by Travis Allen (@wizardbumpin) & James Chillcott (@mtgcritic)
MTG Fast Finance is a new weekly podcast that tries to break down the flurry of financial activity in the world of Magic: The Gathering into a fast, fun and useful thirty minute format. Follow along with our seasoned hosts as they walk you through this week’s big price movements, their picks of the week, metagame analysis and a rotating weekly topic.
Ulamog the Ceaseless Hunger: $25 to $35-40 (6-12 months)
Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy (Foil): $90 to $150 (12+ months)
Origins Booster Box: $90 to $150+ (12+ months)
Disclosure: James is holding both Jace foils and Origins booster boxes, mostly in Russian.
Travis Picks:
Noble Hierarch: $32 to $50 (0 – 6 months)
Doubling Season: $32 to $50 (0 – 12 months)
Foil BFZ Basics: $7 to $20 (12+ months)
Disclosure: Travis is holding all three of his specs this week.
Segment 3: Metagame Week in Review
The guys highlighted the BW Tokens deck played by Josh Cho at #SCGCharlotte as an innovative brew that may impact the ongoing pricing for Auriok Champion, Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and Sorin, Solemn Visitor.
Segment 4: Topic of the Week: Jan ’16 Modern Buyouts
The guys touched on various aspects of the recent Modern buyout and spike cycle, including the impact of technology on Magic prices, the economic realities of playing Modern and the shifting schedule for winter Modern price spikes.
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
Oath of the Gatewatch follows through on the promises of Battle for Zendikar in a big way, rounding out the potential of the Eldrazi tribe with a cadre of fantastic creatures stretching right up the curve. Via the continuing Expedition lottery tickets, Wizards of the Coast continues their (by all accounts successful) bid to boost set sales while lowering the cost of playing Standard.
So what does this mean for those of us looking to make some money on Oath?
First off, now is the time to sell Oath if you’re selling. If you intend to crack cases and sell singles, you should already have them in hand, as within two weeks or less you’ll be facing a saturated market and prices that have fallen to local lows as much as 40-50% below starting prices.
Secondly, this is a small set packed with great cards with a lot of potential both mid and long term, which places it in the same realm as Magic: Origins, a set that should lead to $160-200 boxes within a couple of years as it goes out of print and the cost of Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy stops repressing the price of the double fistful of Modern/Legacy playable rares in the set currently under $3.
Finally, the Expeditions are less desirable, but there will also be less of them, as Oath will only enjoy about six weeks in the spotlight before previews for Shadows Over Innistrad takes over.
Here, presented in order of likely upside, are my picks for the cards in Oath of the Gatewatch most likely to reward timely speculation, with all target prices assumed to be possible during 2016 unless otherwise noted:
1. Goblin Dark Dwellers (Buy-a-Box)
If there’s a rare that seems to be getting lost in the shuffle thus far, this has to be it. It’s worth remembering that Buy-A-Box promo status is often an indication of quality, a la Supreme Verdict and Sylvan Caryatid. Let’s compare this guy to Snapcaster Mage. Snaps is 1U for a 2/1 Flash body that requires you pay the cost of the spell you want to recast. So Snapcaster Mage into Bolt is a total commitment of three mana, but Snaps into Kolaghan’s Command is five mana. On the other hand, GDD at five mana gives you +2/+3 and menace on your threat in exchange for flash. Perhaps more importantly, GDD gives Grixis control decks a great top end in Modern, allowing them to run a package of sweet spells that all double up off of 4 copies each of Snapcaster Mage and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy, with Goblin Dark Dwellers appearing as a likely 2-of. As a five-drop creature there are no guarantees the card is fast enough, but I will certainly be testing to figure out if he makes the cut.
In standard Goblin Dark Dwellers, could easily end up as a 4-of in a great deck that leverages Crackling Doom and Commands of various flavors to create an impenetrable wall of recursive control elements.
A Kenji Tsumura brew to consider.
The buy-a-box version has stunning art and looks incredible as a foil, and I see this as an easy double up given enough time. The fact that you get these free when you buy a box means there are a lot of copies, but it also means that your buy-in cost can be zero if you’re cracking boxes and willing to hold for a while. As for additional copies, I’d be targeting them around $6-7.
