By: Travis Allen

Here’s the timeline of events from this past Thursday, June 19th.

12:57: Evan Erwin tweets the Sphinx’s Tutelage spoiler:

New #MTGOrigins spoiler “Sphinx’s Tutelage” pic.twitter.com/WcKCnOTPlG

— Evan Erwin (@misterorange) June 19, 2015

1:00: JR shares Evan’s tweet with the comment “Painter’s Servant sold out yet?” This is the first time I see the card. 1:00: I check TCGplayer for copies of Painter’s Servant. 1:04: I receive a confirmation email from TCGplayer regarding my order of 3 NM Painter’s Servants. 1:05: I check Star City Games for copies of Painter’s Servant. 1:08: I receive a confirmation email from SCG regarding my order of 25 Painter’s Servants. ~1:10 – 1:15: I look at Sphinx’s Tutelage again and see that it says “nonland.” 1:19: I call SCG to cancel my order of Painter’s Servants. 1:21: I tweet that Sphinx’s Tutelage is not Grindstone. This exchange led to Nick Becvar hassling me that my behavior was the same as stores cancelling orders. I disagreed, and declined to get into it with him on Twitter. I realized instead that this, in conjunction with another recent event, was an excellent opportunity to discuss some of the etiquette in customer/vendor transactions. I’ve talked before about how to behave when dealing directly with other players. Today, we’ll look at some scenarios that arise between players and stores, what you should expect, and what is expected of you. We’ll come back to the Painter’s Servants in a bit.

“Out of Stock”

This is hands down the most commonly heard complaint regarding players and stores. A card’s value increases dramatically in a short period of time—ban list changes are a frequent catalyst of this—and players overwhelm stores to stock up on copies. (It happened with Golgari Grave-Troll and Worldgorger Dragon. And Bitterblossom. And Land Tax.) People order ten copies of Worldgorger Dragon at $1.90 each at 11:00am EST when the B&R article goes live, and by 1:00pm, the price is $30 on TCGplayer. Then comes the email. “Sorry, we’re out of stock on Worldgorger Dragon. Your order has been cancelled. Our apologies!” The player, who was already counting the money he was going to make, is semi-justifiably upset. He might take to social media to decry these unscrupulous charlatans. I’ve done it myself on more than one occasion. Salt is added to the wound when the vendor that was “out of stock” magically has ten copies available the next day at the new ten-times-higher price. As an online vendor, it’s extremely unprofessional to cancel orders you have the stock for, lie to customers, and then relist the items for greater prices. It’s an awful business practice, and there is even an entire forum for vendor reviews here on MTGPrice in order to alert others about this behavior. If someone places an order for your posted price and the price skyrockets, it’s your duty to sell it to them for the listed price. If you’re that worried about losing a few potential bucks on cards spiking, hide your inventory ten minutes before the B&R article goes up and preemptively remove unbanned cards before people can order them. It’s absolutely not worth your time as a vendor, but if you feel compelled to not let anyone get a good deal, it’s better than cancelling on people. Having said all of this, it’s important for us as customers to remember how this works on the other side. Depending on the software a vendor is using to manage their inventory, it’s entirely possible they do oversell through no fault of their own. If a flurry of orders all come in for the same product at the same time, there is software out there that will sell 30 copies of a card when only 11 were in stock. Through no fault of their own, the vendor is now forced to tell several people they can’t fulfill that order. It comes up when product is listed in multiple locations as well. Some vendors will list on their own web page, on eBay, and on TCGplayer. This makes it extremely easy to suddenly sell three times more stock than you have available. You can debate whether or not listing product in this fashion is appropriate, but for the time being, accept that it happens, and that it’s not necessarily the store being scummy if they have to cancel orders. As a customer, it’s entirely fair to be upset when a store cancels your order on a card that just spiked in price. It sucks when perceived profits suddenly evaporate just like that. Just remember that not all stores that cancel are doing so for nefarious purposes.

