All posts by Derek Madlem

Derek picked up Magic the first time during Ice Age and played through the release of Invasion. During Shards of Alara he returned to the game and has never looked back.

Going Mad – So You Want to Sell a Wingmate Roc?

By: Derek Madlem

If you’ve followed my travels in recent weeks and months, you might have noticed that I’ve been working some events as a buyer for a few fine card retailers. On the other side of the table you notice things and you talk with the other buyers, and you encounter the same issues time and time again. Some people just don’t understand. That’s where I come in, because I’m here to help.

Obviously none of my employers would be thrilled if I was giving away their back end information so I want (need) to make it clear that these numbers are all semi-informed hypotheticals used simply to illustrate a point. Consider this all to be a work of fiction.

The Costs

One of the moments that arises when buying cards is people don’t understand why you can pay 50-60% all day long on $10+ cards but not on a $1-3 cards. The costs, kid. The costs.

There are a lot of things you just don’t think about as a consumer at an event. Most people don’t even consider that many events cost as much or more for three days than most of their local game stores pay for an entire month.

Let’s take a look at some “best case” hypothetical numbers here just to get a frame of reference.

Booth cost at a Grand Prix: let’s say you’re getting a bargain at $3,000 for the weekend. It’s got tables and chairs and probably some table cloths but it’s going to be a small booth.

Subtotal: $3,000

Employees: since you were cheap and opted for the small booth, you only need four guys to run it. You’ll need one guy at the buying station, one guy selling, one guy standing in the middle barking orders, and one guy that’s mostly just dead weight so the rest of you can resent him all weekend. Each of those guys is a Magic groupie so they’ll work for $100 a day, so that’s $100 x 3 x 4 = $1200

Subtotal: $4,200

Food: Did I mention you have to feed those guys? Since you’re in fantasy bargain town, let’s assume you can feed them for $5 per meal per person. $5 a meal at 3 meals per day, times 3 days times 4 people = $180. We’ll go ahead and round that to $200 because of snacks. Mmmm snacks.

Subtotal: $4,400

Lodging: Despite popular belief, the people working a booth at a Grand Prix DO NOT sleep in the event hall; you’ve gotta spring for lodging. That’s going to be four nights at a modest $100 a night because everyone is doubling up in queen beds for the weekend and running water is pretty sweet.

Subtotal: $4,800

Transport: Wow, this is getting expensive fast, luckily the GP was within driving distance so there’s only the $100 in gas to worry about. Never mind that you couldn’t really get to a GP in a vehicle that would get that kind of gas mileage, transport your whole team, AND supplies. Don’t forget parking for the weekend!

Subtotal: $4,900

Let’s go ahead and add another $100 to round it out, gummy bears and cocaine get expensive and hypothetical scenarios just work a lot better with nice round numbers.

Final Booth Subtotal: $5,000 (nice round number)

So in an ideal world where every card was purchased at 50% of retail and every single card is sold, that’s $10,000 in sales JUST TO BREAK EVEN. But realistically most sales are not occurring at events, they’re happening through online stores, brick and mortar stores, or through TCGplayer type sites that charge a percentage. Don’t forget that PayPal wants their cut as well.

So now you’re wondering why I spent 400 words explaining to you that it’s expensive to set up at a large event aren’t you? Don’t worry, we’ll get there eventually.

Wingmate Roc

Some of you might be wondering why you only get offered $1 for that Wingmate Roc when it sells for $3? So take all that information above and keep in mind that you have to sell $10,000 in cards at a 50% margin just to break even. But in reality, there is no such thing as 50% margins.

Business is Expensive

There are more costs. Before you can even sell a card you have to sort, grade, price, list, and stock the cards. Then you start selling them, whether that’s in a brick and mortar store or an online retailer. It also turns out that there is no Magical Christmas Land where you get to sell through 100% of the cards you pick up so there’s always going to be some percentage of toxic inventory squishing that bottom line as well. Did I mention that there are still more costs?

Math!