Yeah, this isn’t an under the radar pick. In fact, these foils are already sitting around $25, which is pretty high for a new rare that hasn’t won anything yet. That being said, I see this monster as the spiritual cousin of Goblin Dark Dwellers. As GDD is to Snapcaster Mage, so to is this card to Vendilion Clique. It’s slower, but you get a bigger body and they don’t get a (random) card back until they manage to kill it. The real driver here however is the busted combination of Eye of Ugin and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, which turns Eye into a better land than the hallowed Mishra’s Workshop.
In magical Christmas land you drop 4x Eldrazi Mimic off of Eye on Turn 1, and follow up on Turn 2 with Thought-Knot Seer, clearing away their solution card, and attacking for 16. (Alternatively, drop Vile Aggregate off a Mountain and attack for 20.) Even when you have normal hands, TKS is going to come down early, mess up their plans and set the stage for Reality Smasher and Ulamog to finish things off. His power level and flexibility in Standard is on par with Siege Rhino, so I expect this to be a 4-of in multiple formats. Also, the foils are incredible, especially in Japanese, Korean, and Russian. I suspect you’ll see some deals around $20 as we hit peak supply so have your funds at the ready.
A word of warning, however. If an Eldrazi build in Modern dominates the tournament and makes Top 8 at Pro Tour: Oath of the Gatewatch next week, don’t be surprised to see Eye of Ugin get banned to bring the deck back down to a reasonable power level. Losing Eye could relegate Eldrazi to Tier 2/3 in Modern and slow or reverse growth.
Now: $25 (try to acquire around $20 at peak supply) Target: $40+ (if Eye of Ugin isn’t banned) Timeline: Mid-Term (6-12 months)
3. Expedite/Slip Through Space (Foil)
These guys are probably under your radar, but let me get you up to speed. One mana cantrips are dangerous cards, and ones with effects that enable combo or aggro strategies are well worth paying attention to as foils, even if they’re commons. Both of these cards can be found in foil for under $1.50 at present, but Expedite has implications in Jeskai Ascendancy and UR Aggro builds for both Standard and Modern. Slip Through Space may also find a home in Modern Infect as a 1 or 2-of since it can help get through the final few points of infect damage and close out the game.
Here are a couple of Standard deck shells to drive home the potential.
Note the use of cantrips with Prowess and Delve to end things fast.Jeskai Ascendancy will come out on top again, sooner or later. The card is insane.
I’ve already bought 60 copies of this guy around $0.75 and I intend to go deeper if he bottoms out under $.50. This card has all the hallmarks of a role player that is waiting for its’ deck to hit synergistic critical mass. He passes the vanilla test with flying colors, providing a Crusade style effect to equipped creatures and yields card advantage if they choose to let him live to deal with the equipped threat. Once he’s the last man standing, he can even suit up and enjoy his own bonus.
There are already plenty of interesting comrades for this card. Have a look at just some of the options that may one day make this a card worth having stashed away in the long term spec box:
While his fellow rare teammates Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher soar on early hype at $15 and $7.50 respectively, the lowly Eldrazi Mimic isn’t even commanding the regular 2x foil multiplier, with regular copies at $2 or so and foils around $3.
This seems out of wack to me, given the number of broken hands this card can lead to without even thinking too hard about it. Consider the following (utterly unlikely) opening hands:
Yeah, you’re taking 16 on Turn 2, and having your solution stripped.
Now you’re taking 20 on Turn 2. How’d that taste? Now how about some Legacy action?
Know what that hand means? It means you’re probably dead at the hands of a one mana 12/12 trampler by Turn 4.
All of these hands are pretty unlikely, but none of that changes the fact the Mimic represents an open ended amount of synergy with big colorless creatures that can enter play cheaply. At $3 for foils on a potential 4-of in Modern or Legacy or casual decks, I’m in for $100 worth right off the bat.
Now: $3 (foil) Target: $10+ (foil) Timeline: Mid Term to Long Term (6-12 months+)
This subtly powerful land has all the makings of a long-term all-star. With Expeditions and so many potential 4-ofs in this set set to make a splash, cards like this that will be played as 1-of or 2-of and slowly acquired for Cube and EDH, will enjoy repressed prices for a while.
You aren’t likely to make much on this card in 2016, but I’ll be looking to get in at peak supply for around $2 for regular and $6 for foils on the assumption that I’ll be putting 50 or 60 copies away for a couple of years waiting for the inevitable 100% spike on TCGPlayer as people realize there aren’t that many copies lying around in inventory after all.
