor critiques, casual format highlights, and so much more. If you can put words together in a reasonably aesthetically pleasing manner, it’s just a matter of finding your slot—or creating your own.
Record Magic videos: Magic Online provides a great way to record Limited and Constructed events, but content producers like Tolarian Community College and Evan Erwin prove that it’s possible to make engaging and fun Magic content without gameplay being involved at all.
Start a Magic podcast. You probably already listen to a few. That doesn’t mean you can’t start your own (assuming you have interesting things to say).
Players like NumotTheNummy have proven that streaming on Twitch.tv can be a full-time option if you have the skills and personality for it. That’s more of a job than a monetized hobby, but streaming a couple nights a week and gaining a few subscribers is in the spirit of this exercise.

These are a dozen fine options that cover a wide range of skills and commitment levels, and I’m sure there are many other solid ways to make a little extra cash from your favorite card game. You know what you’re good at, so take those skills and turn them into something of value.

Take a Sure Thing When It’s Available

“Sure thing” is just a shorthand of course, as 100-percent surety is a bit of a mythical beast, but some actions are more likely to pay off than others.

Take Tasigur, the Golden Fang, for example. The card is down to around $6 now, which is pretty low for a card that has proven to be a high-power inclusion in both Modern and Legacy. I wouldn’t deign to say that a certain price is a “sure thing,” but I’m more or less comfortable with the idea that this is virtually certain to be profitable if bought at this price point (and I have been requesting as many as I can get on PucaTrade as a result).

Or maybe you want to create some content, and you’re faced with how to get it out to the world. You could start your own site, which requires a high level of commitment, promotion, and time, or you could let an established site pay you to post on its domain. While starting your own site can be correct with the proper resources, goals, and perspective, many of us would be better served to just take the sure thing of an established site providing a platform and paycheck.

Or maybe—and this is purely hypothetical, mind you—you’re in the top eight of a major Grand Prix and are faced with the choice of a Burst Lightning for your red-white aggro deck or a foil Tarmogoyf for your sideboard (and wallet). Do you take the common that adds some (likely small) number of percentage points to your chances of winning the event, or do you take the sure thing of several hundred dollars (while still having the chance to win the event)?

I know what I would do (it’s the one that involves taking the sure thing). I also know that I can respect the other viewpoint without agreeing with it. What I cannot respect is personal attacks on someone who sees things the opposite way, or takes an action with which you don’t agree. Once personal attacks enter the equation, that causes the attacker to lose any sense of respectability and probably a bunch of Twitter followers. Hypothetically.

And If There’s No Sure Thing?

When it comes to speculation, I don’t do it as much as I used to. I used to feel like I needed to find that next hot spec as frequently as possible.

Nowadays, I virtually never go looking for specs. If something is worth speculating on, it will be obvious. Yes, it’s possible to dig into cards nobody’s heard of and make a nice call for profit, but that’s not the way I like to do things. I’ll stick with obvious calls like Tasigur and the like, thank you very much. And if there’s no Tasigur-type card out there? I don’t buy. Why bother? If I don’t feel extremely confident in a card, there’s no point in buying in. And since we’ve already established the idea of not being dependent on this extra income, that means there’s no reason to speculate until I do feel extremely confident.

I’m interested in your thoughts on this topic. Have you monetized Magic in ways not mentioned above? Share your success story! Have you monetized another, non-Magic hobby? I’d love to hear about it. And how many of you have turned a monetized hobby into a career? Did it ruin it for you? Let us know!

Bursting Modern Master Bubbles

May 30, 2015 Danny Brown 5 Comments

I’m just going to come out and say it: I’m not a fan of Modern Masters 2015.

The funny thing is that I should be the target market for this product: a Limited enthusiast who is willing and able to pay a bit more to enjoy drafting a more-complex-than-normal (meaning better-than-normal) set with the opportunity to pick up sweet cards for my cube or open insanely expensive eternal staples.

So what’s the problem?