“Whoops N/M”

On the other side of the order cancelling coin is when a customer changes his mind. The most egregious example of this came to me across Twitter a few banned and restricted list updates ago. (I forget who originally shared the story. If you remember—or if it was you—be sure to tell us in the comments!) This was back when everyone was expecting Bloodbraid Elf to be unbanned. Now, there wasn’t any actual evidence to support this claim, but the hive mind had collectively decided it was time. BBE’s price rose accordingly: Then 11:00 a.m. EST came, it wasn’t unbanned, and suddenly all those elves were not worth what people had started paying for them. A vendor then shared a snippet with us all. Some customer had ordered a bunch of BBEs, probably over two or three playsets at least, and now wanted to cancel his order—except that the cards were already in the mail, since he had ordered them a few days prior. The customer had ordered all of these cards, then as soon as they weren’t unbanned, cancelled his order. Was the vendor supposed to honor that? The parallels here are what made this amusing. We were all so used to stores cancelling orders on us when a card is unbanned, but what about a customer cancelling an order because a card wasn’t unbanned? I’m not sure what the outcome was. I know a lot of us were hoping the vendor would refuse to cancel the order, as some form of symbolic striking back against frustrating business practices. I’m guessing he did cancel it, though, and he probably should have. In the business-customer relationship, the burden of service is on the business. The business exists to make profit: to take money away from the customer. While a business’s identity exists only in relation to its customers, a customer is a person that exists independent of the business entity. A person is not defined by his or her capitalist relationships. Because of the nature of the interplay between the two, it’s the economic responsibility of the business to provide service to the customer in any way it can, even when the customer is at fault. If the business messes up, it owes it to the customer to make amends. If the customer messes up, the business owes it to the customer to help them clean it up. This is starting to get into philosophy of capitalism, and I don’t want to go too deep down that path lest the comments become littered with libertarians raving about how the destitute ghost of Ayn Rand compels us all to sell our cards and donate the money to R[on/and] Paul. My point, which I’ve taken my sweet time getting to, is that “the customer is always right” is not just a business strategy, but almost a moral compunction.  As a customer, and subsequently a human being, you should try not to be a jerk face. Don’t do things like order cards, wait for the B&R announcement, and then cancel while they’re in the mail because the update didn’t have what you wanted to see. Don’t be extremely unpleasant for no reason. If you’re a business, forgive the customer for these things, and continue to provide him good service. Back around to the Painter’s Servant, it should be easy to see where I’m going with this. Does cancelling an order within 11 minutes make me a bad person? No, of course not. We should try not to do that, but at the same time, it’s not a particularly heinous crime. I don’t feel any guilt over it. There’s a humongous gap between what I did, vendors cancelling orders on unbanned cards, and even people waiting until cards are in the mail or the B&R updates happen to cancel orders. As someone that sells regularly on TCGplayer, I’ve had plenty of people cancel orders, and so long as they do it before I package the cards, I don’t have any real reason to care.

“That’s No Longer $5.”

This happened to me recently, and while I tried to shrug it off, it got under my skin enough that it’s half the impetus for having written this article. It was a quiet Monday evening and I was driving up to Chipotle to grab dinner and take a break from working on my thesis. There’s a card store on the way that I hadn’t visited recently, and I was in no rush to get home, so I figured I’d pop in and see what was in the case. Specifically, I was hoping to find some Alpha or Beta stuff, since that’s been getting hot online recently, and local stores and players are still likely to be totally in the dark. Looking through the case, I first saw several copies of Ezuri, Renegade Leader at $3. I asked the attendant to pull them aside and kept grazing. Then there was a copy of Through the Breach at $15, a completely fair market price at the time. I had just written that I expect this to jump in the near future, so I was happy to take it at that number. A few minutes later I found a playset of Disrupting Shoals at $5, so I asked for those as well. It’s one of the few Modern cards I don’t have a personal set of that I may actually use, so at $10 off from TCGplayer, it was a great time to pick them up. As the owner put the Shoals with the Ezuris and the Through the Breach, he informed me that, “We reserve the right to change these prices. These Ezuris are $10 now, and the Shoals…[he tapped on an iPad twice]…are $15.” I’m a bit flabbergasted, as I didn’t expect them to change the prices on me as I picked them out. I paused for a moment, rather indignantly shrugged my shoulders, said, “Fine, whatever,” and walked out the door. Later that night, I sent this tweet:  

I like where I am in #MTGFinance, though it is a bummer that case prices are absolutely never honored for me — Travis Allen (@wizardbumpin) June 17, 2015

What rankles me about this is that the store is essentially trying to have their cake and eat it too. There are two methods available to a store when pricing singles.

