By: Travis Allen

Ice has finally began to melt from Lake Erie, with only a few chunks of snow left visible on the now mostly liquid surface. There’s grass in my lawn again, I finally switched from my snow tires to my summer tires, and I’ve even worn flip flops outside once or twice. You can even smell it in the air. Have you noticed it yet? Take a big whiff—it’s the smell of an impending rotation.

Battle for Zendikar is five months away, but the financial implications for Theros block are already being felt. Temples are beginning to look a little like dead weights in thin plastic sleeves, most of us writers didn’t speak much or at all about Theros cards that showed up at the Pro Tour, and nobody is recommending picking up Fleecemane Lions for a flip off recent tournament success. Years and years ago, impending obsolescence didn’t hit until maybe mid-summer, but we’re past those days now. As it goes for people it goes for Magic cards; it’s never too early to start planning for retirement.

Now is a good time to discuss how best to handle set rotations and what they mean for your inventory management. When should you consider selling? What shouldn’t you sell? What if you can’t sell? Should you be buying?

You’re Already Too Late

Sadly, it’s true. The best time to begin divesting yourself of rotating staples is around November and December, and the real drop-off happens after March. If you ever read Chas Andres over on SCG—which you should—you’ll know that he frequently refers to the seasonal tides of Magic prices. The cycles are well known at this point. Overall price indexes peak sometime in the first three months of the year, and decline through August. As school begins and new block excitement builds, prices begin to climb again as the year wanes.

Of course, individual cards are not at all beholden to these cycles, and Standard cards especially see price changes based on more immediate circumstances. Consider the seasonal cycle a good rule of thumb. Buy during the summer when everyone is out enjoying the sun and sell when it’s too cold to be outdoors. It’s thematically adjusted sage advice from Warren Buffett, “Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.”

Not only are we well past the peak of many Theros-block staples individually, we’re past the peak of the index as well.

It looks like Theros hit its stride right around November, shortly after Khans of Tarkir released. It has dipped since then, and the set will continue to lose value as we approach Battle for Zendikar’s release.

All is not lost, however. You still have time to move your Theros cards before they completely bottom out. Let’s check out Return to Ravnica, released one year prior to Theros.

Return to Ravnica, like Theros, peaked just after the fall release of the following subsequent block. It dwindled from there, and some time between March and April it really began to slide. The set was worth the absolute least a few months after it rotated, which was when Khans of Tarkir hit the format. For Theros, that time period will be this coming November and December.

At this time last year, the RTR index was about $220, and today, THS is about $200. By the time KTK hit last fall and RTR rotated, the set’s index had dropped to about $165. A loss of  $55 represents a 25 percent drop from April to October. We are at that exact moment now, one year later. If history is to be repeated, that tells me that Theros still has a lot to drop between now and Battle for Zendikar; probably around $50 as a whole.

If for whatever reason you find yourself with a pile of Theros cards this July, you’re pot-committed at that point. Not only are those cards going to be worth almost nothing, there’s also the problem that nobody is going to want them. Rather than trade them away for pennies, just stash them someplace and revisit them down the road, when the Theros index begins to rise.

To sum up: we’re past the best time to sell out of Theros, but you still have time before we hit rock bottom.

Sell Everything, Except Not Everything

Generally you want to hang on to little from a set that’s on its way out the door, especially the banner Standard cards that haven’t made it into other formats. Stormbreath Dragon, and had it not been reprinted already, Elspeth, Sun’s Champion, would be perfect examples of this. Both cards are tier-one mega-staples in Standard, but just haven’t cut the mustard elsewhere. These are your “ship at all costs” cards. What you want to hang on to is the stuff that’s buoyed heavily by other formats, as those are the cards most likely to benefit in the longer term. From Return to Ravnica, an ideal example would be Abrupt Decay. While playable in Standard, it didn’t have run of the format like it does in Modern, and to a lesser extent, Legacy and Cube. It has fared well since rotation, and it’s a popular stock tip among many of the writers here at MTGPrice.

So what from Theros block do we want to hang on to?