Lottery Tickets

Think of your worst-case scenario in a draft. Most versions of this scenario would be something along the line of opening no cards of value and losing in the first round. Consider that in an eight-man pod, four players will lose their first match. Even (probably generously) saying that two of those players opened cards worth more than the price of the packs for drafting, that means that 25 percent of drafters got to play one round (and are probably frustrated due to a loss) and opened no cards of value.

Obviously, being a good Limited player means that you probably won’t see this scenario a full 25 percent of the time, but still, even the best drafters are going to have nights where the whole thing just goes to hell and they end up with less money, bulk commons, and the annoyance of losing early.

Normal drafting usually costs between $10 and $15. That’s not an insignificant amount of money, but it’s also not enough to really lose sleep over (and if it is, you probably shouldn’t be drafting. Find someone with a cube for your Limited fix). When it comes to drafting a normal set, I have made the conscious decision that I am willing to risk $12 (my LGS’s price) for the chance to gamble on some packs for a money rare, draft some cards, play at least one round of Magic, and hopefully win some prizes. Everyone’s line on this is different, of course, but to me, the upside of a perfect draft is worth the downside of losing $12 and experiencing the frustration of a worst-case draft.

The First Modern Masters

I drafted the first Modern Masters four times (in paper MTG), paying $40 cash each time for the privilege. That’s $160 I spent on 12 packs of the set.

I pretty much had my worst-case scenario happen in all four of these drafts: I didn’t open the top cards and I lost in the first round of all but one draft (and did not win that fourth one). To this day, two years later, I regret spending so much on those drafts, but due to the nature of the first Modern Masters, the worst-case scenario wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Here’s an incomplete list of cards that I did end up with after these four drafts. I wish I had written everything down, but I did not, so this is just based on my memory:

4x Spell Snare
2x Kitchen Finks
2x Path to Exile
1x Pact of Negation
1x Summoner’s Pact
1x Maelstrom Pulse (foil)
1x Knight of the Reliquary
1x Angel’s Grace
1x Woodfall Primus
1x Kodama’s Reach (foil)
Some number of Electrolyze
Some number of Trygon Predator
Some number of Lava Spike
Some number of Rift Bolt

None of these cards are the type of thing you open and pump your fist about (at least when you consider some of the mythics in this set), but added up over four drafts, these did a lot of work to help me not feel completely morose about “wasting” $160 on what turned out for me to be highly unsatisfying drafts.

The New Modern Masters

Despite my bad experience with the first Modern Masters, I was looking forward to Modern Masters 2015 and eager to actually win some drafts this time.

Then the set was fully spoiled.

Travis Allen did a great job covering what is also my biggest problem with the design of Modern Masters 2015 as a premium product designed to be a higher-cost alternative to normal drafting. This is the part that stuck out most to me:

The result here is that while half the rares you opened last time just about covered the cost at MSRP, this time only a quarter of them are going to. That puts us a lot closer to the Dragons of Tarkir ratio than the Modern Masters ratio.

The first Modern Masters had cards like Kitchen Finks, Spell Snare, Lava Spike, and a number of other powerful and fairly valuable uncommons and commons that you could be fairly certain would be available several picks into each pack. You didn’t have to open a rare to make at least some value back from your draft.

In Modern Masters 2015, there are a few powerful uncommons and commons, but most of the value is packed in the rare slot of one in every eight packs, since the mythics are where most of the money in Modern Masters 2015 lies.

With the first Modern Masters, someone with a good understanding of cards values could easily take $10 or more from a draft, even if she didn’t open anything in her three boosters. This is largely unprecedented in the world of drafting, where your financial success is often hit or miss—you tend to open one or two cards of value, or you get a bunch of worthless junk with maybe a Standard-playable uncommon.

Modern Masters 2015 leans more toward this second model: you either win big or you lose badly, and the entry fee here is 250 percent the normal price. The fact that a fraction of a fraction of a percent will open a foil Tarmogoyf is cool, but the downside is the same as for a normal set—completely whiffing on cards of value and ending up with only bulk.

