All posts by Douglas Johnson

Conjured Currency

A Gentle Reminder: Looking Past Origins

9 Comments

It’s not a very well-kept secret that I strongly dislike speculating on anything from a new set. When almost every single card in every new edition is at a high price from hype alone, I’m not a huge fan of trusting competitive players’ instincts about what card will be the next Deathmist Raptor, Boros Reckoner, or  Courser of Kruphix. I’ll leave figuring that puzzle out to the people who actually play this game for a living, and try to focus on the most consistent and loss-proof ways to grind value out of the game on my end.

Don’t Call Me a Speculator

As you can tell by a majority of my articles and Twitter activity, my time and cash is usually spent buying collections and singles at buylist prices from people who need or want to liquidate their investments in the game, and then reselling those cards through outs like Facebook, TCGplayer, my display case, and Craigslist. When I do dabble in speculation, I try to minimize my risk as much as possible, even if it means waiting on a long-term investment over a number of years.

Risky Move

That’s why instead of writing a listicle like “Top Five Origins Cards That I Think Are Undervalued!” I’m going to try and remind everyone that you don’t have to be looking for money in Origins just because it’s the hot new thing off the printing presses. Instead of trying to crack the Magic code and find the next Outpost Siege or Mastery of the Unseen, I have my sights set on targets that I think will avoid a reprinting in the long term, hold a strong new price point if and when they do spike, and are relatively cheap and easy to buy into right now without anyone else fighting over them.

That being said, I still very rarely “buy into” cards with cash at full retail anymore, even for speculating purposes. Most of my owned stock of the following list comes from PucaTrade credit that I have stored up, picks from bulk lots that I’ve pulled for essentially free, or singles that I bought at buylist prices but didn’t want to sell at the moment because I felt that the card had a bright enough future. Now that those statements are out of the way, let’s get to the list of cards that I think you should have your eye on instead of Origins, especially if you’re not exactly a Standard player.

glistenerelf

Deceiverexarch

Yes, one of them is a common and the other is an uncommon. Glistener Elf also got thrown its own Event Deck printing and FNM promo, so I’m not entirely sure if the ceiling on this is equal to good, old Exarch. However, I pull these constantly from collections, and the buylist outs are only ranging between 20 and 35 cents. That just doesn’t feel right for a four-of staple in a competitive Modern archetype that was from a set like New Phyrexia. Every time I pull these, I simply set them aside, and I’m willing to wait the required months before we start seeing this as a $2 common that the Modern format has come to accept as a normality.

While I don’t think there’s any rush to go buy out the internet before they spike tomorrow (as you can see, I tweeted the above over a month ago and have seen next to zero gains), it’s something that I would get in on sooner rather than later if you plan on playing the deck, and something I would hold back on buylisting for now if you’re comfortable with waiting into the long term for larger rewards.

phyunlife

Unlife

Apparently my memory wasn’t entirely accurate in the tweet, since Phyrexian Unlife originally jumped to only $3.00 from 30 cents—so only a 1,000-percent increase instead of what I had originally remembered from a year ago.

Something else I remember from a year ago is everyone calling Amulet of Vigor an inconsistent cheese deck that was just a simple flash in the pan. The deck was cheap and easy to build at the time, and Amulet itself had already jumped once. Another New Phyrexia card highlighting the awesome mechanic that is infect, and I can’t see it being printed again until Modern Masters 2017.

adnauseam

Is Ad Nauseam going to take Twin’s place as the throne holder of the most popular combo deck in Modern? No, probably not.

However, Living End didn’t have to put a bunch of copies into the top eight of a Grand Prix to convince the world that it needed to be a $13 in the past couple of weeks. It had a severe case of “being a Modern-legal rare with zero reprints and seeing play in a deck,” which caused it to jump. It’s also the cornerstone of one of the cheapest decks you can build in the format, with the most expensive card being a $15 common that we all know and love (Serum Visions, for those who were scratching their heads).  You can purchase the entire deck for less than three copies of Tarmogoyf, and that’s certainly going to be an attractive dealbreaker for new players looking to enter the Modern format on a budget.

While there are still 100 to 200 sellers of each combo piece on TCGplayer, and I don’t expect a buyout within the next few weeks, I don’t think these two cards are safe from jumping up with sudden demand. If the deck starts to see even a glimmer of a consistent competitive showing or a banned list announcement shakes up the format with the coming of Battle for Zendikar, I want to be the one holding these cards months in advance to sell into any future hype.

