All posts by Douglas Johnson

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Flashback to Nekusar

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Welcome back, financiers and non-financiers alike. In last week’s article, we discussed what the definition of a “fake bulk rare” is, why it’s different than true bulk, and what you should do with cards in the category. I’m relatively proud of it as I think it’s an under-explored area in our little MTG finance alcove, so be sure to check it out.

Go ahead, I can wait.

I’ll continue to hold this awkwardly conversational writing style with myself until you get back.

In other news, Reddit continues to spark inspiration for me to write content for you all. I took a stroll through the weekly “Ask r/mtgfinance Anything” thread this morning, and stumbled upon a question that hit relatively close to home. Instead of doing a scattershot of responses to Reddit’s finance questions, this one is deep enough that I feel I can accurately break it down over the course of a whole article, instead of forcing you to jump from topic to topic with me. Reddit user emeoelmo11 writes:

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Have been holding on a set of Commander 2013 for about two years now and realized that the price isn’t moving up at all, with only a handful of staples in the decks that are worthwhile to keep. Also, have not found any luck finding buyers for these at discounted prices, even.

1) Should I crack these open and sell them individually to at least recuperate some cost? Seeing more Commander products being printed every year, I am not confident any of these will go up any time soon.

2) If I were to crack one open, it would probably be for play. Which of these are best for a beginning player of EDH to delve into?

If you’ve been following my content for a billion years or so, you might remember that I used to write for Brainstorm Brewery. In particular, about a year and a half ago, I wrote an article about my own personal errors that I made when it came to investing in sealed product. Since the information in that article is pretty outdated (and poorly formatted), I’ll save you the trouble of reading it. The short version is that I made a mistake investing into sealed versions of  From the Vault: Twenty and Commander 2013, when I could have capitalized on the huge spike of Legacy staples like Rishadan Port or Tundra.

In that article from August 2014, I said that I would be in for the long haul when it came to my sealed product. I had no need for emergency funds and owned plenty of extra copies of the cards that came in each of those sets. I would just continue to leave them in their plastic totes to collect dust, and remember that I owned them if someones asked for an easy way to get into the Commander format. If I happened to run out of Jace, the Mind Sculptors that I had in stock, I could crack the FTVs and just fill my binders with some of the higher-end stuff, throwing the chaff foils into my dollar boxes.

Only a couple months ago, I decided to crack open a decent portion of my sealed product (five FTV20s, and fifteen C13 decks) to help replenish some of the cheaper cards in my display case, in addition to filling a local order for a playset of Jaces. There was still no movement on either sealed product, and I was obviously never going to realistically move them while still packaged unless I wanted to lose out on a huge chunk in shipping.

Replenish.full

Our Redditor produced a couple of solutions (well, pretty much the only two possibilities) themselves, so let’s go over those in detail.

  1. Crack it all. I kind of spoiled the ending a little bit, as this is obviously the move I chose to make. The cards had been sitting in storage for two years, doing nothing but taking up space and money. I finally got a request for a few individual cards that I didn’t otherwise have, so I filled those by shredding my sealed product for parts. This player is actually, well, a player, so I think they’ll get even more value out of learning the format with their preconstructed decks. Nobody ever accused the Nekusar deck of being underpowered, and you can certainly still trade the True-Name Nemesis toward upgrading whatever deck you decide to stick with.
  2. Let it sit in the oven for a while longer, and accept the fact that these are basically never going to appreciate in price. Let’s get this statement out of the way right now: It will be several years before Sol Ring is ever worth more than $1.50, especially if they continue to print the card in the every yearly Commander set, encouraging its ubiquity in the format. A lot of us (including myself) incorrectly assumed that the Commander sets would be a continuous gold mine of value, following the trends of the first set in 2011. We were wrong. Wizards has learned from its mistakes.