So let’s look at that Wingmate Roc that you wanted to sell. For demonstration’s sake we’ll say that we paid $1.50 for it. When a store sells that card online they have to pick it, pack it, and ship it in addition to the sorting, grading, pricing, listing, and stocking the cards mentioned above. Even if they have the most efficient system in place for all these steps, you’re still looking at somewhere upwards of 25¢ in labor assuming they’re employing adults in America rather than children on the other side of the world.

According to about three minutes of research on TCG’s website, if you’re using TCG Direct you’re going to pay around 75¢ in handling fees. If you package the cards and send them yourself you’re paying 10% + 30¢ credit card processing fee or about 60¢ in total fees; we’ll just ignore the hypothetical customer service scenarios that can eat up your time when the guy on the other end of the envelope is mad because he was planning on getting his Wingmate Roc graded.

For those of you keeping score at home that’s $2.35 – $2.50 cost to sell a Wingmate Roc. Do you know how many of those you need to sell to break even? Let’s get out our calculators!

$10,000 divided by 50¢ is going to take selling 20,000 cards just to break even on that one event. That’s assuming you don’t have any other costs throughout the month.

I did a little bit of research and I was able to determine that there are remarkably few successful businesses built on the premise of “breaking even” every month, so we’d probably need to sell a few more than that if we wanted to be profitable.

Oh did I mention the plethora of other miscellaneous supplies needed?

  • Display cases
  • Things to write with / on
  • Clipboards
  • Sleeves
  • Rock star sunglasses
  • Boxes
  • Banners
  • Display boards of some kind
  • Extension cords
  • Computers
  • Portable internet connection
  • Those sweet custom buy mats you see at every vendor
  • Branded attire
  • Travel crates / suitcases / what have you

As you can see, there is not a lot money being made on Wingmate Rocs, but retailers are often “forced” to carry the entire line so that you can get all of your shopping done in one stop.

Assumption of Risk

This is a concept that’s absolutely lost on most people that sell cards. When a vendor is buying a card from you, they are also taking on significant risk. Magic cards are not something that people need to live, like water and food. The markets can be very fickle and when a card drops in value, whoever is left holding them is the loser. 

When your Wingmate Rocs dropped from $7 to $3, you “lost” $16 on a playset. But if a store is carrying significant inventory of that card, say ten or more playsets, the loss shoots up into the hundreds of dollars.

When you sell cards to a vendor, they are betting that they can sell enough of those cards fast enough to recoup their investment and just hoping that the rest sell eventually. This is that toxic inventory that I mentioned previously. A card that’s not selling is just money that’s tied up and can’t be used to further grow a business, and it’s certainly not anything resembling profit. This toxic inventory factors into that bottom line just as much as the 30¢ credit processing fee on TCGplayer.

Unintended Consequences

One of the neat things that happens in doing thought exercises like this one is that you occasionally have a couple of “AH HA!” moments in the process and you make connections that you might not have made before.

For the last few years there’s been an “event horizon” for the prices on Standard cards. As cards approached that $3-4 mark they often quickly fell into bulk status and I think this might be much to do with the realities of selling a $3 card these days. Great examples in current Standard of cards that couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of a money sucking black hole are Mantis Rider, Surrak, the Hunt Caller, and Sidisi, Undead Vizier. All of these cards were worth $6+ at one point and then crept down to that event horizon and sucked into the cosmic abyss.

This theory would also explain the opposite effect, which would be the price of uncommons like Stoke the Flames commonly getting pushed up into the $4 range. If it’s going to take an offer of $1 to get a good playable uncommon out of a binder, then selling it for $4 is almost required at that point. As vendor you’re pretty much expected to have at least some of the current formats hottest uncommons, so to carry them you pretty much just have to ramp them up to $4.

What Did We Learn Today?

Well kids, we learned why vendors have to offer you the prices they do on low-cost cards like Wingmate Roc. It’s not just them trying to rip you off, it’s just an economic reality of doing business. The alternative of course is that we give up Grand Prix events all together and just go back to playing locally. You did know that all of these venues are essentially subsidized by the vendors right? Why else would a TO let in vendors other than themselves?

The other thing to consider going forward is that with the absence of PTQs, there are going to be a lot less “low cost” events for vendors to set up at. It’s a lot easier to show up and pay 50-60% on cards when your table only costs $500 to setup and you don’t have to plan on staying over night.


