All posts by Travis Allen

Travis Allen has been playing Magic on and off since 1994, and got sucked into the financial side of the game after he started playing competitively during Zendikar. You can find his daily Magic chat on Twitter at @wizardbumpin. He currently resides in upstate NY, where he is a graduate student in applied ontology.
City of Traders

PROTRADER: Playing Chicken

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Before today’s lesson, I have some announcements for the class. The first is that James Chillcott (@mtgcritic) and I have started a podcast, MTG Fast Finance. It’s a no-frills, on-topic discussion of the week’s Magic finance news. We start with a review of the biggest price changes, why they occurred, and what to expect. Then we each share several cards we’re watching as potentially profitable. Our third segment is a look at any recent meaningful tournament results (this week’s episode will assuredly look at SCG Atlanta). We finish off the episode with some quick back-and-forth on whatever topic strikes us. Our goal is to keep the content at the forefront, without a lot of fluff. Neither of us enjoy listening to 3 hours of banter with 3 minutes of useful information inside, so we’re thinking maybe some of you guys don’t either. Our goal is to make this into a weekly show that appears on, among other places, MTGCast and iTunes. Please give it a listen, and watch @mtgfastfinance for upcoming episodes!

If that isn’t enough for you, I’m also still doing Cartel Aristocrats with Jeremy Aaronson, Douglas Johnson, Jim Casale, and Sigmund Ausfresser. It’s an unedited video stream where we take questions and discuss the latest Magic events. You can find all the episodes on YouTube here, and submit questions/watch for news at @cartelartistocrats. Our next live stream is tentatively scheduled for this coming Saturday, 1/30/16 at 2:30 EST. Come hang out and ask a question!

Speaking of Cartel Aristocrats and segues, our last episode included a question about whether someone should sell their Eye of Ugins and Eldrazi Temples now or if they should hold them until some point in time we felt was ideal. I won’t speak for the other writers, but I’ve been asked this question not only on Aristocrats, but also Twitter, in Reddit threads and article comments…really, anywhere I have a presence, I get asked this question. It’s not always those two cards, and it’s not always this time of the year, but it’s a frequent inquiry. It doesn’t even need to be a recently spiked card, but instead a staple such as Snapcaster Mage. And while that question gets asked year round, it happens most frequently about a month before the February Modern Pro Tour, which this year happens to be Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

City of Traders, ProTrader

PROTRADER: A New Beginning

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

I was originally going to write about Oath of the Gatewatch as a set, a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for three weeks now, but this banned list change is too juicy. Maybe next week!

By now I’m sure you’ve heard that Splinter Twin and Summer Bloom are banned in Modern. The day this article goes live, Wednesday, is two days after the official announcement was to be made Monday morning.

What you may have missed is how we found out. Friday night, news rapidly began to spread that Twin and Bloom were banned in the MTGO beta. The question was whether Wizards had been pre-empted by its own lack of foresight and planning on a digital product, or if the software was encountering one of it’s uncountable, nonsensical bugs and erroneously indicating the cards illegal. Considering both possibilities were predicated on Wizards mishandling its digital product, Occam’s razor was of no help.

It wasn’t long before Wizards accepted that the jig was up and officially confirmed the news: Twin and Bloom are out. The latter of those was a foregone conclusion; anyone that wasn’t emotionally invested in the deck knew it was coming after watching Justin Cohen trounce people at Pro Tour Fate Reforged a year ago. The deck regularly violated the “turn four rule” while still able to play a long, grindy attrition game. Defenders of the deck will point out that it hasn’t taken over the format the way combo boogeymen have in the past, but this is more a result of the deck’s extremely challenging lines of play more than anything.