RTR box

Remember these? Back in 2012, these were the go-to slam dunk for sealed product. Shock lands, Abrupt Decay, Deathrite Shaman, all at rare. If you wanted to make a 30-percent increase over a three-to-four-year period, this was what people like me would tell people like you to buy as a safe and solid investment. Now you can find them for almost 20-percent cheaper than they were back when Obama won the election for his second term.

Sealed product is was attractive to us because it required a very minimal amount of effort. You threw money at it, moved your girlfriend’s shoes around in the closet, and deleted the memory of buying it from your mental hard drive. Four years later, you’re supposed to dig it up like a lost treasure, making a significant return on your investment by popping it up on eBay or Facebook, selling to all of the nostalgic players who want to reminisce about their favorite draft format.

I’m here to remind you that the era of making money off of any random sealed product is long gone. Even today, I see posts on both local and non-local Facebook groups, asking the masses, ” What would the best sealed booster box be to invest in?” I see a ton of replies suggesting that you can’t possibly go wrong with Khans; you get fetches, you get….. uhhh….. uhhh…… foil Monastery Swiftspear?

khans

Will these be $80 in three years?

So what could you get instead of a box of KTK, that has a higher likelihood of giving you a return on investment in a shorter period of time? Well, you know, speculating isn’t my personal preference for putting money into Magic, but let’s put on our spec caps for a minute. If you really want to burn through that $90, I’ve got a couple of suggestions.

cryptic

remand

You can buy Remands on TCGplayer for $4.50, NM with free shipping. Seriously, that’s a thing. Remember when these were $15 not too long ago? To make it even more appealing, the buylist prices that vendors like ABUgames pay are close to $3, making the spread relatively low for a cheap modern staple. Cryptic Command has followed a similar trend, hitting its all-time low yesterday (and today, and probably tomorrow…).

You know that my strategy is “never buy Magic cards at full retail,” but I just have a bad taste in my mouth when I personally sell Remands at $4. I’m holding onto the rest of my copies until Modern season hits, because I think these creep back up to at least $7, maybe $8. Cryptic could hit $30 to $35, which is certainly a better ROI than a box of either RTR or KTK.

End Step

In other news, Stoneforge Mystic is the next Grand Prix promo. Someone on this website who cares a lot more than I do will probably write about that.

Awakening Zone has moved up almost 25 percent since I wrote about it last, before the Battle for Zendikar set release. It’s certainly had a stronger track record than From Beyond. I still wouldn’t touch From Beyond at $1—I think A-Zone continues to be a better train to hop onto if you really need copies for EDH.

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Dimes Versus Dollars

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I have not been on top of my game recently, and I apologize for that. I’ve had a lot more schoolwork and mentoring work on my plate than I expected to over the past month, and the quality of my articles has suffered so that they have not been the fountains of knowledge that they used to be.

Another problem that I’ve been having recently is that I don’t have as strong of a niche as some of my fellow writers on this website. Jason Alt gets to handle a format of otherwise “unplayable ten drops” for people who want to pretend that they still play Magic, and Jim Casale handles the “grinder” aspect of the game to help all of you who actually do play Magic. Sigmund is skilled at tying in “real life” finance and investing to the Magic market, and he’s also got a pretty solid handle on this Old-School Magic thing. I should probably sit down and talk to him about that format one day, but I just keep getting too distracted. “Tell me about the war, Grandpa!” I ask him, but then it’s time for his afternoon nap and I have to wait another day.

Oh, and I try to focus on collection buying and building a personal brand as a vendor. That’s supposed to be my area of expertise, if you can call it that.

The Problem

There’s an inherent problem with collection buying though. Well, not collection buying itself. Buying cards at buylist prices is awesome; writing about it can sometimes be another story, though. While EDH, Standard, Modern, and real-world finance comparisons continue to change and evolve based on the new products and information that Wizards provides us, the rules for collection buying largely stay the same.