The first method is to put no prices on any cards. When customers are interested in a card, they ask about the price, and the associate looks it up. This ensures that the store always has the most accurate prices, since they’re checking the numbers at the time of sale every single time.

There are several pitfalls with this strategy, however. Primary among them is the time it requires to do this. An inquisitive customer, especially more casually-oriented players that don’t know exactly what they want and haven’t memorized prices, may end up demanding a huge chunk of time of the employee who has to constantly look up prices on obscure cards. Another issue is that without prices listed, people may not bother to ask at all. Rather than pester the shopkeep, they assume that whatever they are looking at isn’t worth asking about and skip over it all together. A store misses a lot of incidental sales without prices on singles. 

The second method is to put prices on cards. An overwhelming majority of stores do this. This way, employees don’t need to tell people the price on Flooded Strand nine times a day. Customers can process information and make purchasing decisions without bothering anyone first. People will overpay on cards that have dropped in price in the time since you initially stickered them. And the store will get sales on cards that may be a bit underpriced because someone feels like they’re getting a deal. Even though they aren’t maximizing their profit on those transactions, they’re keeping liquidity up, an important component of a successful MTG business. Losing a few potential bucks on cards that have gone up in price is well worth the amount of value the store gains by pricing the cards ahead of time.

What’s especially irritating about this event is just how easy it is to avoid the entire situation. Just assign staff to check the front page of MTGPrice each morning to check for any swings large enough to warrant price changes. The entire process would take less than five minutes each day, and there would never be a need for hurt feelings. Rather than set aside a small amount of time to for this process, though, the store has opted instead to let its customers work for free.

Further still, if a random guy off the street asks for a card in the case, they sell it to them at the posted number. However, if someone they suspect has a greater level of knowledge asks—say, a local player who happens to write for a site specializing in MTG finance—they check each and every price to make sure our handsome hypothetical never gets any good deals. Why bother to go through all the effort of updating prices every day when you can just let well-informed customers tell you exactly which cards you have marked incorrectly?

And by the way, you can bet your ass that if a card has dropped $3 since it was stickered, they aren’t passing the savings on to you. The sticker says $10 and MTGPrice says $15? It costs $15. The sticker says $10 and MTGPrice says $7? It costs $10.

As a private store, it’s the owner’s prerogative to change prices on people (well, probably. I’m not sure if it runs afoul of truth-in-advertising laws. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it doesn’t). If a store wants to update its prices whenever people ask about a card, they’re allowed to.

However, there’s a big gap between “allowed to” and “should.” You’re allowed to spew hateful, racist rhetoric, but there’s no question that you shouldn’t. Changing prices on your customers from what is posted may save you a few bucks in the short term, but you will rapidly destroy any goodwill they have towards your establishment. Is it worth burning all future sales just to ensure you don’t lose $20 on a playset of Ezuris? After all, if a store is selling them for $3, it means it probably bought them at bulk rates. The store is still making a profit even if the card is underpriced, so it’s not even like it’s losing money.

If you’re a store owner, it’s probably legal to change prices on cards in your case when people ask. Even if it isn’t, nobody is going to get you into legal trouble. However, it’s just about the scummiest thing you can do to your customers. Train employees how to keep up on prices. Ensure that they have time to keep things in the case updated. And if something slips through the cracks, honor your posted price. It’s just good business.

By: Travis Allen

Every week for over a month, I’ve sat down to write my article, and while I had various ideas of what to cover (read: actually no ideas), I keep coming back around to Modern, as there’s been something both timely and worth discussing every time.

First it was the Modern Masters 2015 release and all that entailed, then last week it was looking into whether the set was bottoming out, and now this week it’s important we talk about the frenzy of activity leading up to Grand Prix Charlotte, and where things will go from here. If you’re sick of Modern cards, I apologize, but that’s simply where the money is this season. Don’t worry, it won’t be long before we’re in the two-month stretch where no card sees more than a five-percent change in value and I start submitting articles that are about the type of magic that involves top hats and rabbits.