 

Going Mad – Making History at GP Tarmogoyf

By: Derek Madlem

If there’s one word to describe that events of that unfurled at #GPVegas, it’s Tarmogoyf. Tarmogoyfs were the talk of the weekend from basically any angle you could possible consider. Players wanted to buy, sell, open, and trade for Tarmogoyf.

The Same Old

Twitter exploded with Sam Black leading the battle cry against being able to drop before passing sealed pools. Some people feel very strongly that sealed pools are sacred and that you should HAVE TO pass a Tarmogoyf, a FOIL Tarmogoyf, or any combination there of.

Realistically the rule change was put into place to alleviate the logistic nightmare of players “just walking off” with their sealed pool after opening it. Even if the punishment for this crime was a six month ban from competitive Magic, for the average player $250 is more than they’d win during that amount of time anyway. The calculus gets even better at multi-Goyf / Mythic combinations. 

If judges had to check empty seats vs. registry before pools were passed it would delay the tournament significantly. Taking witness statements from people seated nearby would probably be required, then reports based on those statements would have to be drafted. This is a logistical nightmare for everyone involved so it was just better to change the rule.

The other thing to consider, and this is the biggest point: Magic has been changing rules, procedures, and even card design to minimize the “feel bads” of the game, to resounding success. The feel bads of being FORCED to give away something valuable is way worse than the feel bads of not getting passed something valuable. For 99% of all sanctioned sealed decks opened in the world there is no passing of pools so it is really hard to make the argument that this is something most players should be accustomed to.

If you want to ensure that you’re “passed” money, pay extra for VIP pre-registered pools or we can all pay $25 extra per head and they’ll hire an army of judges to do it the night(s) before.

Dream Pools

The room was abuzz with chatter about the judge-registered sealed pool that some lucky savage was going to get with their sleep-in special:

FOIL Tarmogoyf
FOIL Tarmogoyf
Tarmogoyf

I’m sure there were some other cards in there too…but if that doesn’t get an honorary mention for “winning the GP,” I don’t know what does.

Pascal’s Wager

The biggest controversy that’s still causing tremors and shockwaves in the twitterverse is Pascal Maynard’s choice on camera in the top eight. He established himself as a Boros aggro deck with his first picks and faced a conundrum in pack two: he opened a FOIL Tarmogoyf. There are basically three sides to this argument, which is a pleasant departure from the typical two-sided bickering we’ve grown accustomed to:

  • Pro players saying he missed his chance at first place (more cash, Worlds invite, more Pro points, etc) because he made “the wrong pick.”
  • Players arguing the “expected value” of the Goyf vs. Burst Lightning
  • Players pointing out that it is still a game and that ultimately we play to do things that make us happy.

As of writing this article, Pascal has placed the Tarmogoyf in question up for auction on eBay and has promised to donate 50% of the proceeds to Gamers Helping Gamers, a scholarship fund for gamers. There are very few individual cards in Magic’s history that have their own story, so this makes for a unique collectible and supports a great cause. If you’re a high roller, throw some weight at that auction… if you’re a low roller but want to help out, check out Gamers Helping Gamers and donate what you can to a great cause. As of writing this article, the auction sits at $3250… half of which goes to a great cause.

The Other Side of the Table

I’d like to include this in future articles regularly as I’m working events; being on the other side of the table gives you a lot of information about how people feel about certain cards. Seeing “the spread” between effective buy prices and sell prices can give a lot of insight into a card’s trajectory.

Working as a buyer you get a lot of people just shopping around a few or single cards to sell. If there was one question that was asked more than any other this weekend if would have been:

What are you paying on Tarmogoyf?

If there were two questions that were asked more than any other questions this weekend it would been:

What are you paying for Tarmogoyf?

What are you selling Tarmogoyf for?

These questions permeated our ears for the entire weekend, it turns out for most of the Grand Prix that we were paying the most for Goyfs and selling them at the best price. On Thursday and Friday there were two kinds of Goyf people: the people that sold Goyfs to us and people that didn’t sell their Goyfs.