One of the last cards I want to talk about this week is Shelldock Isle.

shelldock

shelldock isle

You’re probably thinking right now:

But DJ! You just listed three niche Modern cards that have already seen competitive play and haven’t spiked yet. Is there some sort of amazing Shelldock Isle deck that’s going to spike the next Modern Grand Prix? How many hundreds of copies should I buy?

Well, don’t get your hopes up. I don’t exactly know what deck is going to play this. Maybe it spikes eventually due to some crazy Modern deck, and maybe it slowly creeps up over time because casual players are infatuated with the idea of reducing an opponent’s library to zero cards. Either way, we have a utility land with no reprints, a weird mechanic, casual appeal, and theoretical competitive appeal.

If someone told you a year ago that Nourishing Shoal would be a $10 card, you would have called them an idiot. I would have called them something less mean than idiot, but still would’ve given them a stern talking to about their life choices that had led up to that pronouncement.  However, Magic: The Gathering players proved us both wrong, came up with a silly combo deck that uses a bulk rare from Kamigawa, and ta-da! $10 card overnight. And Shoal doesn’t even have an ounce of appeal to EDH or casual players, or a weird mechanic that would prevent it from being reprinted in another set in the future.

…

If you’re still tapping your foot and waiting for an example of where I actually made money off of this strategy (I wasn’t one of the people holding onto dozens of Nourishing Shoals when they became relevant), then I ask you to look at another card in the Ad Nauseam deck that recently came to fruition.

Spoils of the Vault was, up until quite recently, a near-bulk rare. Every now and again when I bought collections, I would pull these out of the pile of bulk rares that I picked up at a dime a piece, and throw them into my spec box. “Maybe one day…” I would think longingly. Ad Nauseam didn’t have to win an event for Spoils to give me my spoils, and it certainly won’t have to for either of its other friends in the deck to see a bump. While Spoils was printed approximately sixteen-thousand years before New Phyrexia or Shards of Alara, I still don’t think we’ve seen the last of this deck rearing its’ head in the finance market.

spoils

End Step

Maybe you’re a Standard grinder and you found this article completely useless. You bought into Thopter Spy Network and funneled your entire Swiss bank savings into it, and now you feel like an evil genius because you just unloaded your four-hundredth copy for $3 after you bought in at $1. Why jump in on Shelldock Isle, which will take several months (optimistically), if you have a hawkeye for what’s going to be playable in the first few weeks of Standard? Well, I don’t have a counterargument for that.

If  you’re good enough at predicting the Standard metagame and you have the ability to move a lot of cards as soon as you get them in, then you have no reason to cross your fingers on the long haul like I’m doing with the above cards. It makes a lot more sense for you to pinpoint the exact card in each new set that everyone else considers to be best for kindling a dumpster fire and haul in your profits on the Tasigur of the new set. If it works for you, there’s no reason to quit now.

Good luck, and I’ll see you next week!

 

 

Conjured Currency

Growing Pains

15 Comments

Some of you might remember this article, where I discussed how I got to where I am now as a small-time buyer and seller of Magic cards. One of the biggest points I wanted to emphasize in that article was how flexible I am with what’s on my buylist and how willing I am to buy pretty much anything if the price is right. While I’m definitely not always paying the highest prices in my local area, my trump card has been availability and versatility. From duals to bulk, I’ll take it all.

Cornered Market

One of the clear results of this “buy everything that taps” theory is how I ended up accumulating a reasonably sized collection over time, both in bulk and more relevant staples. The days of “bring your trade binder to FNM” have been over for a while with me: the sheer volume of cards that I would have to lug around means it’s just not worth it. I don’t enjoy dragging my luggage case into local stores anyway, so I have to play a process of elimination game as to what gets left behind whenever I make a trip to vend a local EDH event, meet up at a halfway point for a Craigslist sale, or decide what’s getting unloaded to the vendors at the next Grand Prix.

Because I enjoy being able to find specific requested cards at a moment’s notice, I’m always trying to figure out new ways to optimize how my collection is organized. I want it to be easy for me to find things, easy for my customers to find things, and simple to buylist when I occasionally force myself to sit down and do that. (I hate online buylisting.) If you’ve been reading my content for a while now, the following article might seem a bit familiar.  However, hopefully there’s a big enough difference in my setup now as opposed to nine months ago, and maybe my writing will even have improved a bit.