Breaking It Down

As the above quote from Travis said, you have a 25 percent of opening a rare that will cover your cost of entry. Note that the cost of entry is $10, and that many of these rares are going to be heading south of that very quickly. Primeval Titan (a mythic) is barely above the pack price as is, given it’s three previous printings. Daybreak Coronet‘s previous value stems from one deck that wants it and there being virtually no supply—an influx of supply should crash it very quickly. How many copies of Splinter Twin, Fulminator Mage, and Spellskite does the market really need? All of these cards are on their way down to varying degrees. In fact, with very few exceptions, Modern Masters 2015 packs include mostly cards that are going down in value for the foreseeable future. That just doesn’t seem that attractive to me at $10 a pack.

Consider now the top eight non-rares in the set based on TCGplayer mid:

First of all, the cards at the bottom of this list aren’t even worth a dollar. Second, half of the above cards (Smash, Plating, Vines, and Thoughtcast) are for highly specialized decks, meaning their financial upside is inherently capped. Lightning Bolt at uncommon makes a lot of sense for Limited, but it means players are less likely to get one in their drafts, and it’s not like a card with this many printings is going to have a huge upside despite being at uncommon here.

Only Remand is truly exciting among the non-rares in this set. If you whiff on your rare and foil in each pack, then you have a very limited chance of making back much if any value from the cards passed to you. Compare this to my Modern Masters 2013 pickings listed above, which were almost exclusively passed to me. Modern Masters 2015 just doesn’t compare, and to me, it’s not worth the high cost of entry.

There Is an Alternative

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s take on lotteries from 1984, where the lottery was used as a means to control the masses through providing distraction and false hope.

Look, I understand the thrill of opening a booster pack and hoping to find something highly valuable. That very thrill is the reason that I mainly play Limited, and my love of valuable cards naturally led me to MTG finance. I have drafted sets multiple times with virtually no good cards because I love cracking boosters. The difference is that those boosters were $4 or less.

The ceiling for Modern Masters 2015 is well worth $40 a draft (I’m assuming you’re paying for a prize pack, as well), but the floor is not. Again, each of us will have our own lines, but I find the idea of dropping $40 on a draft and having the worst case happen to be completely untenable.

So what’s my solution? I’m just not going to draft the set. I think Wizards overshot with the MSRP while simultaneously making the set worse value than its predecessor. Sure, I would love to crack some packs, but I’m expressing my dissatisfaction with this product with my wallet. (I may reconsider on Magic Online, where the MSRP is the $6.99 of the original Modern Masters.)

Do I think you should skip the set? Only if you agree with what I’ve written here. I’m not trying to be an anti-Modern Masters 2015 activist here. If you feel like it’s worth gambling with your $40ish dollars on some packs of the set, by all means, do so!

But if you have any way convinced yourself that this set is good value and that you as a financier or player must be cracking packs to get in on the action, I suggest you reconsider your position. There’s a lot of places you can put your money, and randomized packs at $10 a piece just doesn’t seem like your best bet. You can do better. This is no different from any other set: if you’re looking for specific cards, just buy them. Booster packs are bad value, and Modern Masters 2015 are in the same boat as all the others.

Danny Brown, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: PucaPro

May 19, 2015 Danny Brown 3 Comments

In just a few days, it will have been four months since I started using PucaTrade. Since then, I have more or less optimized my cube (which was no small task), gotten rid of a lot of junk I didn’t want weighing down my collection, and have spent zero dollars on Magic, aside from shipping, I suppose. It’s hard for me to overstate just how much use I have gotten out of this service in such a short time. If you’re not on board yet, you’re making a serious misplay.

This isn’t going to be a basics-of-PucaTrade style article. There have been plenty of those written, and the site is easy enough to use without me explaining it. Instead, I’ll be discussing some more specific strategies for using the platform to your advantage, as well as anticipating the best ways to adapt to several known updates that are already in the works.