7. Nissa, Voice of Zendikar (maybe..)
I opened a Nissa at the Pre-Release and she was a solid lynchpin in my Scion focused deck trying to go wide, but she never felt back breaking even when she was giving three to four creatures a +1/+1 counter. As such, I’m not convinced that this is a card whose ascendancy you want to assume.
That being said, she is a 3-mana planeswalker, a gang that has been traditionally known to run the streets. At that casting cost, she could be run as a 4-of in a planeswalker/oath synergy based build like that proposed by Kenji Tsumura today.
Kenji does super friends for standard…
I’m holding off on Nissa, but as a mythic, this is a card you will want to watch out for Nissa to show up in a sweet deck at SCG Atlanta this weekend. If she makes a good showing there, expect her to gain some ground. If she doesn’t find a moment in Standard, she falls to below $12, and you get the chance to stash some away for the long haul, where she is fairly certain to end up a $20+ casual all-star.
The time is not yet right, but in the next couple of weeks, the prices on the best of the Oath Expeditions will be injured by peak supply and you will get your chance to load up. Keep in mind that Oath Expeditions are naturally more rare than their fall release counterparts, as the winter set sales will not match BFZ, no matter how cool the set is.
Of the three high demand ones, I’d recommend chasing Horizon Canopy before the others. Eye of Ugin has the biggest growth potential, as fear of banning will likely drag the price down closer to $125, whereas not getting banned could result in a high demand 4-of land with stunning art having been under-priced early on. My guess is that WOTC lets the Eldrazi get freaky for at least a year before banning Eye of Ugin, but let’s see how the Pro Tour shakes out. If an Eldrazi deck fails to Top 8, the coast may be clear to move in.
In opening my four boxes of Oath of the Gatewatch, I took note that the total # of Wastes lands per box was roughly one for every four packs, or 9-10 per box. This is a pretty low number. The total number of foils wastes I opened alongside 10 foil full art basic lands? Exactly zero. This leads me to believe that foil Wastes, and especially the preferred Kozilek version (#184) will be in very high demand down the road a piece.
These cards are currently available in the $10-15 range, but there really aren’t that many out there yet, so you may get a shot in the $8-12 range. Give it a year, I would guess these will be over $20 so long as the Eldrazi deck sets up shop in Modern and Eye of Ugin doesn’t get banned. Either way, I still like these a lot longer term assuming they don’t start printing them regularly.
Now: $10-15 Target: $20+ Timeline: Mid-to-Long Term (6-12+ months)
Cards You Should Be Selling
Lesser Expedition Lands ($50-80)
The rest of the Expeditions are not likely to see high demand, and though they will rise over time, at current pricing you can pay for most of a box or pick up some key cards you need by trading them out. Get it done.
2. Kozilek, the Great Distortion ($20)
As with Ulamog before him, the new incarnation of Kozilek is a great long term mythic that is likely to bottom out closer to $12 before he rises again. I have to yet to be convinced that Kozilek is preferable to just running 4 Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger in Standard or Modern, and I suspect this mythic will get played almost exclusively in the sideboard of the Standard Eldrazi deck, or at best as a 1 or 2 of. That’s not enough to hold position as the 2nd most valuable card in the set, especially with so many good 4-of rares nipping at his heels. Sell or trade out now, and seek a low entry point.
Note: Now foils on the other hand are just awesome long term holds. Just go ahead and stash those away and check in in 2019 when they are over $100.
3. Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet ($8)
If Drana was any indication, this kind of legendary mid-range Standard only role player isn’t likely to make a huge splash. He’s hovering around $7, which is already low for a mythic, but I don’t see this doing much in the short term. You should be able to score copies for the long term around $4-5, at which point I like it on casual demand alone. Also, he works with zombies and vampires and we’re headed to Innistrad, so heads up.
Battle for Zendikar Upate
In Digging for Dollars: Magic Origins, I called out the following specs as undervalued cards with some chance of financial success (shown with original and current pricing):
Drana, Liberator of Malakir: $15 to $8 (-47%)
Oblivion Sower: $5.50 to $8.75 (+60%)
Retreat to Corelhelm (Foil): $12 to $4 (-67%)
Woodland Wanderer: $4 to $1 (-75%)
Emeria Sheppard (Foil): $8 to $4 (-50%)
Painful Truths: $1.50 to $2 (+33%)
Bring to Light (Foil): $16 to $6 (-63%)
So far, this list isn’t doing very well. Let’s see what’s going on.
