All posts by Douglas Johnson

I'm a 20 year old college student with a scholarship from Gamers Helping Gamers. I write finance articles for MTGprice.com, am a Resident Assistant at school, intern at the Sheriff's Department, and play League of Legends.
Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Shotcalling a Shopcrawl

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I don’t travel a lot.

Deranged Hermit

While several of my friends and co-writers across the country have the opportunity to travel to multiple Grands Prix and Star City Games events on a semi-regular basis, I generally only get the chance to travel to two large-scale events a year at the most. Being tucked into upstate New York way over in the corner of the United States does have its disadvantages, since Wizards of the Coast and SCG only feel the need to drop into my neck of the woods once in a great while.

Thankfully, our relatively isolated ecosystem means that I’ve been able to grow a stable, small-scale setup in my college town of Oswego, where I can help buffer my school expenses and foil Commander decks through buying and selling locally. A mix of Facebook, TCGplayer, and Twitter sales help move some of the larger stuff that my local budget customers don’t want to touch, but that leaves me with a pretty sizable pile of bulk picks from the commons and uncommons to $1 to $3 rares that end up stagnating in the display case. Normally, the correct out for this type of stuff is a long buylist order to a single store to help save on shipping, but alphabetizing and set sorting cards is basically torture to me. I just don’t have the patience for it.

This year, I’m planning on doing something a little bit different.  Have you ever heard of Thomas Dodd? He’s the proud father of Card Advantage, and has been a frequent face of northeastern Grands Prix for a while now. Just five months ago, Card Advantage put the finishing touches on its gaming center, and Thomas and friends have been living the ultra-glamorous full-time LGS life ever since.

Untitled

I’ve sold to Card Advantage a few times at previous events, and the experience has always been great. They’ve always given me excellent numbers on bulk rares, and I haven’t gotten to travel since Vegas in May. Slowly, the idea formed in my head. I could take a trip down to check out the new gaming center, sell a bunch of cards, and turn the trip into a mini-vacation of sorts with the fiancee, where I could also shopcrawl on the way there and back.

Shopcrawl?

If you don’t know what shopcrawling is and you still clicked on the article, I appreciate your daring bravery and thirst for knowledge. In essence, my plan is to carve a swath of destruction down Interstate 81, buying out every card store from Oswego to Athens. I want to create the next Dust Bowl across the eastern coast of the United States, only with Magic cards. All joking aside, the goal is to explore and visit several local game stores along the way, hopefully buy a bunch of bulk that the stores don’t care about (and maybe even the whole Magic inventory of a lower-tiered store if I’m extremely lucky), and then unload my treasures to Thomas when I reach the Peach state. It’s something I’ve never actually done before, but I’m excited to try before my springtime of college youth is over.

EN MTGHOP Cards V3.indd

Of course, phase one of this operation was clearing the operation with my lovely fiancee, Emily. While she’s always been supportive of my… unique source of income, she’s understandably apprehensive when it comes to me spending hundreds of dollars on piles of cardboard. If I wanted to put Operation Sowing Salt  into action, I had to convince her that this would be a fun adventure that probably wouldn’t involve me spending a ton of money. In fact, the goal of the trip was to sell a bunch of cards once I got to Georgia.

“Yeah, Sounds Like Fun!”

Oh. Okay. That was a lot easier than I expected. I had this whole persuasion speech planned, and… Nope. Not gonna question it.

So with phase one complete, now I had to start figuring out our plan of attack. Unfortunately, Wizards doesn’t exactly have an option on its website for “these are all of the stores that you should probably stop at from point A to point B,” so we have to improvise a little bit by combining Google Maps with the Wizards Event Store Locator.

Screenshot 2016-01-26 at 11.01.23 PM

This is our route. I’ve already visited pretty much all of the shops up to the northern Pennsylvania border, so let’s start our Wizards store search with the first large city that we’ll be passing through, Scranton.

Screenshot 2016-01-27 at 12.15.19 AM

Screenshot 2016-01-26 at 11.08.26 PM

Chances are, I’m not going to have any luck going to the biggest named stores in the area. The well-oiled machines will more than likely have their bulk processed or sorted, everything priced out perfectly, and have zero incentive to sell out of a bunch of cards at once. I’m looking for smaller stores that might want to clear out some room on the shelves for more enticing product, and places that might have a smaller total inventory. While I won’t be able to make an assessment like that until I actually walk into the store, I can still do a little bit of research to get a rough estimate of what kinds of stores I want to walk into.