PucaSavings

If you only see my summary on the site, then it looks like I haven’t done too well using PucaTrade:

“You have sent 200 cards with a total value of $903.68 and you have received 115 cards from other members with a total value of $699.31.”‘

Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Now things are looking much better. In my opinion, there is little point to being on PucaTrade if you aren’t able to request cards at a moment’s notice. For this reason, I never like to dip below 10,000 points, and in practice, I haven’t been under 20,000 points often at all.

In many ways, PucaTrade has become my primary way to attain cards, and I don’t want to miss out on good opportunities because I’ve spent all my points. If you’re a player needing to build decks at a moment’s notice, keeping a healthy supply of PucaPoints on hand is a great way to get the cards you need.

Another great benefit here is that I’ve shipped many cards that I expected were going down in value. In my article last week, many of the “sales” I discussed in anticipation of Modern Masters 2015 were, in fact, PucaTrade sends. If I had been trading these out at my LGS or a big event, I would have needed to find cards to receive in return, many of which would be less than ideal and not much better than what I was trading out. With PucaTrade, I was able to lock in value while I could, and have been storing that value for use at a later time. It’s glorious.

The Rhino in the Room

Of course, I’m well aware that letting this currency sit without gaining interest is inefficient. I could pick up over 50 Siege Rhinos with my current bankroll, and unless it gets included in a Duel Deck or something (what a gross thought), by the fall, I will almost certainly have made a hefty profit in either PucaPoints or cash—my choice. I am certainly picking up a dozen copies of a card here and a playset of a fringe spec there, but I still like to keep a good amount of points on hand. Besides, liquidating a huge pile of the same card through PucaTrade is not exactly easy, and things have to line up a lot better to make a profit buylisting.

The thing is, despite using PucaTrade as my primary MTG bankroll for the last few months, I have another reason to accrue points, and it relates to PucaTrade’s IndieGoGo campaign from a couple month’s back. Here’s the relevant section:

I’ve been a #mtgdad for almost a year now, and I’ve learned two things about it during that time:

Even with a supportive wife, getting out to play Magic is about ten times harder than it was pre-baby, and nowhere close to as attractive as kicking it at home with my son after a long day at work.
Drafting on Magic Online isn’t much better, given that I have to dedicate two to three hours and there’s no guarantee that the baby’s mood won’t change like sixteen times during that period. I’ve lost more than one game due to fussy-baby-caused misclicks or timeouts.

This means that I haven’t been playing nearly enough Magic in the last several months, and I don’t see my situation changing anytime soon. I continue to insist that Draft is the epitome of Fine Gaming™ (like fine arts, fine wines, fine cheeses, etc.), but because MTGO offers no way to play meaningful Limited games quickly, I think I’m going to have start looking into Constructed if I want to play more Magic within my current constraints.

I’ve messed with Standard, Block Constructed, and Pauper on MTGO in the past, but have not enjoyed them enough to do more than dabble and then taper off. What really catches my attention is Vintage.

Conveniently, MTG Goldfish’s metagame page lists the exact online prices for the top decks in the format. Ignoring Dredge and Workshop—because when I say I’m interested in Vintage, what I really mean is that I’m interested in playing Ancestral Recall and Time Walk—I can see that I will need roughly 700 tickets. This isn’t so bad when you consider these same decks are listing at around $15,000 in paper!

Still, this means that I’ve got some catch-up to do if I want to be on top of a Vintage deck when these PucaTrade updates go live. I’m also looking into the Facebook group dedicated for PucaPoint/ticket exchanges that Douglas Johnson mentioned in his article last week, as this was not a group of which I was previously aware. Maybe I won’t have to wait for PucaTrade’s updates, after all.

In my first article for MTGPrice, I pointed out that once you have a decent collection of cards together, you have a very liquid asset that you can use for any of your MTG needs, making playing for free—or at least not spending additional money—quite attainable for the average player. In this case, my goal is to play Vintage without spending any additional money (again, disregarding stamps and envelopes), and I’m sure I can do it. One of the greatest benefits to PucaTrade, especially once MTGO trading is added, is that you can turn your collection into anything you want it to be.