In many ways Battle For Zendikar has played out as we predicted. The presence of some very expensive lottery tick – er, I mean Expeditions has held down the price of most of the cards in the set, and if it weren’t for fetch/battle lands driving insane mana bases, Standard would have been pretty affordable this season. Those Expeditions found their lows during peak supply in late November, and have since rebounded, just as I expect the Oath ones to. Moving forward it will be worth keeping an eye on Expedition pricing, as boxes of BFZ around $90 may get pretty tempting next fall if the prices climb enough.
Drana, Liberator of Malakir is a great card that simply hasn’t found a home. I’ve been running two copies in my WB Aggro/Control build in Standard for months, but most players find her to have too little board impact in a format that is contending with perfect mana and multi-format all-stars like Siege Rhino and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy. Moving forward, as both an ally and a vampire, and given that we’re headed back to Innistrad and more vampires later this spring, Drana may find fresh legs, but I have trouble recommending you buy in until something definite develops, since further lack of play could push her into bulk mythic territory around $5-6 and signal a long term buy plan.
Oblivion Sower is on the cusp of finding a home in both Modern and Standard decks, so I feel confidant he’ll keep moving in the right direction despite the dual printings so long as Eye of Ugin doesn’t get banned. Woodland Wanderer looks like the Savage Knuckleblade of BFZ; a big, bad boy that can’t get no respect in the face of even larger Eldrazi. Once Siege Rhino rotates out, he may find his path, but I’ll hold off on $1 copies until I see some camera time at this point.
On the long term side, the Retreat to Corelhelm deck hasn’t posted a big result in Modern yet, but that’s a good thing here because you can now get in on the prospect of this busted card eventually doing big things for just $4 per foil. I love that price. Emeria Sheppard foils are down to $4 as well, and I endorse stashing some of those away for future EDH/Casual angel gains. Painful Truths is up a bit, and Bring to Light has collapsed, but both cards have foils carrying a whopping 10x foil multiplier, a sure sign that people expect them to do big things moving forward. Both cards are seeing experimental play in Modern, and some enterprising pros are already swearing by Truths in Legacy, so grabbing a bunch of these at current pricing for long term gains seems reasonable.
Magic Origins Update
In Digging for Dollars: Magic Origins, I called out the following specs as undervalued cards with some chance of financial success (shown with original and current pricing):
Nissa, Vastwood Seer: $26 to $18 (-28%)
Erebos’s Titan: $8.40 to $1 (-87%)
Abbot of Keral Keep (Foil): $13 to $11 (-15%)
Evolutionary Leap (Foil): $15 to $6 (-60%)
Harbinger of the Tides (Foil): $18 to $6 (-67%)
Demonic Pact: $3.75 to $3 (-20%)
Animist’s Awakening: $10 to $4 (-60%)
So far, the only solid win from the list was Abbot of Keral Keepfoils, if you rode the earlier spike above $20. I correctly identified that the card was Modern-playable and likely to rise on demonstrative play. As it turns out, the card is seeing play in both Grixis and Temur decks in Modern, including the innovative Temur Prowess deck recently played to a solid finish by Patrick Chapin. Since the fall spike noted in our last check-in, these foils have fallen back to $12 or so as the price of Jace has continued to rise. I’d recommend moving in on the card at this price if you haven’t already, as I still predict a future price over $20 on further Modern play.
As for the rest, Erebos’s Titan and Pact look dead for a standard career, but Abbot, Leap and Harbinger all represent excellent long term value. Of the three, Harbinger and Abbot are the most proven, so focus on those.
So there you have it. Anything I missed that you’re on top of? Logic to kill one of the specs? Have at it. Let’s figure it out!
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
On the surface, this is a tale about an MTGFinance deal gone right, but this story is really about the things that can happen when you just go ahead and jump. It’s about the people you meet, the places you end up and the benefits you reap when you step outside your comfort zone and take a risk while doing something you love.
Ultimately, this is my letter to you, dear reader, issued in the hopes that you will ping me back one day with the details of your own awesome Magic adventure, so that I may smile with the knowledge that I have stood where you stood and felt some of your joy.
Finding a Buyer
As you may recall, last we left this matter, I had just finished tallying the retail value of the collection after a week of hectic sorting, sleeving and labeling. You can read all about the initial deal here.