Unfortunately, I can’t stay at college over the summer without spending unnecessary money and taking unnecessary classes. This means that once summer break comes, I pack up everything and move back into my father’s house to spend two months sorting, selling, buying, and binging on League of Legends. On the plus side, I don’t have to worry about going to class or having a social life  during these months, because I’m out in the middle of nowhere. This means I’ve been able to focus entirely on grinding those dollars, and writing about the process.

The Big Picture

article1

Unfortunately, those 5,000-count boxes you see in the far right corner are not filled with cards. Those are all empty  boxes that I’ve just accumulated from buying collections, and I use them for when I unload mass amounts of common/uncommons or bulk rares to vendors. Everything else is full of Magic: The Gathering trading cards, and this week we’ll go through what goes where, how I use different selling strategies to move differently valued boxes, and where I get some of my supplies.

article4

We’ll start off with the more relevant stuff, or at least what most competitive players consider to be relevant. I try to keep my binders clean of any lower-value stuff and move cards that are worth less than $4 to other separate long boxes. Personally, I have a binder for each color, although if you’re a Standard or Modern grinder who wants to have a gauntlet of everything, I might recommend using a binder for each block.

It might also help to have your binder colors match the respective material inside them. It’s too late for me now, but there’s still time for you to save yourself from the confusion.

“Where are your Garruks, DJ?”

“In the ‘green’ binder.”

“This one? It has a bunch of white cards in it.”

Order // Chaos

Anyway, I also suggest picking up some type of labeling system for every single box, binder, or whatever item you use to carry cards around. I used a crude method of business cards and price stickers, but a Sharpie works just as well. Labeling your cards (well, not the actual cards) with your personal information gives you a shot at having them returned if you misplace them, and stickering the contents of the binder helps EDH players save time so that they know not to open up the binder labeled “Standard Staples” before the trade starts.

Sleeve Marking

One of the biggest obstacles I used to run into while trying to keep my collection organized as a single entity was maintaining a divide  between the inventory that was listed on my TCGplayer store and the stuff that wasn’t in my online inventory. I had to keep the TCG cards separate, because I needed to remember to scribble down a note whenever I sold or traded one of them away through an outlet that wasn’t TCG. That way I could remove it as soon as I got the chance. The downside to this used to mean keeping an entire separate binder or two labeled as “TCGplayer” and then sorted by color itself. If someone asked about my Avacyns, I had to keep track of whether or not they were in the TCGplayer binder white section or the non-TCG white binder.

white

As you can see in the picture above, I eventually had a (painfully obvious) idea that I should have come up with a long time ago. As a fairly strict grader, I mark the condition of every card that comes into my personal inventory before I sleeve it by using a trusty, fast-drying Sharpie. The condition is written on the sleeve to help quicken the listing or trading process further. I also note any language differences with short abbreviations to highlight the difference to any potential buyers. If you have miscut, misprinted, or foreign cards that you’re trying to move out of your binders, it’s a great way to make them stand out a little bit more.

To fix the “separate inventory” problem, I started writing “TCG” on the sleeve of any card that was currently listed on my online store. While a certain number of you probably already do this or consider it so obvious that I should have been doing it all along, the idea just never really clicked until recently.

article3

I’ve had this card house ever since my casual Yu-Gi-Oh! days, and I think it’s a great investment for anyone with a large enough collection to fill up at least ten of the 1,000-count boxes. The house itself will run you about $10 to $15 depending on where you look, with Troll and Toad being one of the cheapest I can find. Be careful ordering from them, though—they’ll probably try to fit it into a single envelope and forget the top loader.

Sorting the $1, $2, and $3 cards by price and alphabetically means that it’s still easy to find a specific card in a short period of time, while still allowing you to watch casual players pull out big, splashy mythics with prices that blow their minds. “Kresh, the Bloodbraided is only $2?!”

Most competitive players don’t really bother looking through those boxes of cheaper cards, but they’re easily sorted and accessible for me to pull out their playsets of Electrolyze and Manamorphose.

Another benefit to having all of the cheaper cards laid out in a box like this is that it’s much easier to buylist out of at a Grand Prix. You take your box of $2 cards from vendor to vendor and ask them to pull out anything that they’ll pay $1 on, or whatever number you want to go with.  I’d much rather bring my $1 box to the next Grand Prix and have a vendor pull out Utter Ends for $.25 to $.50 each instead of having them sit in that box until they rotate.