I don’t exactly expect WOTC to start selling “collection buying” kits that come with $1000 cash, a buy mat, and business cards, so as an ex-grinder trying to teach the transition toward “friendly local guy or girl who has what you need, whether it be cash or cards,” it can be difficult to come up with new material when there’s not a new breadth of information that applies to us. I’m often at a loss for words on the night of my deadline when all I can think of in terms of helpful advice is, “Wait until people need to sell cards at buylist prices, then buy those cards at buylist prices.”

A Little Help

convo

Thankfully, I have at least a few people out there who haven’t stopped reading my content (yet), and are willing to provide constructive criticism. I was having a conversation with one of my readers earlier this week, and he gave me some excellent advice that I think will help me focus on this specific topic more, and by extension I hope that will be helpful to you. I’ve already written on bulk rares quite a bit in the past, and why they’re one of the safest purchases that you can possibly make in the game, as long as you don’t overpay on them. They’re versatile, easy to convert back into cash, and they allow you to bridge the gap between competitive and casual players very easily.

I hope that with the hint from the title, and my follow up on that paragraph of helpful advice, you can see where I’m going this week. Well, if you follow me on Twitter then that helps too.

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Three yes votes? Good enough for me—let’s go. While I’ve extensively covered what I have personally nicknamed “true bulk” rares, I’m going to expend on that topic a bit by giving a closer examination to “fake” bulk rares.

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The above is a picture of (mostly) true bulk rares. These will have a TCGplayer mid average price tag of 75 cents or lower, and no buylist will touch them as actual distinct cards. Most stores who buy true bulk rares do so at a rate of 10 cents a piece, although sometimes you’ll get lucky and find a vendor shelling out 12 cents at a Grand Prix. These are the vendors that you’ll likely want to cash out to, and I highly recommend Card Advantage (the United States one anyway) for ousting your bulk rares.

So what’s a fake bulk rare then? Well, they pretend to be higher then bulk, but only if you take a quick glance at the TCGplayer mid or SCG price that so many players know and love. That price will usually waver anywhere from $1 to $2 depending on the site that you use, but the important number that us financiers care about is the always-precious buylist price.

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If you’ve been buying some collections, decks, and lots from players as a result of reading my articles, great! I’ve always advocated waiting until you can find things for buylist prices, as it’s usually the most effective way to flip something relatively quickly for a solid profit. Someone needs to sell an Overgrown Tomb to buy a milkshake or pair of comfortable cargo shorts? Give them $3 or $4, then go throw it up on TCGplayer when you get home.

tomb

When you’re dealing with staples above $4 or $5, it’s much easier to use 50 percent of the average price as an approximate guesstimate line because you have more of a profit margin to work with. It’s fine to pay $60 on a Liliana of the Veil, because you know that the highest buylist price is $65 for you emergency out, and you’ll get $73 or $74 after fees if you throw it up on TCGplayer or eBay. (Hinty hint-hint: you’ll probably get more on Facebook)

lili

What Does This Have to Do with “Fake” Bulk Rares?

Well, your margins are a lot smaller when you’re buying cards that only have a TCGplayer mid of $1 to $2. If you settle into the mindset that true bulk rares are the only actual bulk rares in Magic, then you’ll end up overpaying and losing money when you’re handing out 50 percent of TCGplayer prices when you’re buying Beastcaller Savants. (Disclaimer: CCG House is paying 50 cents cash on Beastcaller Savants, and they want multiple playsets. It’s ridiculous. This is basically unheard of for a card that has otherwise depreciated to the point of being a bulk rare when it’s viewed through the lens of a vendor.)

beastcaller savant

Instead of shelling out 50 cents a piece on these when Ben the Standard player wants to cash out on the remains of a Battle for Zendikar case that he received as a Christmas present, you lump these in with the bulk rares. If you’re feeling like a jolly Santa, you pay 25 cents.