What Spiked

Grand Prix Charlotte finished up Sunday evening with a big ol’ W for Elves (and Travis Woo). While that performance has moved the needle on several cards, like the now hilariously-costed Heritage Druid, decks all across the spectrum have been forcing out-of-stocks everywhere for the last two weeks. Before we get any deeper, let’s start with a top-32 breakdown of the event for reference. (Thanks to meposu of the MTGPrice forums for collecting the data.)

Abzan Company x4*
Jund x3
Burn x3*
Naya Company x3
Affinity x2*
Grixis Twin x2
U/R Twin x2**
G/R Tron x2
Temur Twin x2 (lower than other twin lists)
Elves x1*
Ad Nauseum x1*
Goryo’s vengeance x1*
Abzan(No Company) x1
Grixis Control x1
Grixis Delver x1
Lantern Control x1
U/B Faeries x 1
Amulet Bloom x1
* indicates top 8

While it didn’t manage to top eight, Jund led the pack on price spikes. It started with Olivia Voldaren, which climbed from around $5 to a price tag of nearly $15 at time of writing. Huntmaster of the Fells was next, with similar behavior. What’s most notable about these two is that Olivia was typically a one- or two-of at most, and Huntmaster doesn’t even make it into all lists. When these spikes were just beginning and word was spreading on Twitter, I began wondering if we were entering a frenzy. When cards that see minor play in a single format are selling out, it means the market is extremely bullish. It’s happened once or twice in Modern before, most recently last year ahead of another major Modern Grand Prix: Richmond. More on that later.

Jund didn’t just affect Olivia and Huntmaster, though. We saw Blackcleave Cliffs double to $10 and Raging Ravine triple to $10. Abrupt Decay gained a few percentage points. MPR copies of Terminate have risen considerably. Inquisition of Kozilek doubled to $15. Despite a Modern Masters 2015 reprint, Fulminator Mage has stopped falling in price entirely, and is in fact climbing.

The Goryo’s Vengeance deck has been responsible for quite a few spikes itself. After making top eight, the eponymous card rapidly climbed to $25. Nourishing Shoal, an obscure Kamigawa card that is undoubtedly sitting in bulk bins everywhere, is still trying to find a steady price in the $10 region, up from pennies. As I write this, Through the Breach hasn’t sold out yet, but I can’t find a copy at a single internet dealer, and there are only a handful on TCGPlayer. If it still hasn’t spiked by the time this goes live, I’m guessing someone will buy the last ten copies on the internet.

I could list card spikes for another five or six paragraphs. Deceiver Exarch, Disrupting Shoal, Ezuri, Renegade Leader, Oblivion Stone, Kitchen Finks… frankly, I don’t want to link them all. Just go look at the largest gains over the two weeks and you’ll see everything that’s doing well. A rising tide lifts all boats, and in the world of Magic, coastal towns are building levees as fast as possible.

What May Spike

How about what hasn’t spiked? The list is a lot shorter than it was two weeks ago, that’s for sure. I mentioned before that Heritage Druid has a jaw-dropping price tag of nearly $20 right now. While this uncommon has skyrocketed, Nettle Sentinel has quietly sat by, barely budging. It’s a common, which may cause you to wonder just how high it could possibly rise, but I’m not too worried about that. If an uncommon from Morningtide can hit $20, a set almost undoubtedly opened more than Eventide, why can’t a common reach $5 or $10? Sentinel is just as important in both the Modern and Legacy Elves builds. At $1 apiece, I have a strong suspicion that this is still well undervalued. Full disclosure: I may buy some by the time this article goes live.

In the same deck, Chord of Calling still speaks to me. It’s not going to see any dramatic movements in the near future, but it’s guaranteed to be a gainer over the next year or two. I’ve got a stack of thirty or forty and I wouldn’t hesitate to add to it if the right deal shows up.