Perfect for Those Cards

I’ve touched on this before, but I feel like it’s important to point it out again because it’s such a crucial aspect to PucaTrade. I have speculated on many a card that has panned out, but only just.

For example, I’m pretty deep on Steam Vents, but unfortunately, got most of my copies for $8 each (in store credit) before the Dragon’s Maze reprint was announced. I traded for plenty more copies at $6 or $7, but I generally don’t like the idea of selling them for less than $8.

Currently, the best buylist price is at $7.40, but the retail price is closer to $13. The eBay average is $8, which means I would be losing money after fees. Without PucaTrade, this would just be a spec I had to sit on and hope would eventually pan out a little better, or occasionally find someone at my LGS who wanted to trade for a set. Instead, I’m shipping these out for more than 1300 points each at a slow but steady rate, storing that value for other speculation targets, cards for my collection, or eventual online Vintage.

Dealing with a card’s spread (the difference between buylist prices and retail prices) is one of the biggest obstacles to profit for a non-store-owning financier, but PucaTrade gives a new and very important out for specs that are mild successes or even failures. Previously, the choice was largely between selling at a loss or continuing to hold and hoping for further increases, but with PucaTrade allowing you to get what essentially amounts to the card’s full value in store credit, a whole new world opens up for outing these types of specs.

Know the News

Following along with PucaTrade’s blog is a great way to keep up with what updates are coming up. You also get great MTG market theory, like this gem from a recent update:

PucaTrade has taught me that Magic is fundamentally a game of excess supply. Whether you participate in a draft or buy a booster box to crack open, Magic cards enter your collection as random assortments that you may or may not want.

Part two of this article discusses PucaTrade’s approach to solving one of the service’s biggest problems: the difficulty of sending out popular cards, especially from Standard-legal sets. I won’t rehash it, but basically, they’re testing a “dibs” system this summer. It’s definitely worth a read.

By knowing that the dibs system is coming, you may decide that you are more comfortable committing some capital to Standard cards. Or maybe the fact that it may prove temporary will make you want to move into cards that not everyone will be looking to send. When I see an announcement that MTGO trading is coming up soon, that will give me a little extra time to have the points ready to get those Vintage cards I’m coveting. Paying attention can help you be ahead of the curve in many ways.

Closing Up Shop

I’m really proud of the section header above, because I’m using it both to indicate that we’re approaching the end of this article, and also to reference a frequent criticism I hear about PucaTrade. That’s efficiency right there, folks.

Invariably, any time someone writes an article about PucaTrade, someone will comment saying something like, “I would never put my cards into something like this. They could just pull the plug any day and then everyone would just lose all their points. This is obviously a scam.”

Look, I’m all about being risk-averse. And you’re right, PucaTrade could close down. But considering more than one million trades have been completed and there’s apparently more users active than ever, I don’t imagine a world where PucaTrade will close down, at least any time soon. Frankly, the service has already proven more reliable and personally valuable to me than MTGO, and now I’m on record as being willing to put in several hundred tickets towards a Vintage deck on that unreliable, bug-ridden joke of a client. If you have any kind of collection at all on Magic Online, any criticism of PucaTrade as a risky proposition is willful obfuscation of your true concerns, whatever they may be.

If you want to use all the tools in the financier’s toolkit, you’ve already taken the right step by signing up as a ProTrader here at MTGPrice. We can provide the data and the community you need to make the correct decisions in your Magic finance pursuits.

But if you haven’t signed up for PucaTrade yet, you are missing out on what is in my opinion the finest medium for exchanging Magic cards for other Magic cards that is available. That’s just my opinion, though. You should check it out for yourself to know for sure.

Danny Brown, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Decision-Making Strategies for When You Know Reprints Are Coming

May 16, 2015 Danny Brown

After Birthing Pod was banned, I sold most of my Modern collection. I wasn’t even a Pod player, but I lost a lot of confidence in putting resources into the format, especially since I don’t play a lot of paper Magic these days, meaning my cards weren’t even being used.

It wasn’t just the banning, though. By that time, Modern Masters 2015 had been announced, and it was clear to me that if I wasn’t using these cards and they were likely to be reprinted soon, I should probably get what I could for them while I could.