The rough retail tally of the cards over $1 at this point was about $43-44K USD. Moving into sales mode, I quickly established that at TCG NM Low, the price the cards would likely need to be priced below to move quickly, the value was closer to $39K. (Note that this is not the same as TCG Low, which doesn’t account for the cards being NM. I have long considered TCG Low a foolish statistic, since it has little in common with the price of the lowest available NM copy, but that is another article entirely.)
Now with a collection this large, there were basically three ways to get it sold:
Sell the collection piece by piece and get top dollar in exchange for significantly more time spent, while potentially enjoying some longer term appreciation in card values
Break the collection down into lots and attempt to find an interested buyer for each logical assortment
Sell the entire collection in one go to a vendor or super-collector
Given my fairly intensive day jobs running a web agency and a social commerce startup, Option 1 was quickly put aside. Most weeks I’m already maxing out on MTGFinance time, putting in 5 hours or so buying, selling and writing about the hobby. The prospect of having to at least double that time commitment was just not realistic.
I did spend some time considering the smaller lots option, especially given the large chunks of value tied up in the 60+ NM dual lands, judge foils, Modern and Legacy staples, and casual cards. Had the collection been composed of a plethora of fully formed decks, parceling might have been the better route. Ultimately however, these chunks proved to still rest in the $2500-10,000 range; too large for anyone but dealers to be interested. And dealing with dealers meant accepting their margins, so I ultimately resolved to attempt to unload the collection at a 30% discount.
Now in my experience, when you really want to move some Magic cards quickly, you need to cast as wide a net as possible. As such, in early August I posted details on the collection on various message boards, Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist and Kijiji. As part of my sale prep, I had created a massive spreadsheet on Google Docs, allowing for easy perusal of the collection, including TCG NM Low pricing on each card, and multiple tabs to allow interested parties to sort by set or by card value.
I also made contact with a few local vendors, but the rough offers I received back were much lower than expected. Part of this was likely because Toronto vendors already enjoy consistent access to staples at a steep discount from our large player community and carry significant inventory, but also because Canadians were still wrapping their heads around the ongoing currency exchange shift which is forcing them to rethink their dependency on SCG and TCG pricing at par. Getting a local shop to swallow my conversion math, knowing they would be fighting upstream to pass along that pricing to the local player base just left us too far apart.
Several contacts in the US came back with more reasonable offers in the $22K to $28K range, but when push came to shove, after three weeks of tire kicking, no one was actually ready to produce the funds and close the deal.
Heading into late August, I was on the verge of an extended trip to Bulgaria and Turkey, so I shelved the sales efforts and decided to regroup in the fall.
As it turned out it was nearly November by the time I managed to get active on selling the Super Collection again. This time I narrowed my focus to message boards trafficked by vendors and the high end Magic group on Facebook. With an increasingly busy work schedule, and a growing backlog of MTGFinance tasks associated with my personal collection, I talked to my financing partner and we agreed to target a pre-holiday season sale in the $22-$25K range. This price tag on the collection seemed most likely to ensure a dealer would see the value and make a move as it represented a margin closer to 40% than 30%.
Through early November, I fielded about a dozen more tire kickers, with four of the suitors coming forward with solid bids and a commitment to closing the deal. One offer was over $25K, but with the caveat that they couldn’t close/take delivery until February ’16. In my experience, folks that need time to raise funds are at the mercy of their funding sources, so we took a pass. The rest of the offers were all between $23K and $24K, with most requiring that I drive the collection across the US border and travel 10-16 hours, mostly to parts both cold and unknown to me.
And then there was Matt, a frequent poster in the High End Facebook thread, a man committed enough to the deal to send a deposit, sign a contract for $23,500 and set a meeting place in sunny California for early December.
Can you say “sold”?
Prepping For Success
There are versions of a $25,000 Magic collection that would be nearly impossible to easily transport on a plane, but fortunately for me, a lot of the value in the Super Collection was associated with a two-row cardboard box full of hard cases containing all the cards over $20. The rest of the cards had either been single sleeved (cards over $5) or put into penny sleeves in sets (cards under $5). Sadly, I had taken the initiative on pricing every last card, only to realize that my buyer would almost certainly want to reprice them.
At first I thought I could get away with leaving the rest of the cards in the two-dozen fat pack boxes I had used to organize them by set, but a bit of experimentation quickly showed that fat packs in a suitcase would result in far too much card damage due to the overabundance of space between card and box top.