Over in the Ad Nauseam deck, I’m a big fan of Spoils of the Vault. It’s an instant-speed black tutor. Sort of. The cost is high, but in a deck that’s either invincible, has a very high life total, or is searching for a four-of, it can be just what the pilot needs. We’ve all seen what happens to rares from the Mirrodin era when the demand is on, so at a $1 buy-in, this is low risk with an extremely high reward. What’s particularly appealing is just how cheap Ad Nauseam is to build right now. The deck has basically no real value in it. There’s a few Pact of Negations, sure, but that’s about it. Several of the rares required to function were printed in the first Modern Masters run, hampering their price tags severely. Even the mana base is extremely cheap for a Modern deck. When there aren’t any expensive cards in a powerful deck, there’s typically one or two that steps up. The same thing happened with Living End, and we could see it here. I’m in for a stack.

Back on the other side of the color wheel, I’m a bit surprised Scavenging Ooze is still around $5. I think we’re getting close to the end of that. This is a card less poised for a dramatic rise rather than simply gaining five percent week after week, a sign of steady public demand. This will reach $10—it’s just a matter of how long it will take. I’m dubious it’s the best place to park your money, as I think there are faster options out there, but at the very least, it’s safe.

A UB Faeries deck showed up in the top 32, an archetype that’s been remarkably quiet since the unbanning of Bitterblossom. Of all things contained within, Mutavault is my favorite card. This crashed extremely hard after its run in Mono-Blue and Mono-Black last year, from $30 to $10 today. Mutavault remains possibly the strongest manland ever printed, and I have no doubt this will continue to rise in value over the coming months, same as Scavenging Ooze. If you want foils, now is the time to act.

What Will Happen to the Spikes

All of this discussion so far is just a review of effects without consideration of the cause. Why did the entire Modern index jump so strongly? Is it all speculator buyouts (it’s not) or is it real demand? Will prices rise through the PreTQ season? Will they drop once Battle for Zendikar rolls around?

I’ll begin with an idea from my article scratchpad. I never got around to writing this particular piece, but it’s been sitting there staring at me since last summer.

I can still explain my thought process here a year after writing it down.

It was a few months after Grand Prix Richmond had occurred. Prior to Richmond, Modern prices were in a tizzy. The war drums were beating and the market hordes were marching. Check out some of these price spikes, all happening within a few weeks of the GP.

Those are all on the same time scale, highlighting that each saw major gains at the same time. In four months, when we look back at the price graphs for Olivia, Oblivion Stone, and Deceiver Exarch, it’s going to look the same.

What we’re seeing is that a major Modern GP, heavily publicized and run by a grade-A organizer ahead of a Modern season, is a huge catalyst for price changes. In other words, GP Charlotte is GP Richmond, simply one year later. Same organizer, same marketing. Last year it was a Modern PTQ season, this time it’s a Modern PreTQ season.  Card trends before, during, and after Richmond should prove to be predictive of this year’s. One of the best resources available to financiers in any market, whether Magic or Wall street, is history. Those who don’t study it are Dr. Doom. Or something.

Look back at that idea I had scribbled down. The first third of it is that single events—in this case, Richmond and Charlotte—drive prices wild. The second third is that seasons—PTQ or PreTQ—apply less pointed pressure. What do I mean by that? Well, just look at those price graphs. All of the spikes are occurring right around the GP. Once you get out into May, there’s basically none. If the green chart is distracting, check out the blue buylist line. That’s a great indicator of market demand, and there are no jumps after the spring.

I’ve got more examples too, these more stark.

Birthing Pod was the deck to beat last year. There isn’t much contest to this claim: after a summer of dominance it was banned this past January. The card Birthing Pod, the entire engine of a to-be-banned Modern deck, the best deck in the format, couldn’t hold a price tag north of $10 through the PTQ season. And Scalding Tarn, after rocketing north of $100 ahead of the GP, continued to dwindle in price. Today it is $60, half of its former glory.

Birthing Pod and Scalding Tarn were two major, major staples in Modern at the time. The Grand Prix drove their numbers up, but the PTQ season was unable to sustain those new prices. They both subsequently sunk in price over the following months. The other cards I highlighted—Cryptic Command, Splinter Twin, etc.—did not suffer so dire a fate through the summer, though their prices were also moved by a single event rather than a PTQ season.