I first noticed the deck when Gerry Thompson mentioned it in an article, and after loading it up in Magic Workstation, was struck by just how difficult the deck was to pilot. I mentioned as much to Gerry on Twitter, and he confirmed that it was possibly the toughest deck he had ever played. Success requires a skilled player investing considerable time and effort into learning the intricacies of the various lines, especially in the face of opposition. That any average Joe couldn’t pick up the list and pop over to his nearest SCG Open and wreck house is a major reason Bloom wasn’t dominating the format.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

City of Traders, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Bulk Does as Bulk Is

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Man, it has been a wild several days, hasn’t it? The amount of cards that have gained over 20 percent in the last week is possibly a record, with Modern excitement the catalyst for most. Oath of the Gatewatch is a deep set with an abundance of brewable cards, many of which are feeding the public’s ceaseless hunger for the Eldrazi deck that is consuming the format. It started out as just another fringe deck, but with pros getting on board and results beginning to roll in, there’s a chance we’ve got something special here. One day I think there were actually four separate articles on SCG about the deck. When you get to play a better Mishra’s Workshop that also tutors for threats—in Modern, not Vintage—you’ve got a recipe for shenanigans. I’ve been waiting since Modern’s inception to tap Eldrazi Temple, and I’m excited that the opportunity is finally here.

 

Outside of card prices, Wizards has apparently begun contacting stores to gently remind them that it’s against policy to allow proxies of any sort in any event, whether it’s a Standard FNM or an unsanctioned game of EDH. Unsurprisingly, this has ruffled quite a few feathers from the “Magic should be free” community that is so vocal on Twitter. It’s not surprising at all that Wizards is making a move on this, as the slope between writing “Gaea’s Cradle” on a basic plains and ordering a pile of counterfeits from China for $10 is as slippery as slopes can realistically be. One of my older articles on the topic made something of a round, in fact, incensing plenty. I’ll try to get some more words on paper about this soon, but one article at a time, you know?

What’s on the docket for today then? I asked on Twitter this week whether people wanted to read about: Oath of the Gatewatch’s positioning, PucaTrade’s burgeoning yet complicated economy, and extracting more value from bulk rares. I can honestly say I did not expect the bulk rares topic to win, but it did, so here we are. If nothing more pressing comes up within the next week I’ll probably try to tackle the Oath topic, since I think it’s a good one, and I’ll hit Puca sometime in the near future, too.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

City of Traders, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Oh Yeah, This Series is Called “City of Traders”

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By: Travis Allen

It’s Monday evening and I’ve got the last mouthful of a 10-percent barleywine swishing between my cheeks, savoring the flavor.  I’ve been cooking my chicken chili for the last hour or so, and I’m finally sitting down for the first time today. It’s a solid barleywine, by the way. Not my favorite, but definitely drinkable. Reasonably sweet with obvious flavors. Beer Advocate tells me I’m tasting caramel and toffee. I wouldn’t buy this again, but you can do a lot worse, and if you find my typical recommendations too sweet, this backs off on the sugar content a bit while maintaining some of the strong flavors I’m so drawn to. I’ve been posting short beer reviews occasionally as I discover them in the wild, and you can find them over on my Twitter. The easiest way is to just look through all my tweets with photos. I could not be further from a sommelier if I was a dead raccoon on the side of a hot desert highway,  though I enjoy drinking beers that offer an experience, and people apparently wanted to hear about them. If you’re a fan of huge, heavy, barrel-aged stouts and rich barleywines, see if anything in my Twitter profile is available in your area.

Anyways, where was I? Right, I had just polished off a 10-percent beer 30 seconds before realizing I needed to write an article tonight, a responsibility that had slipped my mind for the last five days or so. Hrm. I’m swimming just a little right now, and I need to pound out 1,500 words good enough to warrant a ProTrader subscription. I pinged my black-ops Magic finance encrypted cartel chat (typically used for coordinating buyouts of TWoo-hyped cards) that an article needed to be written. Jeremy was quick to respond with a great idea. If you aren’t following Jeremy on Twitter, by the way, that’s a huge mistake. While he claims to attend school, I don’t believe him. What I do believe is that he spends all his waking moments grinding Magic sales and travelling to GPs and SCG events to buy and sell. For all the broadcasting I do from my writer’s pulpit, you can’t substitute hard hours on the ground, trading with the masses. His instincts are on point and you’ll make money if you listen to what he has to say. I’ve learned to pay attention to people who invest this much time and money in the field, and you should, too.

This week it’s a collaboration—he told me what cards he thinks are hot, and I’m writing about it. You get his insight and my verbosity. A win-win situation, I assure you.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.