A trip to 401 Games in Toronto, revealed the solution. Packed tightly, hard acrylic 250 count Ultra Pro storage boxes were perfect travel containers for the perfect sleeved portion of the collection. I needed 40 or so of them to house the majority of the cards, but it was a reasonable investment given that the airline would never insure my bags for their true value. By stacking and taping together the 250 count boxes, I was able to easily fit most of the collection into two large suitcases, reserving the most expensive $20K worth of hard cased cards to travel with me in a large backpack. This also allowed me to resell the Fat Pack boxes, many of which were old and in demand.
My savior for safe travel.
With a signed contract and deposit in hand, along with a specified delivery date, time and location, I realized that my four day round-trip was going to allow me plenty of time to explore. The suburb of Los Angeles set to host our deal was about an hour out of town, but with a vibrant city at my disposal, I decided to stay in West Hollywood and accept a longer commute to the drop-off. A decent last minute flight price and a visit to AirBnB later, I had my trip booked.
$40K in cards ready to roll.
The Fruits of our Labors
I had to put time aside from my work and personal life to make the trip to L.A., and I was a bit stressed from my desire to see the deal work out as intended, but one step into a stunning California afternoon in mid-December was all it took to reform my resolve to have an amazing time getting this thing done.
As a sidebar, let me just remind you that Magic is unique among nerd hobbies in its’ ability to encourage travel and new experiences. Ask the Brainstorm Brewery crew how fondly they remember their time at Grand Prix Vegas last year or ask the pros how they feel about their trips to Hawaii, Japan or the time they got to rock a Pro Tour on the Queen Mary to get a sense of the potential. Sure, pro teams gather early overseas to get in a maximum of practice before a big tournament, but they’re also putting in valuable time with some of their best friends, eating, laughing and enjoying the wider world beyond the cards.
Following in that fine tradition, I dropped off my gear and headed straight for the Tempest Freerun Academy north of LA. I’ve been a parkour practitioner for almost a decade, and Tempest is one of the best indoor training facilities on the planet, so I looked up a few contacts and enjoyed an awesome evening with some of the most friendly monkeys you could ever meet.
Tempest Freerun Academy is a great place to workout in LA.
Next I checked out the events going on around the premier of The Force Awakens at the storied site of Mann’s Chinese Theatres in Hollywood. The Disney store was stocked with some figures I’d had trouble finding at home, so I scooped those out with a smile and headed over to Birch, one of the best value restaurants in Los Angeles. By any measure, from ingredient quality, to presentation to flavor, this is the spot you want to check out if you’re on the West Coast. My rabbit baklava was sublime and magic cards paid for that. After dinner I headed over to Ameoba Records, one of the last great American record stores.
Good times in Los Angeles.
The next morning, I rolled up on one of the longest running flea markets in L.A., enjoyed a wicked Vietnamese fusion burger at a foodtruck, tracked down some vintage lingerie for my lady and stumbled on a dude selling a huge pile of vintage Transformers, which as it so happens, are the only collectibles I love more than Magic. With the market closing shortly, I managed to swing a deal on about $500 worth of robots for $280, and set myself up to cover my meals on the trip via a little Ebay flipping.
Fun at the flea market!
In the afternoon I took a tour of the various nerd shops around the north and west ends of the city, and managed to track down a few solid deals on cards I am actively speculating on.
Melrose Music is more MTG than music these days.
That evening I headed over to Universal Studios City Walk, picked up a few rare collectibles on the strip and then took in Creed all by myself with a huge bag of popcorn. A long sleep later, I was ready to get this deal done once and for all.
Delivering the Goods
Matt is a custom car guy, a mechanical engineer and an online Magic dealer, who’s moving a few thousand a week via the usual channels. He bought the Super Collection mostly for resale as part of his usual sales activities, but it was pretty clear a few of the more choice pieces were going to find a home in his private collection. His town is a charming hour drive north of Los Angeles, in the shadow of some of the most beautiful mountains you can imagine, and I find it hard not to envy the folks who run to work there when it’s -40 back home.