“But DJ! The TCGplayer mid of that card is $1, how can you rip me off and pay 10 percent of the cash value on a card like that?”                  –Ben, who is woefully misinformed about the cash value of his card

This is the part where you get to choose what to do. You have control over this situation; it’s like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books that I read in fourth grade (and got like six reading points for each book, even though it’s obviously not a “full book” and I only had to read like 30 pages to get to the end). You can choose to A) Educate him by pointing to this article, B) Explain a summarized version of this article to him and let Ben know that he would be hard-pressed to get even 25 cents for the card, even if he were to sell on Facebook, or C) Don’t bother explaining the economics of everything to him if he seems genuinely offended and expecting to get 50 cents, and just let him keep the card.

beastcaller

You’ll notice that I have some other Battle for Zendikar rares in that pile of garbage, like Radiant Flames and Scatter to the Winds. I paid 25 cents each on the Radiant Flames, and 10 cents each on the Scatters. That’s not a brag about how I’m going to make 400-percent profit on each of those cards, because that’s probably not going to happen. Nobody wants to pay the full TCGplayer retail price on a dollar rare like that, unless they’re inside the convention hall on the morning of a tournament and in a desperate situation to find the card.

So Why Should I Acquire “Fake” Bulk?

I’m glad you asked. While these cards are almost impossible to sell for a significant profit margin, trading these off to Standard players who “need a set” or “might play these in the future” is definitely the play. Because they teeter on the edge of fringe playability in one format or another, you’ll have much more success using them to bump the value of larger scale trades when your partner wants to use TCGplayer mid or SCG values. While I don’t think PucaTrade is the worst outlet for fake bulk at it’s crisp and tasty full value of $1 to $2, it’ll be basically impossible to find a trade unless you’re willing to put in a massive amount of time and effort to upload all of your lower value rares, then use a bot or program to help click your trades for you before they’re gone in an instant.

If you happen to be $3 or $4 up on a trade involving Modern and EDH staples and your partner needs to find that amount to cover the difference, grabbing three Scatter to the Winds or Radiant Flames at $1 each can be a quick and easy way to finalize the trade instead of dealing with awkward Modern increments of $5 or $6. Alternatively, you can work up small piles of fake bulk rares into rock-solid casual/EDH cards that can later be sold for a relevant value. One playset of Fathom Feeder for a Blood Artist? Seems fine, especially when our trade partner is a Standard grinder who has no use for a Blood Artist, and might play Esper Dragons in the next couple of months.

Fathom Feeder

Before I make my exit, I want to go over a point that may not have been initially clear. Fake bulk is not always rare, and it’s not always “semi-playable garbage from the most recent Standard sets.” Some fake bulk cards can still have buylist to retail spreads of 90 percent, but manage to hold their demand and retail value exceptionally well. These are usually better known by the term “picks.”

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If you had the option of paying a dime for a Beastcaller Savant or a Pyretic Ritual, where are you throwing your coin? Exactly. Many of these modern, casual, and EDH commons and uncommons share a retail to buylist spread similar to the fake bulk rares that we’ve been learning about, but it’s going to be much easier to find a buyer or trade partner for a playset of Pyretic Rituals, Brainstorms, or a single Alara tri land at $1 per card than you will for a Bring to Light.

If you have the opportunity to pick bulk and end up with a pile like the picture above, I certainly don’t recommend buylisting off those Rituals, Thought Scours, or Delvers at 10 or 25 cents a piece. It’s fine to play the waiting game here until Modern season rolls around, or until a budding Commander fanatic texts you a list of stuff that he needs, but is too cheap for other players at the LGS to have in their binders. If you have it stashed away like my pile above, you’ll be that player’s hero and make a few dollars for nothing.

No “End Step” this week, because I feel like we’ve covered a lot of material already, and all of my other co-writers will have covered the current news to the point where I’d just be beating a dead horse. It feels good to be back and writing about a topic that I think has a shockingly low amount of content, and I enjoy feeling like I’m at least filling some kind of niche in this arsenal of prolific Magic writers. Thanks for reading!