What’s this mean for you? It’s likely that Tarmogoyf has likely scraped bottom already. Being the highest price in the room forced other vendors to pay more or take home no Tarmogoyfs at all. The number of vendors that thought they were clever offering $80 a piece for Tarmogoyfs was comical, but eventually they had to compete for cards or go home empty handed. As news of buylist prices going up made ripples across the internet, the market price for Tarmogoyf solidified and has already begun a slow recovery.

If you had Tarmogoyfs and were afraid of them tanking completely – you’re welcome

If you did not have Tarmogoyfs and were hoping to pick them up in the double digits – sorry about that!

Hot Cards of the Weekend

Bob is back. We bought a TON of Dark Confidants this weekend, we also sold a TON of Dark Confidants this weekend. There were multiple points throughout the weekend, especially Saturday and Sunday that we were completely out. We can thank the recent success of Jun(d/k) in Modern for revitalizing a card that was in a complete death spiral. I’m pleasantly surprised to see this card curve out from flying straight into the side of a cliff and plummeting to the canyon floor below. This just goes to show that you can’t keep a good card down.

Monastery Mentor was noticeably absent from binders all weekend, and the price to pry those bald bastards out of the pages was significantly higher than in recent events. People are finally figuring out how to capitalize on this creature’s incredible abilities and a 50% increase in the buy price reflects that. I expect to continue paying more for these cards in the coming months and through rotation as much of this card’s success is tied to non-rotating formats. I especially like FOILs of this card going forward… but water is also wet.

The biggest surprise for me this weekend was Bitterblossom. People really took to this card over the weekend and it was another one that we could hardly keep in stock. I’ll confess that I don’t really know where all these Bitterblossoms are going, whether it’s a tokens deck or if people really want to play faeries all of the sudden. Whatever the reason for their popularity, people gobbled them up almost as fast as we could get them in stock.

Of the cards hardest hit with reprints were any of the legendary creatures: Iona, Elesh Norn, Kiki-Jiki, Emrakul, Kozilek, and Ulamog especially took a pretty severe beating. The buy price for these dropped down all weekend long and most people just seemed happy to be rid of them. One Kozilek is awesome, but two is purely excess. Ulamog faired even worse thanks to his (her?) cameo in From the Vault: Legends; even with a limited release, this set left a lot of festering stinky tentacled Ulamogs floating around the wild and nobody wants that. Emrakul is the most likely to rebound as it is the defacto creature to sneak into play, at least until Battle for Zendikar when we see a new version showing up.

Karn Liberated’s new lower retail combined with his inter-planar domestic partnership with Ugin has stirred some investment interest in Urza-Tron staples; we had a lot of interest in Wurmcoil Engines throughout the weekend. Even the Commander printing of this card was hot for most of the time that I was helping out on the sales side of things. This deck’s positioning as Paper vs. the Rock decks in Modern is another obvious reason for Tron staples to become more popular as Jund and Abzan continue to put up results.

I might have been wrong about Collected Company. More accurately, I was wrong when I tried this card out in Modern alongside Congregation at Dawn. Collected Company was extremely popular all weekend long and the majority of people that picked these up were buying full playsets, while it’s no real replacement for Birthing Pod…I guess it will do in a pinch. I fully expect this card to come crashing down pretty hard in the coming weeks for a number of reasons:

  • The decks it sees play in fill a similar space as Birthing Pod decks did
  • It’s not as consistent or flexible as Birthing Pod was
  • There are roughly a bajillion of these in the wild compared to Birthing Pod

If you’re not playing these over the next few weeks, then you should probably trade them away and rebuy when the price bottoms out.

Shoutouts

I want to thank everyone that took the time to come up and introduce themselves at GP Vegas this weekend, it’s always great to meet the people that enjoy what I create and am glad to have met you all.

I also got a chance to hang out and chat with fellow writers that I haven’t yet had the chance to meet: Corbin Hosler, Jason Alt, Travis Allen, and DJ Johnson… these are some pretty swell fellas and glad to be on board with all of them. [Liar -ed]


 

Going Mad – What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Go to Vegas

By: Derek Madlem

For those of you that missed it, the first GPVegas was well…a valuable learning experience. Things quickly grew out of control because nobody had anticipated that level of attendance, and it showed. As the final days drew closer a cap was instituted and players were warned that on-site registration was going to be limited at best. This was the first GP to really push the preregistration game.