Matt and I hit it off right away, to no real surprise. We’re both guys in our mid-30’s that grew up loving Magic, super heroes and things that go vroooom. He’s 6’8″ and could eat me as a snack if he wanted, but that didn’t stop us from wasting a bunch of time reminiscing over every sweet card he pulled out of the collection as we tried to confirm the haul. The cards are well sorted and line up precisely against the list in our contract, so the tally is smoothly achieved in just a few hours. In the end, a banking snafu ends up forcing me to delay my trip home by a day, but I’ve got cash in hand and Xmas shopping to do so it’s no big thing.
All of a sudden it’s Monday afternoon and I’m standing in the parking lot of a bank in California handing a man $40K in Magic: The Gathering cards. The sun is shining, we’re both smiling as we shake hands and I leave knowing we’ll likely stay in touch, men of like minds with giant piles of cardboard in their closets.
A deal completed.
The Final Tally
A most satisfying drive after the drop.
In the end, the numbers worked out for all involved.
The original seller got $14.25K up front, in cash, and never had to move a muscle to find a better deal or sell the cards individually. He could likely have found a deal for up to +5K, but would have had to rebuild contacts, research the market, sort and price 50,000 cards, and basically take on the work that took place further down the line.
My financing partner put in $14.25K in July, and received back $18K in less than 6 months, based on his guaranteed claim to the first $17.5K and 25% of the next $6K, minus $1K in expenses that he covered as agreed (flight, hotel, rental car, supplies). This resulted in a 26% return on his funds, or the rough equivalent of a 50% annualized return. During that same period, the stock market fell nearly 10%, and he got his money back just in time to reinvest in some temptingly low stocks.
My buyer took on approximately $40K in inventory, with a solid 40% margin intact as he pieces the cards out during his normal day-to-day online sales activities, and just before Modern season boosted prices on a plethora of cards.
As for me, I traded about 40 hours of work, mostly while watching Netflix in my off hours, for $4500USD or about $6300 in my local currency (CDN). All told, that’s about what I make per hour at my day job, and it certainly won’t impact my bottom line very much. I did however, hold aside a couple of sweet cards for my own collection, and there are still 35,000 bulk cards to reap some benefit from. On a pass this week, I found an Arid Mesa, and $200 more in assorted goodies I missed on earlier passes, so the mine isn’t closed.
Ultimately, one of you may have logged a better result, had you parceled out the collection a card at a time. At least on the surface, the revenues would have been higher. The time factor however should never be underestimated. Even as a student you need to value your time at minimum wage or whatever you could be making elsewhere. In my particular case, I need to balance the additional profit against the dozens or hundreds of hours I would need to spend trying to squeeze every penny out of individual sales when I could just be focusing on my mainline responsibilities as a well paid web executive.
More to the point, I met some great people, enjoyed an amazing trip to California in the middle of a cold Canadian December, and did it all for free while making a solid payday fooling around with the hobby I’ve loved since I was a teenager. And that, my friends, is the greatest prize of all.
(p.s. If there were cards in the Super Collection any of you were after, say 7th foils, dual lands or various Modern/Legacy staples, I’d be happy to put you in touch with their new owner, who I’m sure will provide value pricing to move them along.)
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
Heading into late 2015, PucaTrade is still humming along. Casual players are still having a blast getting cards for “free” just by ditching some cards at the post office that they never play with. For those of us attempting to use the platform to speculate or amass significant collection value, the system is still a mix of many positives and frustrating bottlenecks.
On my side of things, I am still leveraging my initial strategy of trading out of successful short and mid term specs and using the acquired points to trade up into collection defining big ticket cards. Given my success earlier this summer trading up into a lovely Mishra’s Workshop, I was emboldened to see if I could make a habit of consistently acquiring great cards through the platform.
As a quick refresher, here’s a summary of my current strategy:
Focus on trading up into cards in the $500-$1500 range.
Give myself three months or so to complete each acquisition for a total of $2000-$5000 or so in major trades per annum.
Focus on outing short and mid-term specs that have ripened past my loose “limited greed” limits, turning dozens of sub-$100 cards into bigger, potentially more liquid pieces that help keep my collection trim and consolidated.
Make use of points bonuses offered by users to get access to specific cards they want as a way of offsetting the potential point premium assigned by sellers to the high end cards I’m after.
Network constantly with other power users on the platform to gain access to important opportunities to trade up into something great, with a secondary focus on time dependent deals on both the buy and sell side of things where users may be willing to offer discounts or points bonuses to unload or acquire cards quickly.