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Finance 101: Emotions and Goal Setting

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When my coworker Sigmund Ausfresser posted his article for the week on Monday, I almost had a heart attack because I thought he managed to grab my idea before I was able to put it up for my own deadline later in the week. Thankfully after reading through it, I learned that his content was mostly different than what I plan to write about this week. Instead of struggling to pick out a specific format I want to sell out of, I (and I can only assume many other Magic enthusiasts out there) have previously been emotionally conflicted with selling out of cards for a myriad of other reasons.

One of the more frequent mistakes I made as a budding Magic financier several years ago was letting my emotions and desire to show off my “victory” in my trade binder before I had actually made any money in reality. I remember one of the first singles purchases I ever made online with value in mind was pre-ordering two sets of Inkmoth Nexus for $20 each through eBay, on the night that the card was spoiled. My rationale for making the purchase was definitely flawed at the time because of my semi-casual bias towards infect, and my desire to make some sort of infect deck work in standard. I thought that it would be in every single Standard deck ever, and I knew I would be able to flip the second playset that I had purchased with ease at my local card shop that I had recently started attending in the previous months.

By the time the set was released and my cards were shipped to me, Inkmoth had made it to approximately $10 a piece. My years of calculation and planning had finally come to fruition. The first bud of a future Magic finance empire had finally begun. I would take the world by sto- …..

Except, there was one problem. I never actually ended up selling those Inkmoths. Well, I shouldn’t say that was the problem specifically. You don’t need to sell cards to achieve a goal, and I didn’t even sell cards back then: partially because I didn’t know how, and partially because I actually played Magic. However, I didn’t trade the playset of Inkmoths away either. I let them sit in my trade binder for weeks, even during the several requests of “Would you trade your extra set away?” that I was approached with during the first few weeks of the set’s release. Eventually, the hype over the new infect land had faded, the the price moved to reflect that.

Why? Well, I was proud. Those Inkmoths represented a story to me, even though my initial reason for buying them was “I think this card will be worth more by the time it arrives in my hand, and I will be able to get more trade value out of it if I buy now.” They were a reason for my 17 year old self to humblebrag to the other guys at my shop, and a constant reminder to myself that I had made a smart buy every time I flipped to that page in my binder.

The lesson here, if it’s not too visible already, is to remove emotional attachment from your cards when you’re planning on buying them for strictly financial purposes. As Magic players, we tend to have a tough time with this because the cards are tangible, and we can see our rewards in front of us while using cognitive dissonance to shove aside the failures and bad thoughts. We got into this game on an emotional level, and can have trouble separating business and pleasure when it comes to what we’re willing to sell, whether it’s in our personal collection or investment portfolio.

Personally, I’ve been very loose with my goals when it comes to how much money I want to make through my various streams of revenue in Magic. As a broad goal, I would love to just be able to pay for my graduate school degree, and maintain a sizable collection to use as inventory at the same time. Interestingly enough, players who need to liquidate their collection for unexpected life expensive and are selling at a discount are much better at this aspect of goal setting than I am. Some people need to sell specific decks to pay for rent, to buy a car, or help afford a trip to their next Grand Prix. Due to the fact that I’ve been very poor with goal setting and not having any immediate bills to pay, I’ve grown apathetic in how many cards I currently have listed on TCGplayer, my Facebook posts in the buy/sell/trade groups, and buylisting as a whole. With no immediate need to acquire funds, I’ve gotten really lazy when it comes to selling cards.

Goals in Goal Setting:

smart-goals-template

If you were forced to go to some sort of goal setting orientation at a job, school, or something else, you’ve probably heard of SMART as an acronym for determining goals that you can stick with, instead of just saying something vague like “I want to sell Magic cards and make money” as a goal.

You’re going to want a particular exit price in mind when you buy cards with the intent to sell. If I buy 5,000 copies of Seance, I need to be immediately ready to sell them (emotionally and physically) if I pick $.50 as my buylisting sell point. I don’t recommend picking a spec and saying to yourself “I’ll sell this when it goes up.” When I bought into He Who Shall Not Be Named, I chose $6-7 as my price point that I would sell out at, after buying in at $3. It can help to write down your projected sell point on the sleeve of the card so that you don’t forget in the long term.