Two pairs of restrooms and one concession stand is not what you’re hoping for when you attend a GP…especially when over 4500 people show up.

But they’ve learned a number of lessons this time around…and we’re looking at upwards of 8,500 players cracking Modern Masters 2015 by the fist full.

6x 8,500 = 51,000 packs opened

With 1 in 8 packs containing a mythic rare and 15 mythic rares total you’re looking at roughly 425 copies of each mythic rare without even going into the FOIL copies.

Keep in mind this doesn’t even take into account the numerous side events that will be happening from dawn until dusk for four straight days.

This is not a Magic tournament, this is a Magic convention.

Money…

I’m sure many of you are planning to bring a binder, box, or Ziploc bag full of cards with you to Vegas. After all those buffets aren’t going to pay for themselves…but when’s the best time to sell?

Well let’s think it through here. You can expect the FIFTY vendors at GPVegas to roll out their war chests for this event so there’s going to be a metric expletive ton, expletive load, or different expletive load of cash flying at you. There are even a number of vendors with $1,000,000+ buy budgets for this event. I feel pretty safe in guessing that there will be $10-15 million in cards bought by vendors over the four day weekend.

So what’s that mean for you?

Obviously those war chests are not going to be balanced evenly, so a number of the “small timers” are going run out of money fast. $50,000 in cash might get you through an average Grand Prix, but in Vegas that’s going to be gone on day one.

If you haven’t figured this out yet: sell as early as possible.

There are going to be 9,000 people in a city that inhales cash. People aren’t flying to Vegas to play EDH, they’re flying in to be a part of the biggest Magic event in history in a city that provides 24 hour a day amusement of any kind. You also have to keep in mind that many of these people are not collectors or speculators … they’re just people that play Magic and off their extra cards to allow them to keep playing Magic.

From the vendor side of things, there’s a “break even” point for events like this. If they’re buying cards at 50% of retail, then they need to buy at least double their expenses to break even. Once stores buy enough to justify their trip, they’re going to want to switch to “good buys” … which means they’re looking to buy anything CHEAP. 

As that war chest shrinks, vendors are going to be more picky about what they’re buying and they’ll be more prone to push a trade bonus on you to make their cash last a bit longer. I’ll go into trade bonuses in another article, but they’re really not quite all they’re cracked up to be.

The Bad Guys

With the amount of money changing hands on the convention center floor, you can bet that this event has caught the attention of some ill-intentioned individuals.

Common sense will get you pretty far in most cases:

  • Don’t leave your stuff unattended
  • Your friends are terrible stuff attenders
  • Put your bag under your chair during your match

But an event of this size is likely to attract professionals. So you might want to be a little more precautious:

  • Don’t flaunt your “bling”
  • Be aware of your surroundings at all times.

You can be almost certain that numerous people are going to have cards stolen. I would even venture a guess that a non-zero number of people have cards stolen out of their rooms, vehicles, or from their person.

Another threat that we’ve heard so much about over the past year or so is the increasing quality of counterfeits. If these guys will show up to a Starcitygames event in Indianapolis, IN…you can bet they’ll be around at GPVegas. While you probably don’t have to worry much about anything printed after Magic 2015 thanks to those embedded holograms, any of the older cards is on the table as a possibility.

If you’re looking to pick up power, dual lands, or even those Juzam Djinns for your #mtgunderground deck, buy from a vendor you trust or ask your trade partner if you can get a second set of eyes on the card if you’re not sure what to look for. There have been countless articles about how to spot fakes, so I won’t go into that here but it’s important to know that they’re out there.

Modern Masters Buy Prices

There has been a lot of debate and chicken-little antics regarding Modern Masters on Twitter the past few days about what a beating the recently reprinted cards are taking.

