By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

This week on @mtgfastfinance, James and I got a chance to speak with Andrew Brown, a member of Team East West Bowl and co-creator of the UR Eldrazi deck that won Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch. For insight on what he would change and what beats the deck, as well as our regular discussion about recent price changes and our cards to watch, make sure to check out episode four. Thanks for listening!

Click here to listen to episode four!

If you follow my buddies James Chillcott (@mtgcritic) or Jeremy Aaranson (@xemitsellsmagic) on Twitter, you may have caught their incessant tweeting about all the various Modern Masters packs they’ve been opening lately. While I was mostly aggrieved that they got to crack sweet packs and fill up my timeline with it while I did nothing of the sort, it wasn’t all for nought. It got me thinking about sealed boxes of the original Modern Masters.

We’re now nearly three years past the printing of Modern Masters, which hit store shelves on June 7th, 2013. That’s an anniversary four months from now. Reprints grow more likely by the day, which could slash prices on key cards for a period of time. Most of the cards in this set are durable and enduring, such as Arcbound Ravager, but each reprint tacks on months or years before it climbs back to its original price point. Repeated key reprints could keep the value of a box suppressed for over five years if you were unlucky. Add to that that the rumor mill is churning about the appearance of an Eternal Masters set, (something which I remain quite suspicious of), and you can see why the threat of reprints is getting scary. Well it turns out Eternal Masters is real. We know there’s going to be some Modern reprints, we just don’t which yet.

Yet, working against that is the immutable law of nature that useful and desired Magic cards slowly (and sometimes not so slowly) rise in price without other forces acting upon them. While tournament cards are often subjected to more tempermental swings, casual fodder picks up percentage point after percentage point as they age. Sealed product especially so should benefit from this, as there is value in the package as a draft experience and giant lottery ticket. If you show someone a stack of Modern Masters cards worth $300, and then point to a sealed box of Modern Masters and guarantee someone that the exact same cards are inside, they’ll opt to take the sealed box every single time. Ten years from now you’ll be able to buy all the Modern Masters singles your heart desires, possibly for a good bit cheaper than they are today, but sealed boxes should still hold more value as a collector’s item and draft product.

Here’s the question I find myself with. I’ve got five boxes hanging around and I’m questioning what to do with them. I have three options.

Option #1: Keep Them

This is the default and “doing nothing is better than doing something” plan. Leave them stashed in a closet, continuing to (hopefully) appreciate.

Option #2: Ship Them

Leave the boxes factory sealed and sell them. If I think that prices are likely to decrease over the next year or two, this is a plan. Furthermore, selling sealed product rather than cracking it and selling singles is typically ideal.

Option #3: Crack Them

Undoubtedly the most fun choice, in this scenario I crack all the packs and sell the singles. It’s an unorthodox strategy, but possibly the most lucrative.

Keep ‘Em

Alright, we’ve got three options. Our goal is to figure out the best one. I’m going to begin by trying to figure out if selling it is even correct at all, then we’ll assume it’s time to sell (whether it is or not) and see how those two scenarios may play out.

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Make sure you’re listening to MTG Fast Finance with James Chillcott (@mtgcritic) and I! New episodes usually land on Thursdays. We’re on iTunes and Twitter @mtgfastfinance.

Regardless of your opinion on this weekend’s Pro Tour, whether you were rooting for or against the Eldrazi, we should all savor this moment as one in Magic history. It’s not often that a deck takes up six of the eight slots in the elimination rounds. Elves did it at Berlin, Flash Hulk did it in Columbus, and Affinity and Tolarian Academy have done similar.  What we’ve seen here is actually the goal of every single team that shows up to a Pro Tour: break the format so thoroughly that their deck dominates the event. It’s only due to a balanced meta and power level that this doesn’t happen every time. When a team’s best laid plans do come to fruition, it means either Wizards messed up and put cards into a format wildly better than their peers (Affinity, Academy, Eldrazi?) or a list was discovered that totally sidestepped everything everyone else was doing (Elves). You can tell the difference because decks from the former camp end up getting banned, and decks from the latter are beaten back into place by a metagame. Of course, the question that should be on everyone’s mind today (rather than already having a completely formed opinion about it) is which type of deck Eldrazi is.

On the one hand, this deck does some fundamentally busted stuff. You’ve got eight lands that produce two mana (or more!) on turn one. The last deck to generate that much mana that fast was Amulet Bloom. You can kill people on turn two with triple Eldrazi Mimic off an Eye of Ugin on turn one followed by Eldrazi Temple, Simian Spirit Guide, and Reality Smasher, or you can play a long attrition game with Eye of Ugin eventually ensuring that you never run out of gas until one of you is dead. The last deck to kill on turn two and still be capable of playing a long game was…Amulet Bloom.

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