5Ds collectables

This is the kind of store that I would be interested in stopping at: only a couple hundred Facebook likes, mostly evening hours (which suggests that the owner most likely has another “real” job and running this store is a secondary hobby), and not too far off my chosen path. While I highly doubt I’d be making offers on a bunch of high-dollar staples, I’d be happy to start a conversation about the bulk commons and uncommons or bulk rares that the store has been stockpiling for an extended period of time. Now to repeat this process for the rest of the fourteen-hour blue line on Google Maps…

While stores that focus primarily on games like Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Force of Will, and tabletop games are fine choices for loading my fiancee’s vehicle with large quantities of cardboard, we’d really prefer to hit the Atlantis of shopcrawling. We want the dusty old binder from Arabian Nights and Legends that’s been sitting in the back of the store for longer than I’ve been alive. No store that’s focused even remotely on Magic as a business is going to have this legendary binder full of ancient cards, so we’re going to have to look to other types of stores that our fellow Magic players aren’t as likely to have already stripped clean.

baseball

Apparently, sports cards stores still exist. While I know essentially nothing about how to play a Derek Jeter in attack mode or what Michael Jordan’s ability is when you direct attack your opponent’s heart points, I do know that there’s a (slightly) higher chance of finding a shop owner who would love to get rid of  his mana and spells to make room for more sports memorabilia. The further we stretch away from the bigger cities, the more our luck increases. I highly doubt that those three shops located in a larger city like Scranton haven’t already been picked clean by savvy Magic players like ourselves. Basically, this is the store I’m looking for while shopcrawling:

grassy-butte36

To be honest, I’ll probably just pull out my phone and google “baseball card stores near X location” every half hour or so instead of planning out this huge expedition and targeting stores in advance. I’d rather wait and find the ones that are off the beaten path, but unfortunately Interstate 81 is a pretty well-worn trail. We’ll see where it goes, and I’ll report back on our results when I get back from our trip.

Preparing for Negotiations

Now, let’s actually get to the fun part. We’ll assume that Emily and I actually find a store that’s interested in selling a large chunk of their inventory, whether it be bulk or otherwise. How am I going to go about making an offer and actually buying? I’m a young city-slicker from out of town, and there’s no reason for this mom-and-pop store to trust I don’t have forked tongue. We need to be sure we are actually offering them a service that they’re interested in. Trying to bully or force someone to sell cards is not only obviously wrong, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. 

Starting the conversation will likely go something like this: “I see you have a lot of bulk commons and uncommons lying around. What do you usually sell them for?” Some stores are happy setting their customers pick through the bulk at five or ten cents per card, and make a surprising amount of money just from non-competitive players digging up decks. we’re not going to try to compete with that. We’ll be offering $4 to $5 per thousand, depending on a rough guesstimate as to the age and picked-ness of the bulk. Shopcrawling is one of the only scenarios in which I can see myself gambling and paying a little bit more than $5 per thousand, if I really wanted to lock in a purchase and it looked like the cards were from a prime time frame (say, 2003 to 2009). I’d be accepting a possible loss in that scenario should the bulk have been picked by someone who knows what they’re doing, but I’m willing to take a few more risks on this trip than I normally would otherwise. 

Our trip is scheduled for February 11 through the 16, so I’ve still got a couple more weeks of planning and preparing. While it’s definitely possible pretty likely that we won’t find any stores worth buying from, I’m still excited to make the drive. I don’t get to experience the “play the game, see the world” part of Magic nearly as much as I’d like to, so I’m getting a few last chances to travel before I have to settle down with graduate school next year. Until next week!

Conjured Currency

The Finance Article With Almost No Finance

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The Last MTG Finance Article of 2015

Welcome back. It’s the end of 2015, so let’s get that hooplah out of the way. It seems like just yesterday I was still writing for Brainstorm Brewery and regularly attending FNM like an actual player. I would not have predicted that this position (in writing and Magic) was where I would be one year ago, and I hope that I can continue to provide and improve on my content through 2016.

I’m not the only one that’s changed in a year though; I’m sure you have too, and Magic itself is quite different. Our subculture of MTG finance has certainly come a long way in the past 365 days: we’re moving into uncharted territory with a new rotation schedule and block structure, WOTC’s reports suggest that the playerbase hasn’t increased as steadily in 2015 as in past years, and we have more tools than ever before to keep our finger on the pulse of the game that we love.