Here’s the thing, retail stores ultimately determine and guide the value of cards. There’s a lot of factors that they take into account when determining where to set the bar, including supply and demand; but when the big stores set a buy price on a card, that is more or less drawing a line in the sand. Everyone else can play the “race to the bottom” on TCGPlayer, but ultimately they’re in the business to make money so if they’re going to sell every copy of a card they have in stock at $10, there’s absolutely no reason to sell it for $8. 

When a Channel Fireball level store says “we’re paying $110 for Tarmogoyf” then other stores either starting paying somewhere close to that price or they don’t get many Tarmogoyfs. We’ve seen this time and time again, especially with Starcity’s buylist. Force of Will floated back and forth between $65-80 for months on end, then one day Starcity pulled the trigger and upped their buylist price to $75 and everyone else pretty much fell in line and now Force retails in the $115 range.

With an event like Vegas on the horizon, many stores have been too preoccupied with planning, packing, and preparing to bother wading into the fray to buy Modern Masters cards. They also know that they’ll be in a room with 51,000 freshly acquired cards, so they’ve been tightening up their bank roll in anticipation for this event while gleefully watching the prices plummet.

Vegas will likely be pretty close to the “bottom” for many of the cards in Modern Masters 2015, you can bet that many of the vendors will be buying up as much Modern as they can get their hands on, reprints included. With fifty vendors in the same room, prices for these cards are going to sort themselves out pretty quickly. While there will be a few “barn burners” blowing out cards at ridiculous prices on Thursday, prices will stabilize by Friday and we’ll know where to expect these cards to land going forward.

History lesson for those that missed it: two years ago we had our first Modern Masters Grand Prix in Las Vegas, Tarmogoyf was hovering around $110 with a reprint coming in that was sure to decimate it’s price. During one of the early rounds of the event when 4,500 players were preoccupied with their matches Starcity sent their agents into the field to buy every single Tarmogoyf in the room from the other vendors at full retail, cementing Goy’s future as a $200 card.

Stores WILL be making moves at this event; some of them will undoubtedly be mistakes, but some will be home runs.

It’s Not Time to Panic

Yeah, Modern Masters prices are going LOW. That’s great, Timmy spent his allowance and drafted Modern Masters so he’s got a Tarmogoyf to sell – good for him. Unfortunately for Timmy, he can’t reinvest his profits in a ton more Modern Masters because that supply is going to quickly run dry.

Here’s the thing about Timmy that you need to keep in mind – Timmy only plays burn, and is generally a complete degenerate. Timmy’s burn deck doesn’t include any copies of Mox Opal, Tarmogoyf, or Vendilion Clique so he sells every copy of those cards he opens. Did I mention that Timmy is an absolute degenerate? Seriously, Timmy’s the kind of guy that finds a stray cat, feeds it, and leaves it out in the yard to get pregnant and litter the yard with kittens because he has no concept of the future.

The thing to keep in mind with Timmy is that he’s going to ship those cards, and he doesn’t really care what he gets for them because he’s got reservations for one at Denny’s tonight and those grand slams aren’t going to pay for themselves.

If you’re not going to Vegas this weekend, it’s going to be a great time to snipe some cheap auctions on eBay as everyone’s attention will be focused on the festivities and the bulk of Magic’s loose money is going to be on the battlefield in Vegas.

Modern Masters strategy in a nutshell: If you see a good price on a card you need – BUY IT. If you’re just trying to time the bottom so you can profit – GOOD LUCK, this is the sort of thing that could be an eight hour window or you could have an entire week, as long as you’re generally buying low you should be in good shape.

Shameless Self Promotion

I’ll be working with Aether Games this weekend in Vegas, come by the booth and “holla at ya boy” if you feel so inclined. I’ll try tweeting out SOME information on how prices are shaking out if I get a chance this weekend, so you can follow me on Twitter @GoingMadlem for that.

Also there’s a slap bet that may or may not be settled between one of the other owners and Aether Games’ own Kyle Lopez (@itsyourboyLOPE)…so I’ll try to announce when that’s going to happen or at least post a video.