I usually don’t bring the bulk foil common/uncommon boxes or the bulk foil rares unless someone specifically asks me in advance to drag them along. Most vendors don’t care about bulk foils if you’re at a large event, but sometimes you can find a local guy who’s trying to foil out a common cube. Hell, if you have enough bulk foils, build your own foil cube!

Relevant Commons/Uncommons

article2

Most of my articles mention picking through bulk common/uncommons at some point. It’s one of the most consistent returns that I have in this business, and I’ll forever advocate buying bulk commons/uncommons until I can make an actual house out of them.

This is where all of those “picks” that I’m always ranting about end up. All of the Nettle Sentinels (before they got upgraded to the $3 box), all of the Glistener Elves (which will eventually go in the $3 box, and I highly advise buying into this now instead of looking for the Moby Dick of Origins finance), and all of the Vampire Nighthawks end up here. The fact that there are six boxes there is a sign of my laziness and unwillingness to sit down and buylist a bunch of it, but I absolutely love these storage case boxes. They hold a little over a thousand cards each, and are relatively compact enough to fit a couple into a backpack. Whatever you do, don’t buy them from Amazon on that link I just gave you. I got all of mine through a combination of gifts and Wal-Mart, where they were $5 a piece.

End Step

Lord of the Void is a $3 Magic card.

…

…

…

Seriously, though, $3?

Anyway, let me know if this was interesting or helpful. I’ve received positive feedback in the past about explaining and snapping pictures of my own personal organization process, so hopefully this had something useful for someone. Let me know in the comments if there’s anything specific you’d like me to cover in the future!

Conjured Currency

Bulk Rare EDH

10 Comments

I already know what you’re thinking. You clicked on this article because it had “EDH” in the title, and because you thought, “Finally, someone on this website who actually knows what they’re talking about when it comes to the Commander format.” You wanted a benevolent writer who’s not afraid to tell you how much I like your smile, instead of an angst-filled podcaster who’s gonna call you a nerd. I feel you. I understand you. We’re gonna steal some of Jason Alt‘s spotlight for the week, and combine something that I love (bulk rares) with his EDH fetish.

DJ, You Play Magic?

Articletweet

That tweet was posted from #GPVegas, but that’s beside the point. I do actually own five EDH decks and enjoy the slow process of foiling them out through trades. It warms my cold, financier heart to find a foil piece for Savra in a binder when I’m so close to having the deck as foil as possible; it gives me something to actually be excited about when trading.

hollow

(If anyone has a foil one of these, I’d gladly trade for it.)

However, some of my decks end up being too powerful for local and new groups that I attend. I’m pretty awful at figuring out whether or not my deck is 75%, but I still wanted to have a brew that could be on a somewhat similar power level to someone who just picked up a Commander preconstructed deck from the Walmart.

I also have thousands of bulk rares that sit on top of my display case and there are some that I’ll never run out of (I’m so glad I have a dozen copies of Sultai Ascendancy). A few months ago, I figured that maybe I could use those… Fate Reforged had just been released, and I wanted to make a Tasigur deck while still being original and having a cool “theme.”

bulkrares

The $30 Deck

I already had Jarad as my mono-dredge deck, so I didn’t want to go down that path with Tasigur. I had Savra for tokens and sacrifice themes, and Nath was all enchantments. I really didn’t want to make a “good stuff” BUG deck with all of the best Sultai staples that were just recurred over and over again, because I like all of my decks to have their own dedicated theme or niche.

While I was pawing through some of my bulk rares in my display case, I had the idea to combine the best of both worlds: what if I made the Tasigur deck, and only used rares that were under a certain price point? It would limit the power level of the deck to the point where I’d be comfortable playing in a lot more environments with casual players, the deck would cost me literally nothing to build (I resolved to only use cards in my $.25 rare box), and I might be able to start a trend in my area. If this building restriction ended up being a ton of fun and took off, then I have a ton of bulk rares to sell to my friends who might make their own bulk rare EDH decks.