Be firm, and stick to the decision you made a year ago, if and when the card actually reaches that price point that you picked when you purchased it. If you bought into Snapcaster Mage at $35 in late 2014 and decided you would sell at $60, then you need to be steadfast and hold yourself to that number, or else you risk the demand for the card declining over the next several weeks and days. (Yes, I get that Snappy peaked at $80 or something ridiculous, but it’s one of the exceptions to the rule)

Screenshot 2015-11-25 at 7.21.39 PM

Going back to the “paying for a college degree with Magic cards” goal a few paragraphs ago, I’ll use myself as an example for how a more specific goal would help encourage me to list more cards at a time and keep a more constant flow of income happening, instead of just relying on the local players who irregularly ask me to piece together decklists for them.

If I pick a more specific, measurable, and achievable number for a month’s worth of TCGplayer sales, I’ll be able to constantly keep track of where I am in my goal, instead of just guessing on the vagueness of an unclear finish line. To start us off, I’m going to try and have 150 TCGplayer orders in the month of December. If I really work towards it and start listing a larger portion of my collection, this is almost certainly a realistic number for me to achieve, as it boils down to 5 orders a day. Depending on where we end up at the closing of 2015, we can increase or decrease that number based on how close my estimate is to my real potential.

End Step

Having a personal goal to stick to that’s specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound should help to increase my personal productivity, and remove some of the emotions from the equation to help me focus entirely on the business aspect of Magic. Even now, there’s still a lingering emotional satisfaction when I buy a collection, sort everything out, and have the pile of all of the relevant and listable stuff on my desk. Sometimes it takes me much longer than it should to actually incorporate those new assets into my existing inventory, simply because the cards are tangible in front of me, and the changes in numbers for my bank account are much less so. Here’s to hoping that I manage to fix this personal problem, and help you set some goals in Magic finance as well.

Conjured Currency

Wrapping up BFZ, Plus More Reddit Questions

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Well, we’ve almost made it. It’s the day before the midnight prerelease of Battle for Zendikar, and I can’t remember the last time I was this excited for a prerelease. I feel like a 2.5 on an excitement scale of one to ten, which is saying something. I haven’t gone to a prerelease in exactly a year; Khans of Tarkir was the most recent one that I attended, and that was just because my fiancée and I were bored and needed something to do on our weekend away together. There’s about a 25-percent chance that I’ll end up going to the Battle for Zendikar prerelease with her for the same exact reason.

Counterbore

But hey, Wizards is getting there with its marketing. A 25-percent chance is better than nothing.

Shameless Set Review Plug

Now that we’re this close to the wire, I’m thankful that I don’t have to dedicate an entire article or two to a set review. With our spoiler coverage, Jason Alt and I have been taking care of that throughout the past several weeks, a little bit at a time. The small dosage of spoilers each day prevented us from being driven insane at the thought of doing entire set review articles, so I’ll just link our coverage here in case you missed it and are just dying to read about Battle for Zendikar cards today. Jason and I restricted ourselves to all of the rares (and a few cool uncommons), but you can find the complete card image gallery here. 

Apathy

All in all, I’m pretty apathetic about the set. There are a few cards that I’m excited to add to a couple of my EDH decks (Smothering Abomination for Savra, and new Drana for Marchesa), but I’m overall disappointed at the lack of material for my Child of Alara lands deck that I keep talking about.

Our wide staff of writers (I mean, I’m saying that we have a lot of writers, not that all of us are fat…), including myself, have been covering Battle for Zendikar a ton in these past few weeks, so I’m sort of already Zendikar‘ed out. Last week I got a huge positive response wave to my Reddit Q&A/mailbag article, which made me incredibly happy. I really appreciate all of the comments and messages that I received, and it especially works out because I really enjoy writing articles that answer specific questions that allow me to go into a lot of depth with a single answer. Because of that, I want to test the waters with a second article that picks questions from the same weekly r/mtgfinance weekly AMA to see where it takes us.