 

Going Mad – Modern Masters Effect

By: Derek Madlem

This last weekend, I worked at Grand Prix Atlantic City with Aether Games. There were two things I wish we had known going in:

1. How terrible a place the entire state of New Jersey really is
and
2. The full spoiler for Modern Masters 2015

Don’t get me wrong, my team tried to warn me how terrible Atlantic City was but I just couldn’t believe it was THAT bad. But now, I can say that after eating subs with “mutz” for every meal that I was definitely not impressed. No businesses opened on time or stayed open as late as advertised … the sub shops wouldn’t (couldn’t?) even give us a total for our food orders and basically every food order came back wrong. We thought we were safe when we stopped at a Chik-Fil-A on the way out of the state, but even they swapped out sausage for chicken on the chicken breakfast sandwiches we ordered.

The one thing Atlantic City has going for it is how beautiful the skyline looks … in the rear view mirror.

The full spoiler was a different issue all together. Since traveling to these events requires bringing a lot of things, most stores had to print out their “hot lists” beforehand which had to be a significant risk with the spoilers not showing up until we were all there and set up Friday morning.

The Triplets

Three significant uncommons dodged reprinting in Modern Masters 2015: Path to Exile, Inquisition of Kozilek, and Serum Visions. We already knew at the time that Path to Exile was being printed as an FNM promo, but the lack of Inquisition and Visions in the full spoiler caused a bit of a flurry in the room. Buy prices on these cards reached as high as $7 this weekend, whether or not that price transfers to online stores is yet to be seen.

Serum VisionsWhile I don’t expect the FNM promos to have too substantial an effect on the price of regular Serum Visions, it will provide a low cost FOIL alternative. It’s also sure to provide endless years of sophomoric jokes due to the very unfortunate artwork. Somebody actually APPROVED this artwork.

Inquisition of Kozilek is probably a near-lock for reprint in Battle for Zendikar so I don’t think this is a great time to buy in as a spec target…but it’s probably approaching the top of the graph as far as cashing out goes so if you’re sitting on extras, now’s the time to pull the trigger.

Most notable among the rares missing this set was Goblin Guide; the previous source for spoilers had this guy listed at being included in the set and his absence has already caused the price to start climbing.

The Signs

Modern Masters 2015 also brought us a number of signals from Wizards of the Coast. Wizards clearly does not want staple uncommons to be expensive. The inclusion of cards like Electrolyze and Lightning Bolt signal that they do not want the basic components of decks to become a major cost for players. Of course Lightning Bolt being bumped up to uncommon does also let us know that Lightning Bolts will never be in the common box ever again.

lightningbolt

Other notable uncommons from Modern Masters that further illustrate this point include Cranial Plating, Darksteel Citadel, and Expedition Map. While these thematically fit with the some of the draft strategies, it’s fairly safe to point out that many those draft strategies are directly inspired by the constructed decks those cards appeared in initially. But there are some cards that were just unrealistically high and they had to end the absurdity.

Smash to Smithereens

The Craters

Part of problem with a set like Modern Masters is that sometimes cards can show up and their price simply never recovers. A great example of this would be the mythic dragon cycle we saw the first time around. Keiga and Yosei especially had a pretty solid upward curve on their value over time and that all but stopped once they were reprinted. They didn’t just take a price hit and recover like a number of cards did, they took a price hit and stayed there wallowing in past glory. This time around there’s a number of rares that have to die so that the set gets the mythic rares that it deserves.

tarmogoyfWhile aggregate box value is a topic for another article all together, the basics are that the average value of a box is constrained to be within a certain percentage of the retail price.

The basic result is that your fetchlands are holding strong at $10+ and your Siege Rhinos are half the price. Someone has to take the hit. Unfortunately if you own these cards, it’s probably too late to do much about it.

etchedchampionA card like Etched Champion is currently only worth something in paper because of the inefficiency of the market. There are likely more playsets of Etched Champion in the world than there are people that play with Etched Champion, but because those cards are out of circulation or are in poor circulation spots like local inventories the price went up. With an influx of this card into the market, we can expect the price to crater for a very long time. This card is likely to hover around $2 for a very long time.

Niv-Niv-Mizzet is just dead at this point. The duel deck had already handed this card a pretty substantial blow, but another printing at rare is going to push this card even further down into oblivion. I will not be surprised to see the old Niv-Mizzet in the bulk rare box alongside his Return to Ravnica counterpart.