These are the rules that I kept myself to during deck construction:

  1. Every card in the 99 that is not a basic land must be rare, and worth less than $.80 TCG mid (most cards above that price end up in my $1.00 box, so I don’t consider them true “bulk rares”).
  2. The general is excluded from this rule, because damn it, I want to play Tasigur.
  3. Mythic rares are not allowed, because those aren’t in my $.25 boxes.
  4. If the card jumps above the right price point, it must be removed from the deck.
  5. I didn’t care if the card had been reprinted as common or uncommon, as long as I was playing the rare version.
  6. No foils, other than Tasigur. That would make the card too expensive to play.

The “Golden” Fang

My first rough draft ended up, well, pretty rough. I learned really quickly that most decent mana fixing was printed at common or uncommon, so Farseek, Cultivate, and even guildgates were out. Any semi-quality rare dual lands are above $1, so I was unable to use stuff like Drowned Catacombs even though it has four printings. As a result, I managed to find Astral Cornucopia and the Ramos rocks as begrudgingly playable. It’s not as though anyone was clamoring to buy them out of my bulk boxes anyway. Ways to fill my graveyard were especially hard to come by, but I managed to pull out Jace’s Archivist and one of those good old Sultai Ascendancies to help cast Tasigur even easier. I even had a cute combo with Laboratory Maniac in the list for a while, but now it looks like I’ll have to remove him. He’s grown up to be a big boy and will move onto the $1 box, so I’ll have to find an additional win condition. My favorite win condition in the deck is definitely Villainous Wealth, though: if I can’t cast expensive and powerful Magic cards, I’ll just try to use yours!

After a bit of tweaking a few months ago, this is what I have sleeved up today.

bulkrareEDH

While writing this article, I’m learning that more and more cards that I initially had in the list no longer fit the price requirement that I set. Though I set my number at around $.80, you can pick whatever number you like, which I think is a cool way to adjust the format to your personal playgroup’s budget. Removing commons and uncommons from the equation makes it a sort of “anti-Pauper,” where you put a lot of faith in WOTC’s inability to designate rarities early on in the game’s development. I can take advantage of Persuasion having  a gold set symbol, but I don’t get to play Control Magic.

Advantages of Battling with Bulk

I’m not going to pretend that I play as much EDH as Jason does. I’ve probably only played this deck a dozen times in the six or so months that it’s been together. However, I’ve gotten enough positive local feedback and interactions by using the deck, that I think there are tangible benefits to building one if you’re an individual looking to sell off some of your bulk rares for higher than $.15 a piece to a vendor.

When I cast Sudden Spoiling to ruin someone’s entire army of dragons and make blocks that devastate their board, one of the responses of the opposing players was, “There’s no way that’s a bulk rare. It’s way too powerful.” That conversation quickly turned into, “How many extras of those do you have that you would sell me? I need one in every black deck.” By displaying powerful bulk rares that can stand up to higher-tier decks, you can show them first-hand that building a deck that I can only accurately describe as “not that bad” can be surprisingly cheap.

I mentioned this earlier in the opening, but it’s worth going over again. If you or your playgroups find this type of idea to be fun (I mean, it’s probably cheaper and more fun than Tiny Leaders, if you’re an EDH player who tried that format out), then it’s easy to buy into, challenging to build, and allows for constant adjusting of your deck. I’ve had the deck together for less than a year, and I’ve already been forced to remove at least 7 cards from it because they slowly crept up in price. If I played enough Magic to know for sure, I’d guess that changing your deck up little by little over time manages to keep it fun, refreshing, and exciting to play. These types of decks are also fantastic to show blossoming EDH players who have just purchased their precons, or who have no idea where to start.

While we’re on the subject of comparing this to Tiny Leaders, I have to make the amusing observation that it’s impossible for this “format variation” to warp the market like TL did. I’m not suggesting that this will ever actually be as big as TL was, but if a card becomes powerful enough and demanded just because of its efficiency in bulk rare decks, then it no longer becomes a bulk rare. When that happens, we remove the card from our decks until it goes back down to where we want!

One final advantage that I want to aggressively push at you about this variant of EDH that I created, is that talking about it is actually getting me to feel and care about spoilers again.

I’m actually excited for Gilt-Leaf Winnower to drop down to a bulk rare so I can try it out in this deck. Is it going to be good enough? I have no idea, but I want to try it. I’m going to end up paying $.10 for one eventually anyway, so I might as well take it for a run. I’m even crossing my fingers hoping that Managorger Hydra becomes a bulk rare to supplement the +1/+1 counter subtheme that the deck has slowly evolved into.