I’m not sure why the text is so small on these screenshots that I took of the Reddit comments, so I copied and pasted the users’ questions into the article itself to make them readable.

$30 for a Set Symbol

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I’ve been wondering for some time as to why there can be such huge price variation of a certain (near identical) card that is printed in multiple sets. I.e. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth has been printed three times: Planar Chaos, FTV Realms and M15 and these are the trade values of the foils from the different sets (from mtgprice.com):

Planar Chaos: $47.75 FTV Realms: $12.98 M15: $14.70

Now that’s some huge differences for the same card that has the same art and flavor text. If they’d had different art, I would have no problem understanding the differences – but they don’t. If anything, I believe the M15 version should be the highest valued because of the hologram (which makes it a whole lot harder to fake).

Hence, my question: Do people really pay $30 extra just for a certain icon on the card or has the card prices just not evened out yet?

—dramak1ng

urborg

If you’ve ever foiled out an EDH deck before, you might have noticed that original set foils are often a lot more expensive than their reprinted counterparts. While this can usually be explained partially through different a different card frame, art, or even flavor text, there are a significant number of original set foils whose price remains a huge degree higher than the reprinted version, even when they have the same art.

Reddit user dramak1ng asked if people really are willing to pay $30 extra for a certain set symbol, and the simple (yet somewhat unsettling) answer is yes. There are people out there who are still willing to pay $45 for a foil Planar Chaos Urborg even though the $15 M15 version exists and has the hologram at the bottom of the card. The first reason behind this is the same reason people buy foils in the first place: they want their decks to be the best, regardless of how much money needs to be spent to make it happen. Even when that small difference between the two cards is the set symbol, there’s a sense of pride and honor in your opponent asking to read your card, and being able to say “Yeah, that’s the $50 one. It’s from Planar Chaos and there are a lot fewer copies out there than the other versions.” Does it make sense to most of us? Hell no. I’m not going to shell out for black bordered ABU duals for Child of Alara just to gain bragging rights.

The other part of the equation is one that I can relate to more. I actually own a Planar Chaos foil Urborg, and it sits in my Savra deck. I’ve had the thing for god knows how many years, and I probably traded for it back when it was at $20 or $25. I remember when it was worth $65 for that brief period around Journey Into Nyx right before it was reprinted, and I was so tempted to sell it, but I just couldn’t do it. Now that the M15 version is out and the price has dropped to $45, I can’t bring myself to sell it for any less. Yes, price memory is a very real thing.

Price memory is a reflection of how strongly a card is tied to a specific price in the mind of the Magic-playing community at large, regardless of what that value actually “should” be based on pure supply and demand. If a bunch of players like me own foil original Urborgs and think that they should be worth $45 even though they rarely sell for that much, then the price will remain close to that just because of an unwillingness to sell for anything less. This is one of the reasons why original set foils are much safer of an investment than anything other than reserved list staples, but they are a lot harder to find the right market for. Their value is theoretically harder to kill than later reprinted cards, but you have to work a lot harder to find that one guy who cares enough about shelling out for the original version.

Using Fat Stacks to Buy Fat Packs

question1

I’m not sure how the printing for Fat Packs works; I’ve heard somewhere that they were only printed once. I’m seeing some really ridiculous prices for them here (60$CAD+taxes…) but I’ve managed to find some for 45$. Should I be buying them now, or waiting until the hype dies down a bit?

—Azuriae

Yes, you heard correctly. Fat Packs are printed in a single run (albeit an enormous one), and once that print run is done, there aren’t anymore. The world can theoretically run out of Fat Packs, and Wizards will be be all dried up. However, I highly doubt this will happen. Wizards knows that there will be a large demand for this specific product because of the full-art lands that will be included, and there will be a huge number of Fat Packs available.