To be perfectly honest, the amount of content that is produced on a daily or weekly basis concerning MTG finance is staggering.We at MTGPrice have a staff of over a dozen writers, with at least two articles being released every weekday in addition to a running spoiler coverage of each upcoming set, as well as a number of other tools. We have MTG Stocks giving us daily and weekly interests so you can check what the most recent movers and shakers are and avoid getting ripped off while trading at FNM.  Sites like  MTGGoldfish also provide a ton of information to help you aggregate data about the metagame, frequency of specific cards appearing in decks, and showing you affordable lists that you can put together on a budget. Even /r/mtgfinance has grown to over 10,000 subscribers in the short couple of years it’s existed, and you can (usually) find a healthy discussion on whatever question or topic you want.

Too Much Information?

In reality, you can only consume so much of it all before you start to get diminishing returns. If you try to read every single MTG finance article that comes out on every single website daily, you’ll end up losing a large percentage of the information and not using the rest of it because it was irrelevant to you in particular. Don’t get the wrong idea; I do think that there’s value in a Modern player reading some of Jason’s articles about Commander, because you don’t want to miss out on Exsanguinates while picking your first collection. However, there’s a balance between ignoring the content available to you and trying to become the omniscient MTG finance guru just by spending three hours each day scouring articles and listening to podcasts.

Overload

The goal of this article is not to teach you something about bulk rares or the new Standard rotation. I’m not going to mention any specific cards to pick up or stay away from, nor pull a “review of 2015” out of thin air.

Instead, I want to start a discussion on how you can go about consuming Magic content more efficiently, and cutting out the content that you won’t use or need. This was something I wanted to write about because of something I read recently on /r/mtgfinance, where a Redditor was complaining that content concerning the finance aspect of our game was reaching a tipping point of quantity over quality. To an extent, I think there’s some truth to that. The existence of deadlines will inherently push for content to be created, even when there’s unfortunately not a lot to talk about.

That’s where you come in. There are a few articles that follow this basic structure: “Here’s this thing I’m really good at. This is how you do that thing. These are the basics of doing that thing, and the rest of my articles will go into depth on it,” kind of like what I do with bulk rares. On the other side of the coin, there are so many more that are more of a “I think that thing Y might happen this way next year. There are a few reasons why that might be the case, and there are a couple of other reasons why that might not be true at all.” I’ve written my share of those as well, and it doesn’t feel great. It’s unfortunate, because these articles can make the reader feel like they wasted their time (hopefully this article hasn’t made you feel that way yet).

“So where do I come in to this equation?” –Some reader

Oh, right. I, for one, write articles to be treated as a starting point of discussion for whatever topic or question that I’m writing about. Even if you disagree with a point or idea that a writer has made, posting that can still contribute to the topic that we’re trying to unravel. When it comes to unexplored territory like the Expeditions lands, we don’t have anymore information than you do. If you want to absorb more information from each piece of content that you dedicate some amount of time to, it’s well worth it to type out your thoughts or responses in the comments section (if there is one), or start a discussion on Reddit or some other forum where like-minded individuals can politely bring up points and counterpoints.

Counterintelligence

With the MTG finance subreddit floodgates being opened back up, I’m crossing my fingers and hoping to see a lot of quality content being produced and posted there. The subreddit has gotten a lot of accusations of being “just a place for writers to dump their articles,” and I’m hoping that will change as the more experienced members of the community join together to downvote the random garbage that gets posted. Dedicated readers will gain a lot more from the forum through active participation and eventually creation of their own articles, like Jeremy did months ago.

Not Every Card/Article is Designed for You

Wizards gets a lot of hate for printing cards that “don’t do anything,” or cards that don’t appear to generate excitement for any player in the vocal market. If you’re following along on Jason’s and my spoiler coverage for Oath of the Gatewatch, you know that I’ve been very, uh, disappointed at the power level of several revealed rares so far. A card like Durdle Dragon #76 really grind my gears because I already know its financial future, there’s nothing exciting to read on the card itself, and it makes the set that much less exciting. However, that doesn’t mean that nobody cares about that card at all. There’s a reason Wizards continues to print durdle dragon after durdle angel: they continue to get new players hooked and excited when they open booster packs, similar to how those exact players complain about opening the same fetch lands and battle lands that get competitive players excited.

The same holds true for MTG finance content. I would honestly be shocked if you told me that you read every single article that comes out on MTGPrice, every day of the week. I’d be flattered, but still surprised. If you’re a Standard-only player who has no interest in grinding collections, then you might not need to read every single one of my articles (unless you’re looking for boyish charm and beautifully articulated word salad). I mostly write about how to grow your own individual collection into a store-esque situation where you turn into “that guy” at your LGS who has everything and is willing to part with everything. My articles aren’t designed for that Standard grinder in particular, unless he or she is looking to dive into the world of collection buying. Thankfully, we have Jim Casale on staff, a Standard grinder himself.