End Step

Am I crazy for thinking this is an actual fun tweak on EDH/Commander? I’ve had a blast playing with my Tasigur deck against other relatively low-power decks. If you’re a fan of 60-card pauper or pauper EDH, I think this is something you’d enjoy a lot. As someone who never used to enjoy actually building decks, I enjoy keeping this one up to date, and writing about it has revived my fervor for sharing it with the world.

Let me know what you think in the comments section, on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, email, whatever. You know the drill. Thanks for reading!

Conjured Currency

The Dime Dealer

11 Comments

Nobody’s going to argue that hitting on a personal spec target isn’t one of the best feelings in our little micro community. Seeing that 200-percent increase on Boros Reckoner the week after release or reminiscing on when you bought out the internet of Tasigur at $2 each feels great, and it’s one of the biggest reasons players try to dip their toes into the world of Magic finance. Seeing your $3 preorder hang out at $9 for its entire Standard lifespan is something that will always hang on your mantle as a brag story for years to come, especially if you went all-in on dozens or hundreds of copies.

Today, I’m not here to teach you how to do that. My ability to evaluate pre-order cards is less than stellar, considering I called Rabblemaster “hot garbage,” and claimed it would be a bulk rare soon after the set release. You don’t want me to tell you what card to pick out of Origins to be the next Deathmist Raptor, because that’s not what I’m good at. What I am good at, is making money off what I thought Rabblemaster would turn out to be: bulk rares.

What is a Bulk Rare?

As we’re all well aware, not every gold- or red-symbol-bearing card in the rear end of a booster pack lives a privileged life of playability and power. Some are cast aside and forgotten by the Spikes of our realm, left to rot in the dregs of trade binders for years, thrown into boxes of bulk and forgotten about, or left on draft tables to be thrown away. For the purposes of our discussion today, a “bulk rare” will be any card with a gold set symbol and a TCGplayer mid price of under $1.00.

I’m going to separate the types of bulk rares into a couple of different categories. First, we have “true bulk.” These are the rares that can literally never be seen as anything other than $.10 to $.12, depending on what vendor you talk to. These are the Dragon-Style Twins of the world, which have a TCGplayer mid price of $.35, are acquirable as throw-ins during trades (if you play nice during the transaction), and have never seen any sort of play on a camera. You are not happy when you open one of these in a booster pack. Ever.

Deathbringer

Next up, we have something that I’ve patented as a “fake” bulk rare. While vendors at a Grand Prix will treat true and fake bulk rares to be one and the same, you have room to make more money off them than their bottom dollar counterparts. Let’s take a look at Increasing Savagery:

Savagery

Compare that to the graphs for Dragon-Style Twins and Deathbringer Regent. With a Fair Trade Price that most people would round up to $1, this set of scary window teeth is worth trading straight across for Delver of Secrets or Brainstorm. And the best part is that anyone who cares about casting Delver or Brainstorm is more than likely willing to dump Savagery at a bulk rare price while they’re trying to finish their set of Snapcasters.

We can see a similar price chart in the more recently printed Flamewake Phoenix.

Flamewake

While the card isn’t as bulky as Dragon-Style Twins, it certainly hasn’t made any flamewaves in Standard (yet.) This is a card that I’m extremely happy to pick up while trading for or buying bulk rares at $.10 to $.12 each to set aside with my fingers crossed for post-rotation. I definitely keep cards like this and Increasing Savagery away from my “true” bulk, and either trade them out at $1, buylist them online for more than a 100-percent profit, or speculate at a negligible cost.

Why Should I Care?

Excellent question, voice in my head. When you deal in bulk rares, you get to bridge the aether between the hardcore Spikes and grinders who only care about pureblood Snapcaster Mages and the casual kitchen-table player who will lose his freaking mind over how awesome it will be to windmill slam a Dragon-Style Twins against his friend and then pump it with Increasing Savagery. While it’s a rare occasion to sell massive amounts of bulk rares and reap in huge loads of cash at once, they are one of the most stable assets in Magic.

If you looked at the price of Underground Sea a year ago and given me the choice of one NM Revised Sea or 3,300 bulk rares, I would have taken the 100 duck-sized horses instead of one horse-sized duck. In the past 365 days, Sea has actually depreciated by a decent percentage, while my army of dimes wouldn’t have moved an inch. Unless Magic as a whole collapses, I can’t see the price of bulk rares ever going down past the dime—casual players just love the game too much. While you sometimes end up having to buy Gallows at Willows Hill, those are the ones that you pass off to the highest bidder at your next Grand Prix.