I didn’t sell everything, though, and I’d like to go over my thought process with some examples of cards that fit four different categories:

1. Did get reprinted, but I didn’t sell.

2. Did not get reprinted, and I didn’t sell.

3. Did get reprinted, and I did sell.

4. Did not get reprinted, but I did sell.

As I often do, I’m drawing some examples from personal experience, but am also looking for overarching themes and lessons we can all learn from moving forward.

1. Did Get Reprinted, but I Didn’t Sell

There are a few cards in this category, but the two I want to talk about are these:

The main reason I didn’t sell these cards is because I got in cheap, but there are other factors, too.

When Karn rotated from Standard, I traded for three copies at $15 each (how I wish I could say it was 30 copies…). One of those has since been traded out, but the other two reside in my cube and my Maelstrom Wanderer Commander deck.

When considering whether to sell these Karns, I considered it like this:

Is the retail price of Karn likely to drop below the $15 point where I previously acquired these?
If I buylist these out for $35 right now, that represents $20 profit. Am I likely to be able to purchase reprinted Karns for $20 or less?
Do I want to go through the effort of trading these away and then trading back for them after a reprint?
Do I want to play with a cube or a Maelstrom Wanderer deck that lacks Karn?

The answer to each of these questions is a solid no in my mind, so I kept my Karns.

I employed the same logic to my playset of Cryptic Command, which I acquired (shortly after Modern Masters was released) in slightly played condition for $70 and a Deathrite Shaman. In Cryptic’s case, I was not as sure that it would see another reprint, but I figured that even if it did, I probably would not be able to beat that deal (they are Lorwyn version, too). Since I’m not currently using the full playset, though, I mitigated my risk by trading out one copy at its peak. As of now, I don’t really have any regrets about trading that one or not trading the others. We’ll see if some other factor changes that.

Overarching Strategy: Consider the price you got in at, the profit you could make, what you expect the post-reprint price to be, how much you risk you’re willing to take, how much use the cards are currently getting, and any other relevant factors to determine if you should sell a card you anticipate is getting a reprint soon.

2. Did Not Get Reprinted, and I Didn’t Sell

I admit, I was skeptical of everybody immediately assuming that Innistrad was not included in Modern Masters 2015. The text in the original announcement was vague, stating, “Modern Masters 2015 Edition takes players back to some of the most remarkable planes from recent history, including Zendikar, Mirrodin, Ravnica, Lorwyn, Kamigawa, and Alara.” By contrast, the first Modern Masters announcement set a very specific range: “Cards are reprints from Eighth Edition through Alara Reborn.” I don’t think I was wrong to think Innistrad cards might be included, but luckily for me, I eventually got on board with what the community at large.

As a result, I didn’t sell my Snapcaster Mages (thank heaven, it’s nearly doubled in the last six months) or Geists of Saint Traft (I don’t own Lilianas). But Innistrad cards were easy.

Other than Innistrad cards, the main category of cards I held onto were lands. The first Modern Masters didn’t have a cycle of rare duals, and while it was certainly possible for Modern Masters 2015, seeing fetches in Khans made me feel basically safe holding everything I owned. So I did, and none of it got reprinted. Phew.

Overarching Strategy: Consider the information that is official, compare it to past situations that are similar, listen to trusted community members, and draw your conclusions.

Just like you shouldn’t marry the first pick of your draft, though, you shouldn’t cling to your early conclusions just because. If I had stuck with my immediate thoughts regarding Innistrad‘s inclusion, I would have sold off my Snapcasters and Geists for a (relative) pittance and would now be looking at sharply increased prices should I be wanting to reacquire.

3. Did Get Reprinted, and I Did Sell

This is, of course, where I was hoping to be most successful, and I did okay.

I sold my Emrakul, I believe before it was officially spoiled, but not because I necessarily thought its price would crash—more just because I wasn’t using it. There are three big cards that I sold or traded specifically because I wanted to avoid a big crash:

Each of these cards was pretty obviously going to be targeted for reprint, and although I could see a world where Wizards would print these at mythic, their earlier rare printings suggested otherwise.