Organ Grinder

In short, there are better ways to learn about MTG finance than just reading every MTG finance article that pops up on your Twitter feed. I think questioning authors and creating your own content are steps in the right direction. Did I spend a week’s worth of writing telling you to post in the comments section, skim through some articles, and go join r/mtgfinance? Damn right I did. I relish in the irony of it all, and I’ll be back next week with a sequel to the best article ever written in the history of articles written.

End Step

Happy New Year!

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Finance 101: Region Locked

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So how about that Steam sale, huh? I’m actually just an extreme casual when it comes to games that aren’t Magic, Fire Emblem, League of Legends, or Pokémon, and this is the first time I’ve actually been bothered to download a game on Steam. I’m a fan of tactics and turn-based strategy at heart, so my friend convinced me to download XCOM: Enemy Unknown for $7.50 to relive some of my favorite single-player gaming over the past few years.

If you’ve been around the videogaming world for at least a little while (99 percent of you reading this, probably), then you’ve heard of the term “region locking” before. For those of you who keep to the card and board games, imagine you couldn’t use any of your Japanese foils in your Legacy deck. No Italian Legends cards, and no French copies of Delay.  Bear with me; I know I write an article about Magic finance and not videogaming, but I’m going somewhere with this.

xcomregionlock

(Thankfully, this is just a random screenshot I found. My XCOM was downloaded with no problems.)

While we don’t have this specific problem as Magic players, it would certainly be frustrating to be restricted from content that you bought, traded for, or were gifted due to a  company’s desire to prevent imports or force certain purchasing channels. In fact, you might feel similarly to someone who owns some Legacy staples, yet lives in an area where it’s nearly impossible to get rid of them at full value, when you were told something like, “Legacy cards will always get you a premium if you’re trying to trade into Standard or Modern.”

Cartel Finance

Recently, my fellow MTGPrice writers Jim Casale, Jeremy Aaranson, Travis Allen, and I (and soon to include our friend Sigmund Ausfresser) started up a video podcast on a whim. One of the topics that we touched on this past week was how much our experiences differ depending on where you’re located in the U.S. (or outside it entirely).

While I’ve always advocated “buy cards from other players at buylist values when they need to sell,” that logic is not always feasible for people like Jim, who is “region locked” in his MTG finance efforts (see? I made the segue work) by living within driving distance of Cool Stuff, Inc. When the players near Jim need to sell cards, they’re flanked by multiple LGSs that are ready to compete with each other and pay competitive buylist prices. If I had to relocate down to the land of terrible one-liners and Florida Man, there’s no question that my number of collections bought and singles sold would drastically decrease.

Since I live in upstate New York and five hours away from NYC, the area is devoid of any human interaction  large-scale LGS like ChannelFireball or SCG. The closest huge competitive buylist I have to compete with is either down in NYC, or Face to Face Games in Canada (the downside of this is that we get maybe one SCG Open every three years, but hey, give and take). Players could also drive 45 minutes to Syracuse and sell cards to one of the several card stores in the city, but the number of cards they’re willing to buy and amount of cash offered are both on the short side.

I mentioned earlier that you might be in a situation where you have Legacy staples, but are unable to trade them. Jim picked up two dual lands a couple of years ago, supposedly the “impossible to lose” investment in Magic. Unfortunately, crocodiles don’t play Legacy, so Jim ended up selling the duals to a store instead of being able to trade or sell them to a  player for a premium toward Standard or Modern staples. That’s a story that initially confused someone like me, who has almost never left the northeastern part of the United States: “Inability to trade Legacy staples? That’s just unheard of! We have one of the more vibrant Legacy player bases in the U.S!”

Before you trade those shock lands for that Lion’s Eye Diamond just because it’s on the Reserved List, know the routes for moving the LED if the Legacy scene around you is nonexistent.

Story Time

This doesn’t hold true for just Legacy, though. Let’s say this new MTG financier Jason is trying to make a bit of extra cash while having fun speculating and trading. He doesn’t have a store on TCGplayer or eBay, he just buys and sells locally, trying to trade up and sustain his hobby. Almost everyone at his LGS is a Standard or Commander player, because there’s a very limited number of people who can afford a Modern deck in his area. FNM is always Standard or Draft, and there are a couple of Commander pods that meet up twice a week.