Now since I last checked in, word has come down from the PucaTrade admins that the next big upgrade will include the ability to support foreign cards across the platform, which will be an intriguing option for potentially unloading some of my Japanese, Korean and Russian foils. MTGO to paper trades will also be supported, which may open up some interesting arbitrage opportunities.
Now many users are still experiencing trouble unloading standard cards, an issue that seems linked to a fundamental supply/demand inequality and the use of bots and browser monitoring tools by high volume sellers to ensure they can move their product. (I’ve recently gained access to MiseBot and Pucauto and will be testing them in the near future in support of the next article in this series.) Despite real concerns about the inflationary nature of the platform the Pucapoints to USD exchange rate is still hovering between .70 and .75 on Twitter and relevant message boards.
Here is the list of cards I traded out to Pucatrade members during this phase of value storage in order to build up a sufficient reserve to target a high value card.
Here are some insights into the cards on this list:
I acquired 10+ Liliana of the Veil shortly after the holiday season last year around $55. With it being easy to acquire 11000+ points on these including bounties I haven’t been shy about outing them since I already have the playset of mail damaged ones I got for free last year.
Jitte, Dreadnought, Flooded Grove, Minamo, Sword of Feast and Famine, Academy Ruins and Horizon Canopy were all cards with minimal short term upside that had already accrued excellent value while sitting around in my personal collection. I continue to trim cards like this where I don’t need them for my deck collection.
Godless shrines were acquired around $6 and had been sitting latent for too long.
Verdant Catacombs and Scalding Tarn were sold out of fear of reprints and I am happy to be rid of them in anticipation of a reprint in the next 24 months.
Chord of Calling is a card I acquired dozens of under $4, so I was happy to out a few copies here.
Sum total, I’m proud to say that I took no losses on the cards shipped, and that average profits vs. original costs varied from 25% to well over 100%. I still try not to underestimate the real costs of shipping all the cards, and the value of my time in prepping all the cards for shipping, with total time spent during this phase likely equaling a couple of hours. As usual this was mitigated somewhat by the fact that I already have a daily ritual of prepping shipments while I’m watching online media/TV, allowing me to reasonably distribute the time cost across additional sales.
Along the way I also acquired some smaller value cards, creating a relatively minor drain on the accumulation of points, including:
11x Hangarback Walker @ 1793 points
2x Hangarback Walker @ 3050 points
6x Evolutionary Leap (foil) @ 1300 points
These are all cards I consider to have a little potential for gains before rotation and excellent long term prospects in Modern and casual formats.
Consequently, by early October ’15 I had almost $1000 USD in points built up again and decided to start poking around for a frseh deal. Starting with my list of previous trading partners, along with the most recent publicly posted list of the most active sellers on the platform, I again started reaching out to let folks know I was looking for a sizeable trade. As per usual I barely bothered with a Want list at all (only listing Power 9 cards there for the most part), opting to instead make a note in my profile that I was looking for big ticket items and had points at the ready.
After a few conversations yielded no especially desirable opportunities, I was approached by a European dealer who had seen my profile notes requesting high value cards. He sent over some pics of a fairly sexy looking German Foreign Black Border Volcanic Island.
In case you aren’t aware, Foreign Black Border cards were released in Europe in the mid 90s as a result of a policy that dictated cards were to be black border the first time they were released in a given country/language. As such there is a relative fortune in black border Revised cards out there in German, French, and Italian. These cards offer many of the aesthetic benefits of Beta cards, but are in fact first run European Revised cards. Relatively rare in North America, these cards move reasonably well on Ebay and CardMarket.eu when priced a bit below market averages, especially if they are blue duals.
I had a bit of hesitation reviewing the pics of the Volcanic Island, as it seemed as though it might have a shuffle crease, but the buyer insisted this was not the case and that the card was easily SP quality. And so, after getting approval from Pucatrade admins to back my play on the normally unsupported foreign card, I negotiated a value of 84,000 points for the card based on the few Ebay and European price references I could find. I then sent a deposit of 54,000, with the rest due upon successful delivery and condition review.
Much to my delight, the Volcanic Island arrived within the week and indeed, proved to be a solid SP grade. Here’s what I got on a pretty good mail day:
With the lovely Volcanic Island in hand my confidence in PucaTrade as a solid option for trading up is upheld and I have already begun accumulating another round of points to put together another deal. See you guys next time!
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, “The Future of Collecting”, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
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