The nice thing is that I got great deals on each of these cards, too: each was acquired at 10 to 25 percent of its current retail price. However, Cryptic Command aside, a reprint at rare does a lot more to crash a card’s value than a reprint at mythic, and I wanted to make sure I locked in profit on these while I could. I did keep a single Splinter Twin and a single Spellskite for my cube, but Noble Hierarch got proxied—I’m not playing a $70 mana elf in a casual format when I could triple up instead. Good thing, too, because it’s already down to $50. Expect it to drop more.

Then we have commons, uncommons, and casual rares, which I anticipated would just get wrecked, even compared to the above three cards. In this case, I sold off my Smash to Smithereens (reprinted at common and has already dipped from $5 below $3), Remands (keeping a couple for Cube and Tiny Leaders, because this is honestly one of my favorite cards), and Mirran Crusaders (which I still had around from Standard rotation and clearly weren’t going anywhere). I feel quite good about selling these. Remember what happened to Spell Snare after the first Modern Masters?

Overarching Strategy: Of the cards you most expect to get reprinted, consider which ones are most likely to get hit hardest. Those are the ones you should most prioritize trading or selling, as you want to lock in any profits (or minimize any losses) as soon as possible.

It’s important to note that if I had been actively playing Splinter Twin in Modern tournaments, I would have eaten the anticipated loss and kept them. It really all comes down to how much use the cards are seeing versus how much money you expect to lose based on the reprint.

4. Cards I Did Sell, but Didn’t Get Reprinted

I always knew this would be the most painful category, once I could identify the cards that were in it. I traded out my last set of Serum Visions, and I’m still having a hard time believing it’s not in the set. Again, though, I’m not playing Modern right now, and Visions is only good in that format, so I’m not feeling too much regret. The best part? I pulled three or four sets out of five-cent bulk bins back in the Avacyn Restored days, so I made plenty of profit off of this card. I can always rebuy for the stupid $10 price if I feel the need.

Inkmoth Nexus is where most of my regret lies. I got in on about 10 or 15 copies of this at $5 or $6 each a while back, and had been anxiously watching for it to go up ever since. This seemed like a likely include for this set, given Infect’s perpetual-if-not-dominating presence in the Modern metagame, but a reprint was not to be. Now Inkmoth is sitting at a retail price of $20, while I’ve sent all my copies out on PucaTrade for 1000 to 1200 points. If Infect wins an event or two in the next year, I expect it to go up even more.

Overarching Strategy: Considering this is the “screw-up” category, maybe it’s not wise to recommend anything here? Then again, it’s not like I lost money on my Inkmoths or Visions. I don’t mind a cautious approach, and I don’t think you should, either.

Too Few To Mention

You know what? I feel like I made a lot of good calls in anticipation of Modern Masters 2015, and even if my decisions regarding Serum Visions and Inkmoth Nexus were ultimately incorrect (and disappointing in hindsight), I don’t think my thought processes were wrong, nor do I regret taking a cautious approach.

I locked in value on all kinds of cards that got reprinted, successfully managed to not fire-sell cards that I want to own and don’t believe will lose anything on, and correctly identified cards that were not at all likely to be reprinted. There are too many variables to say how much money I “made” or “saved,” but I know that it’s more than what I “lost” by selling my Inkmoths and Visions for a smaller profit than I might have otherwise gotten.

So what are the big lessons here?

1. Think things through critically.

2. Have a reason for each of your decisions.

3. Don’t second-guess incorrect decisions that were made for the right reasons.

4. Don’t dwell on decisions that didn’t work out, especially if you made a bunch of decisions that did!

5. I made a lot of presumptions in making these decisions, and you know what happens when you presume, right? It makes a pres(ident) out of (yo)u and me! Yep, I’m pretty sure how that’s how the saying goes. Presume away, folks.

That’s it for this week. Have questions or comments? You know what to do.

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