Jason is trying to get into MTG finance a bit more heavily. He follows people on Twitter, listens to podcasts, and reads articles. He sees a lot of people agreeing that Modern Masters 2015 staples are a pretty smart pickup right now (hint-hint: they are). Jason starts targeting the scattered Modern pieces out of his friends’ binders, trading away the dirt cheap Battle for Zendikar rares and mythics. He picks up a couple of Cryptic Commands at $25 in trade, Spellskite at $23, and Remand at $5.

If we jump inside our time machine and skip a few months into the future, Jason’s trades have theoretically paid off. His Cryptics are $35, Spellskites are $30, and Remands are $8. But (you probably see where I’m going with this) who is he going to trade or sell them to? If his entire playgroup focuses on Standard and Limited, Jason has to either start using eBay, TCGplayer, or PucaTrade, or convince everyone to play Modern after all of the cards they need are more expensive. Granted, a lot of you reading this probably think, “Well, Puca/TCG/eBay is simple and effective,” and I would agree with you. However, not everyone is looking to constantly send cards through the mail, and there are still players who don’t trust PucaTrade due to bad personal experiences from trades in the past.

I sort of went in a different direction than I was planning when I laid out this whole “region locking” theme for the article, but I’m hoping that I still managed to explain my point. The tips that are given out every week in the constant stream of MTG finance news are not universal, and should be adapted depending on what your playgroup and LGS focus on. Legacy still has a bastion of players in the Northeast of the United States, but it’s a waste trying to trade a Wasteland where Jim lives. If you drive a few hours to buy a solid collection of EDH staples when your LGS is firmly steadfast in 60-card territory, it might be time to adapt and learn how to use internet outlets like Puca, TCGplayer, or eBay instead of letting the stuff rot in your binder. Even if you personally are “region locked” from collection buying because you have to compete with several other stores or local names, there are multiple different strategies to either compete or coexist with them.

End Step

  • Sell Painful Truths for $8 to $10 a playset on Facebook. This is a perfect example of a bulk rare that I’m happy to take the 1000-percent increase on, then ride away into the sunset with my Subway meal paid for by each playset that I sell.
  • Stoneforge Mystic continues to rise in anticipation of an unbanning. Do what I did and sell your copies into the hype on TCGplayer. Don’t do what I did, and don’t accidentally list two of your SP copies for $14 instead of $24, because then they’ll sell instantly and you’ll realize your mistake too late.
Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Reddit Questions #3: Finance 101

1 Comment

I really enjoy writing these personalized response threads, because I know for a fact that my content is helping at least a few specific people in particular with their questions about Magic finance. If you weren’t around to read the first two articles where I answered questions from Reddit, then feel free to do so. I mean, I’m not sure if the answers to those questions are still relevant two months later, but they should at least make for some decent reading material if you’re bored. Hopefully next week, I’ll be back with a more comprehensive article on collection buying, since that appears to be my niche among MTGPrice writers.

GriselGrand Prix

Our first question comes from user Edward_Dionysos

Question3

Griselbrand GP promo. It’s played in Legacy, modern and has a lot of casual appeal. It’s down to 13 and I think I can pick a number up for 11.

Worth buying into or wait a couple months yet? The regular foil is at 60.

griselbradn

I don’t think the promo Griselbrand is the best pickup you should be aiming for right now (unless you happen to need copies for personal play, in which case I don’t think you need to wait for it to drop any further). The supply on these is absolutely huge, and I think people often forget that these are still being given out! There will be over a thousand more copies added to the pool this weekend at GP Pittsburgh, and I don’t think the casual appeal on this is as high as you suggest, partially due to his “banned in Commander” status.

If you’re looking for safe Modern-legal investments, I would turn your attention towards Modern Masters 2015 cards that have been suppressed over the summer and fall, and will continue to dodge reprints through next year. We’re not opening anymore of that set, and we’re almost guaranteed to see cards like Remand that have hit an all-time low start to creep back up. I also wouldn’t hate you for picking up Fulminator Mage, Mox Opal, or Cryptic Command.

Boros Bartering

Question number two comes to us from A_Tattooed_Biker:

question5

I pulled an Arid Mesa Expedition (currently @ $105) and a Sacred Foundry Expedition (currently at $65). I’ve watched the Mesa climb from mid 70s to the current price. My question is, how long should I hold on to these guys? They’re only going up, right?

mesa

foundry

Expeditions lands have definitely settled down over the past month, although I don’t recall Mesa ever being at $70. If you’re someone looking for pure finanical gain, then you’re correct that I think these can only go up in the long term. However, that long term is, well, a very long term. I expect these to slowly creep up over years, not weeks or months. If you’re a player who is on the hunt for pieces to decks, then I can only recommend trading or selling them to help you play Magic.