Bulk rares also have the advantage of randomly spiking six-million percent every now and again. Nourishing Shoal was sitting in my bulk rares box before it suddenly became a $15 card, so that dime saw a higher percentage increase than Deathmist Raptor could ever hope to dream of. Older bulk rares from the blocks of Mirrodin, Kamigawa, and Future Sight are harder to find than modern-day bulk mythics, but have infinite more upside just due to the explosive popularity of a deck being on camera. Guess how quickly I listed my Quickens after this past week. While some people say that I’m insane for holding onto all of the copies of Plunge into Darkness that I pull from collections and bulk buys, I’m confident that it only takes one camera match or new card printed to shoot the Fifth Dawn rare into overdrive.

How Do I Pick Up Bulk Rares?

Thankfully, there are a lot of players who aren’t as interested in these penny stocks as we are. Competitive tournament grinders are (in my experience) often happy to grind their dusty bulk rares into Cryptic Commands, especially when you point out the fact that no one else has wanted or will want these cards other than yourself.

Proper etiquette here is to gently approach the subject, and ask if your partner is interested in moving any or all of their NM bulk rares. You let them know that they’re free to decline any card in particular for any or no reason at all, and that you won’t be offended. Set a price beforehand (I like to use $.10 as a cash baseline and $.12 in trade), and one of you can start pulling and making small piles of 10. I also take any mythic at $.25 to help people not have to look at their copies of Archangel’s Light anymore. Even if they don’t exactly have 300 bulk rares to equal the Cryptic they were looking for,  it certainly helps cushion the blow by reducing the number of their own staples that they have to trade out towards completing their deck.

Alternatively, I used to find success with a “two for one” box. While I don’t use it anymore due to keeping my bulk rare boxes on a glass display case in a storefront, it was a very effective method of grinding sheer quantity of bulk rares during our college gaming nights. The general rule is that you have a large box of at least a few hundred rares, preferably ones that have a degree of casual and Commander appeal. While I’m not sure this is something you want to start while playing at your LGS (it always had kind of a “vendor” feel to me, so I always reserved it for casual events at our college), it’s a great way to make a bit of value on the side, and remove the stress of searching through someone else’s binder for some random rare that you don’t care about anyway.

The key to picking up bulk rares goes back to my article “Nothing is Sacred” from a couple weeks ago. Be flexible, and willing to buy (almost) anything. While I’ve personally drawn a line of not accepting MP or lower bulk rares anymore, I don’t care what NM rares I’m buying. As long as the price is a dime, I’m perfectly willing to pick up binders and binders full of bulk rares. Even though I own more than 30 copies of Daxos of Meletis, I’ll still buy the next one at $.10. In the absolute worst-case scenario, I’ll need to unload it at the next Grand Prix I travel to and break even. The best case is that I make $.03 off of it. The best, best-case scenario is that there’s the next Nourishing Shoal in the same pile as that thirty-first Daxos, and that I help someone complete a deck by taking the cards that she doesn’t need off her hands.

Moving Bulk Rares

It would be really awkward if I closed this article without going over the best ways to sell and trade your newly acquired penny stocks, but I’ve already actually sprinkled those methods throughout. Let’s go over it to recap.

Your number-one outlet is casual players. If you don’t know any casual players, try to find some. I’m not talking about Commander players who understand that Steam Vents is a quality Magic: The Gathering card. Your homework for this week is to meet a casual player who gets excited when they consider putting a Tidal Force into an unsleeved, 78-card deck. Help them experience Christmas in July by giving them a box of sweet rares to look through that are only $.25 each. That’s, like, $3.75 less than a booster pack!

End Step

So yesterday, I learned this:

ranks

Even hardened financiers like myself can slip up sometimes, and it makes me wonder exactly how many copies of Endless Ranks of the Dead I’ve thrown into my quarter box for the past year and a half. If you have someone local who does what I do on the scale that I do, there’s a damn good chance that they messed up at some point, or haven’t gone through their thousands of bulk rares in god knows how long. I remember pulling Gavony Townships out of other people’s bulk boxes back when the card was $1.50, so it’s your turn to do the same. Do some research and go make money off of people like me. Preferably not me, but other people like me. Go buy their Endless Ranks for a quarter. Leave mine alone.