Thoughtseize was the topic of hot discussion a few months ago. It seems like it peaked late last year, having since dropped a bit. I’m seeing growth in the buylist again at the tail end though, so I think this is a safe hold. My expectation is that Thoughtseize will suffer little if any loss in price as rotation occurs. A small bump in stock will occur as a few Standard players move their copies, though many will be shrewd enough to know that they should hang on to them. Supply will dry up through the winter and spring months, and by the time we hit fall of 2016 it will ideally have gained 10 to 30 percent from where we are now.

I’ve got most of my gods stashed away, as well. They’re driven purely by casual demand at this point, an indicator of resilience through rotation. If nobody is playing the card in Standard, then losing Standard legality will have virtually no impact on a price. Copies will slowly dry up in the coming months.

Foil Swan Songs are way underpriced in the $5 to $7 range. Eidolon of the Great Revel is a great mid-term hold, as it’s absolutely absurd in Modern and Legacy. This time next year, I’m hoping to sell all my copies in the $15 to $20 range, just ahead of the Modern PPTQ season.

Other than that… there’s not too much exciting out there this time around. Temples are a real clunker in old formats. Courser of Kruphix sees mild play in Modern, but not nearly enough to warrant holding on when most of its demand is Standard-based. There’s probably some EDH and casual fodder in there that will appreciate over time, I suppose. On the whole, I like trading away anything than the small list of cards above.

At a more general level, your goal is to hang onto cards that do not hold value because of Standard demand. You want casual all-stars and eternal staples. When considering if a card will see a drop in price or a rise after rotation, ask yourself where most of the copies are showing up: SCG Standard opens, Modern IQs, or kitchen tables? That will inform your decision.

If You Can’t Sell ‘Em, Trade ‘Em

I sell most of my cards on TCGplayer. It’s a convenient avenue for moving cards for those of us that do too much to want to regularly deal with eBay, and who don’t do enough to warrant our own web storefronts. (Also those of us that aren’t lucky enough to live in an area where there’s only one or two local stores and both of them will let you run their cases, but screw those guys.) While I’m happy with this tool, I completely understand that it’s not the right fit for many of you out there. Even just selling on eBay requires more of a web presence than many may be inclined towards, which is fine. That leaves local transactions, which often takes the form of trading. (Look into local Magic Facebook groups, though. There are a few for the city I live in, and can be an excellent way of organizing the sales of smaller quantities.)

Drilled into all of us is the desire to extract maximum value from our cards. Every time we open another binder, we want to take cards out of it whose sum total is worth more than what we give away. After all, that’s the root ideal of all of this, the writing, the ProTrader, the entire website and subculture. But what if I told you that sometimes, that isn’t the right choice? What if I told you that something bad…is actually good?

Basically, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a small loss on soon-to-rotate cards today if it means dodging a major loss on them tomorrow. I’ll give you a recent example. This past Friday, someone flipping through my binder expressed a passing interest in my Courser of Kruphixes and Sylvan Caryatids I hadn’t managed to get rid of just yet. My eyes lit up when he asked about them. He wasn’t exactly sure he wanted them, and was waffling a bit. Eager to make the trade, I gave him a few dollars in value on a $35 trade, and I made sure to let him know that I was doing that for him.

“I’ll make you a deal. I really need these Rhinos. I’ll give you those Coursers and Caryatid for these cards. You’re getting some value out of me, but I don’t mind.” Bam. I got rid of ticking time bombs, and I scored Siege Rhinos.

Had I been a stickler and demanded maximum trade value for those Coursers and Caryatids, that trade may not have happened. In fact, I’m almost sure it wouldn’t have. If that had been the case, I would have had those cards this coming Friday, when they may each be worth just a bit less than they were last week. And so on and so on, for multiple weeks, until each was worth half of what it had been when I had refused to give up a few bucks in trade. When you’re in the market to trade away cards ahead of rotation, don’t hesitate to sweeten the pot a bit for the person on the other side of the table. You’d much rather trade your $40 worth of Coursers for $35 today than trade the exact same playset for $20 in a month. (The same principle exists for trading away a card with a price tag that far outweighs its current play profile. Narset is exactly the type of card I would trade away for less than book value right now.)

Okay, but When Can I Spend My Money?

I’ve given you a lot of information about selling and trading your rotating cards away. How about buying them though? That’s easy. It’s almost always right around the November and December after rotation. Check out Snapcaster Mage, whose price floor was right around that first red line, which was late 2013—right after Innistrad had rotated from Standard.