Fat Ass Fat Ass Fat Ass

They aren’t a limited release product like From the Vault, either, so you should be able to still find them at Wal-Mart, Target, or any other large retail store should your LGS happens to be sold out.

I really don’t think you should be shelling out over MSRP for Fat Backs, booster packs, boxes, cases, or anything from Battle for Zendikar. Take some deep breaths. There will be enough to go around. If you do want to buy some Fat Packs at MSRP, I wouldn’t recommend holding onto them as spec targets either. Just because there’s a single print run doesn’t mean that you will be able to find buyers willing to pay above MSRP several years down the road. At that point, people would rather just buy booster boxes, and the full-art basic lands will be a dime a dozen. Don’t speculate on fat packs.

Phyrexian Judge Foil Panic

question3

The Phyrexian language Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite just dropped like 40 dollars overnight. That’s about 5% of its total price. Is there any reason why? If I want it, should I keep waiting for it to drop?

—green_circles

Norngraph

Man, I will never get over how cool that text is. I highly doubt that they’re ever going to reprint Norn in such a way ever again, at least for several years. While there may have been a blip on the radar that suggested Norn was going down a bit in price, remember that there are an extremely small number of copies of these on the open market, and that any slight change in inventory by sellers on TCGplayer and eBay can cause the card to look like it’s trending somewhere.

Nothing has happened in recent times that would suggest the card is any less popular on a grand [cenobite] scale, so I would just mark it up to a small number of sellers deciding to undercut the market to move their copies as quickly as possible. There are only four sellers on TCGplayer right now, and MTG Deals has, well, a pretty good deal considering the fair trade price of the card. If you’re looking to pick one up for cube or EDH, now doesn’t seem like a bad time. The card probably isn’t going to be getting any significantly cheaper over the next few years.

norn2

Need vs. Want

question4

If I need a playset of [[Shambling Vent]] for Abzan but would be okay waiting a couple weeks if it were worth it, should I buy in at $4.25/ea or wait a couple weeks? How about [[Canopy Vista]]?

—mtg1200

Sorry mtg1200, but the r/mtgfinance subreddit doesn’t have its own cardfetcher bot.

In your situation, there isn’t really a right answer that I can tell you right now. I mean, there is, but I’d be guessing. I need more information provided in your question. How badly do you need those cards for the opening week of Battle for Zendikar? Are you going to grind a bunch of events in the first few weeks of the set’s release, and do you feel confident in your skill level and deck construction to take all of them down? If so, then your investment of $17 for a playset of Shambling Vents could very well pay off (although I question the necessity of an entire playset of that card in Abzan… maybe it’s a one- or two-of?).

Need for Speed

However, if you just want them for one or two small, local FNMs, then you might want to hold off on the investment until a lot more product floods the market. I wrote this article over six months ago, but it’s still one of my favorite shorter pieces that I wrote for Brainstorm Brewery: Rent a Card. The TL;DR of the article is that when you invest in a card knowing that its price will likely decline, you’re basically paying to “rent” the card for those few weeks. The price of renting is your initial cost of payment subtracting the amount you eventually sell the card for. While you could just wait until those numbers will cancel out and be zero, you’re hoping to obtain an intangible play value out of the card that will make up for the overpriced amount you paid at release.

End Step

In other news, Hardened Scales continues to climb. It’s up to $3.50 fair trade price as of today, and I’m on the fence as to whether or not I should sell my copies. I’m leaning towards selling them if I can get $3 a piece, but who knows. Maybe there will be a competitive Standard list that plays it after rotation and makes me bite my tongue.

After seeing the entire set spoiled, I’m less bullish on Dragon Whisperer at $3. We don’t have a Lightning Strike or Searing Spear for the first time in a while, so I’m not sure if mono-red will have the burn it needs. I still like Whisperer as a trade target at $3, and I still think you should pick them up now if you’re adamant about playing Mountains post rotation. I’m just done picking up any more right now (disclosure: I have 10 copies), and I don’t think buying large quantities is the correct move at this point.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? There’s a section for that stuff, you know.