If you’re looking to get into Modern, these two lands can help to put a decent dent in some of the higher-dollar cards that you probably don’t want to shell out pure cash for. The Foundry can turn into a set of regular Foundries plus $15 in other random goodies. The Mesa can split itself into two Mesas plus some other small stuff. There’s probably someone at your LGS who is hunting these down and has a fully stocked trade binder for you to go digging through that you normally wouldn’t have access to without these kinds of cards. If you care about trying to build a deck, I think these are your ticket to help with that. If you’re not planning on playing anytime soon, they should be considered reasonably stable holds.

The Waiting Game

Next up at bat is N1trobunny asking about the potential growth of sealed product:

Question2

Greetings!

I usually just lurk on r/mtgfinance[1] , so please forgive me if I’m asking a question that always comes up (a link would be nice too!)

I was thinking of snagging a couple boxes of Khans to hang onto, as I imagine they’d go up in value due to the fetch land content. Is this a realistic Idea, or would I be better off buying fetches and letting them go up?

Thanks all!

Not to go too deep into the time machine, but one of my favorite articles that I wrote back on Brainstorm Brewery was about investing in Sealed product, and how it’s really not what it used to be. Return investment on boxes of RTR have been, well, lackluster to say the best, and that was three years ago. The TL;DR of the article is that other than novelty product like the  first-ever Commander set, I really don’t think we can expect the return on investment for fall- or spring-set booster boxes to be what it used to, like with Zendikar or Scars of Mirrodin. You’d be waiting three, maybe four years to get a return of 20, maybe 30, percent and then what? Selling them will be brutal with all of the shipping costs. I really think you’re better off looking into single card specs at that point, although not fetches. They’re currently too high from their ubiquity in Standard. If you’re looking for card specs that have the potential to span over several years, you can continue reading and we’ll get to that in just a bit.

Question4

If you’re looking to hold onto the boxes for three years and then have some booster drafts with your friends down the road for nostalgia, then my advice is a bit different. I’d tell you that you can find KTK boxes for around $85 on Massdrop. If you can’t wait patiently until the next drop becomes available, you can find a local judge who’s willing to sell you his box that he received for judging an event, or until you find a lucky deal on eBay or something. I wouldn’t feel like you have to run out and buy it right now is the point I’m trying to make here.

Bulk Rares are Best Rares

Lastly, we have a question on cheap cards to invest in that have the potential to show a lot of growth very suddenly, from dbchiu.

Question1

Okay, so maybe he wanted to know more about Pauper picks, but he didn’t ask that specifically in the question, did he? Eh, I’ll use any excuse to talk about bulk rare penny stocks. Instead of Pauper penny stocks that you may or may not have a hard time getting rid of to a large crowd, I love setting aside certain bulk rares that I pick up for a dime a piece. Eventually some of them pop, like Spoils of the Vault earlier this year. More recently, Kabira Evangel and his other ally friends from Zendikar gave me some pretty ridiculous percentage gains.

In terms of risk versus reward, I absolutely love cards that just have that sense of “this could be broken if the right card is printed.” At a dime each, you can’t really go wrong. The worst case scenario is buylisting back to a large vendor at a Grand Prix, or shipping them to someone like me who wants all of your bulk rares.

heartless

Okay, seriously. Someone has to break this eventually. It has so much potential, and just screams combo.

crucible

Once a proud $6 card, now reduced to a mere bulk rare. This one’s less of a “combotastic Modern sleeper” and more of a “non-competitive slow gainer over three years,” but I’d rather have 1,000 copies of this instead of a booster box of Khans of Tarkir any day. Even if I wait two years for a slow gain back up to being buylistable at 50 cents, I’m perfectly fine with that.

End Step

Normally this is where I give you some random small tid-bits of information that I realized at some point throughout the week, but I’m not sure I have anything today.

This coming weekend is Grand Prix Pittsburgh, and you might see me there. If I do decide to go, I promise I won’t write about it for next week. I’m trying to think of a topic focusing on collection buying that I can hone in on, so if you have any suggestions or requests, then I’d be glad to hear them! Hit me up on the Twitter or Facebook, or in the comments section. Have a great week!