The point I’m making right now is that while conventional wisdom seems to be that competitive seasons cause price movement, our evidence from last  year doesn’t support that, and neither does the evidence this year. Last year, it seems that all of the spikes happened ahead of a GP, and then either remained stagnant or even fell after the fact. This year, we’ve seen a truckload of price spikes, probably more than last year.

What’s our takeaway, then? Well, if history is any indication, it’s that we’re sitting at the top of the market right now. Modern staples will generally remain stagnant or even decrease in the next four months.

You may find this at odds with my article from last week, the tl;dr of which was that MM2 prices have probably already hit their floor and are beginning to rebound. This claim regarding MM2 does not clash with this week’s lesson. We’re essentially looking at two different halves of the market. Last week’s half of the market is all the brand new cards that were hit by reprints. Those are basically unable to spike, burdened as they are with supply. That’s the bottom of the Modern market. Prices have gotten as low as they can, and now they’ll begin slowly growing, and will continue to do so for months and months. The other half of the market is made up of the cards not reprinted. The Eternal Witnesses and the Goryo’s Vengeances. These were the cards ready and willing to be bought out. Now that that’s happened, they will remain mostly stagnant, with only minor fluctuations in price between now and September.

We should seek practical application of this information. Given the trajectory of so many of last year’s hot Modern cards, I don’t believe we’ll see many more price spikes this year. I’d say a good 80 percent or more of them have occurred already. We may see a few here and there, possibly in part due to Origins ramifications, but for the most part, if a card was going to see a dramatic rise in price this year, it has already happened. Furthermore, don’t expect prices on cards that have changed to change much more. Goryo’s Vengeance isn’t going to end up much further than where it is today. Nor will Olivia or Oblivion Stone or Blackcleave Cliffs.

If you’ve got any of these cards that have spiked, don’t feel bad about selling them. I’ve got several sets of Raging Ravine I’ll be listing shortly. While I believe they could potentially hit $20—look at Celestial Colonnade and Creeping Tar Pit—it could be months before that happens, and if the metagame swings back towards Abzan from Jund, it may not be before a reprint. I’m happy to take my profits and move on to greener pastures. Same for any of these cards that have spiked, and really, any Modern product at all that has seen generous increases recently. Is it possible there’s still considerable growth possible on any given card? Sure, but how likely is it, how long will it take, and how valuable is the money to you right now?

Snap Decision

Where I stand most starkly in contrast to the rest of the entire analytic field is Snapcaster Mage. Every person on Twitter is talking about how safe he is, how high his price could possibly rise, and just how far out of the park they’re going to hit this home run. While I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this, I am more bearish than my contemporaries.

Those price charts on Birthing Pod and Scalding Tarn scare me. Scalding Tarn especially, because I was there. I had ten or fifteen Tarns that I didn’t sell because I was hoping to eke a few extra dollars out of them over the summer. Rather than increase through the PTQ season, they dropped, and I ultimately sold most at around $60. Considering I could have been getting $100, and I had at least ten, that’s a solid $400 in lost profit that serves as a vivid reminder not to get greedy.

When I look at Snapcaster, I see red flags. Take a look at Snapcaster’s price chart.

And now, here’s Scalding Tarn’s chart, stopping just two weeks after Richmond last year.

Those are damn similar graphs. Of course, all graphs of cards rising in price are going to be fairly similar: the line gets higher as you go right. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that Snapcaster may retract in the coming weeks or months. Plenty of people are going to tell me I’m crazy, and that there’s no reason for Snap to drop. He’s played in a bunch of formats, there’s been steady price growth, there are no immediate avenues for reprints. None of this is incorrect. Of course, the same could all have been said about Scalding Tarn last April, and look where that ended up.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with my own Snaps yet. I’m looking to have some of my peers read this article and then have a conversation. Do we sell Snap now, at $75, and walk away happy? Do we hold out for $100 or more this year? It’s very easy to say that his price isn’t done growing and that there’s more profits on the horizon. That’s what everyone wants to hear. It’s a lot harder to say that this spike is not permanent and that if you don’t sell now you’re going to lose $20 on each copy.

How about you? Are you selling your Modern spec stock? Holding? There’s a comment section below—use it.