Basically anything you see in this set that is not a tier one rare like Cryptic Command or Noble Hierarch is going to go straight to Bulk Town USA.

The Staggers

SpellskiteSpellskite was recently holding around $25 and has now been put on the short list for a bloodbath. A card like Spellskite will take a substantial hit because it’s primarily a sideboard card in Modern but it does have the advantage of slotting into any deck thanks to it’s Phyrexian mana activation cost. I expect one to dip as low as $10 once they flood the market, and that’s probably the point where everyone dog piles back on. Spellskite has a significant future thanks to Splinter Twin‘s power so there’s likely to be a pretty substantial recovery after the initial hit.

fulminatormageFulminator Mage is easily one of the most overpriced cards in Modern right now, at $40 for a card that primarily dwells in the sideboard of a tier three deck it’s almost laughable. But as we’ve seen in the past, being the scarcest component of a “budget” deck like Living End can drive up the price of a couple cards to ridiculous proportions. With a reprint the already low demand for this card should be satiated pretty easily, I would be amazed to see this card over $20 a year from now.

Wilt-Leaf LiegeIf you’re like me, you had a hard time believing the $15 price tag on this one, then it shot up to $30 overnight. Wilt-Leaf is a solid inclusion in a very limited number of decks. While it’s sweet to see 6/7 Siege Rhinos, the reality is that at the four mana slot there just isn’t room in a lot of Modern decks. The discard effect is a pretty sweet hedge against Liliana of the Veil, but Obstinate Baloth does the same thing, nets you four life, and is a relevant sideboard card against burn decks. I expect the Liege to take a pretty solid shot to the face with the repint, knocking it down to the $10-14 range before it begins making a very slow recovery climb. Very slow.

NobleNoble Hierarch will likely be a case study for future staple rare <cough>Snapcaster Mage<cough> reprints. Because Hierarch is so prominent in Modern, I don’t expect the price to fall near as dramatically as some of the other cards. This last weekend in Atlantic City we had basically zero of these cards come across the table to buy which leads me to believe that most people are just holding on to them for play value. I expect it to settle out around $40-45 and start climbing as soon as the dust settles.

Cryptic CommandCryptic Command is a card that I don’t expect to fair as well this time around. Frankly $60 was an unreasonable price point for this card already. With a year of full art promos and two printings for a card that typically shows up as a two-of I’m just not seeing the same levels of demand that are present with Noble Hierarch. I expect Cryptic to hit the $25-30 range and begin a slower recovery.

The Disgraced

Dark ConfidantThe ruse is probably long over at this point. The appearance of Dark Confidant in many Modern decks has been abysmally low for quite a while now. Even trying to search winning decklists with Dark Confidant on SCG’s deck database returns answers along the lines of Google saying “did you mean to type Splinter Twin?”

Dark Confidant has seen a steady decline over the last six months as GBX decks have leaned more towards Abzan and Siege Rhinos than Jund and Lightning Bolts. Bob has already declined 25% in that time period based purely on the realization that the card doesn’t really see much action in Modern anymore…how much lower can it go? Even $40 seems like a number that this card will have no problem flying right past on it’s way down. I would not be surprised to see this card continue to fall for months following Modern Masters‘ release.

Having a strategy going into Modern Masters 2015 is a good plan; get out of singles you open and don’t need quickly while biding your time for the cards that you do. You can execute this strategy even better by trading the money you open from this set into cards that didn’t show up. Arcbound Ravager, Inkmoth Nexus, and Goblin Guide all seem like great cards to pick up while cards like the Emrakul, Iona, and Elesh Norn seem like terrible holds.

Many of the cards showing up this time around are from sets that appeared relatively recently in comparison to the last outing. There was nine years between Mirrodin block and Modern Masters but there’s only been four years since Scars block so expect these cards to behave substantially differently this time around.

Shameless Plug

For any of you that are going to Grand Prix Vegas or Grand Prix Charlotte make sure you stop by the Aether Games booth and say hello and be sure to follow me on Twitter @GoingMadlem