A set’s price index is almost always at its lowest shortly after it rotates out of Standard. Everyone holding cards for Standard use, even the bad ones, is in the process of or have already traded them away. Markets are now saturated by these eternal staples and casual haymakers, and prices drop. As the respective markets begin soaking up the extra copies, typically by players who were patient and didn’t want to pay a Standard-legal tax, supply dwindles and prices rise as fewer and fewer liquid copies are available on the market. By the time you hit the spring set after rotation, e.g. Dragons of Tarkir when considering the 2014 rotation of Return to Ravnica, the index has already started to turn right side up. Here, take a look at that RTR graph again:

Notice the slight upturn around Fate Reforged and how it has continued up through Dragons of Tarkir. A slow growth sets in, and for the most part, prices rise continually from there.

Occasionally sets find their floor the summer after their release. Innistrad’s absolute floor was in August of 2012, just four months after Avacyn Restored had hit the street. It’s hard to predict if a set will bottom out during it’s first summer or if the true valley will be found sixteen months later  in December, just after it rotates. Looking across all the indexes of the last few years, it seems that a big part of determining that is how strong the set is relative to other Standard sets, as well as how strong the cards are in other formats. That is to say that it’s damn difficult to predict only four or five months in whether a set is at its floor during the August immediately after its release or if you should wait until next winter. I’d say a good rule of thumb is to just wait until the December after the set releases. That would mean that this past December would have been the time to buy Return to Ravnica, and this coming December after Battle for Zendikar it will be time to buy any Theros cards you’re still missing.

Understand? Great, Now it’s All Irrelevant

Magic’s rotation schedule is about to undergo a sea change, and with it, the markets. Rarely in the last 15 or 20 years have we strayed from the formula of a new block in the fall which gets wrapped up in the spring. According to the wiki, the last two times we’ve seen much different was Lorwyn, which was still similar enough that it didn’t make a big difference, and Alliances, which is old enough to pre-date modern Magic finance.

How price cycles will be affected by such a titanic shift is anyone’s guess at this point. Cycles as we know them right now seem to be heavily influenced by two factors: the set’s temporal position to its lifespan in Standard, and the current calendar season. Under the new rotation, a set’s lifecycle will fall out of sync with seasons in a way that it never really has before. How will prices react with two new blocks each year instead of one? How will this interact with seasonal dynamics? Will this be enough to sustain demand through the summer? Will winter months buoy soon-to-rotate cards?

None of us know the answers to these questions, and the next two years are going to be a lesson for all of us. While I’ve spent this article speaking specifically about the current rotation model and how to approach it based on what month we’re in, the lessons will still be applicable to whatever the new rotation brings. You’ll still want to sell early, avoid getting stuck with rotating Standard staples, and pick up cards when they’ve recently rotated.

In the meantime, make sure you ditch Theros soon. Then go out and enjoy the warm weather. I’m going to go dust off my bike, pump up the tires, and bellyache about how uncomfortable my seat is.

By: Travis Allen

A few days ago, Sam Stoddard posted on Twitter that R&D’s goal was to make dragons competitive in Standard. Mission accomplished, guys.

The breakout deck of the event had to be UB Control, insomuch as a well-known archetype can break out. After no real presence at any major events since the release of Dragons, this was the coming home party many were looking forward to. It wasn’t just reasonable, either—PV commented that it’s the best deck he has played at a Pro Tour in quite some time.

As many suspected, Dragonlord Silumgar is in fact the real deal. Without a removal spell handy, Silumgar puts games away in a hurry. Adrian didn’t run Silumgar, though he seems to be in the minority. Both the other two control decks in the top eight ran him, and he was peppered throughout the other top-scoring Standard decks. Consequently, some time over the weekend, he was bought out to nothing but a scant few foil copies available. His price isn’t soaring out of control though; I see a few copies available for $10 to $12 as of writing this on Monday evening. Even though Silumgar is an excellent creature in these decks, he simply isn’t needed as a four-of. While Ojutai and Atarka are arguably playable playsets, Silumgar is often found solo or as a pair. I anticipate we see his price hover between $8 and $13 for the time being, and quite possibly dipping below that.

Dragonlord Atarka, on the other hand, is the real winner of the weekend. There were seven copies across two decks in the top eight, and no shortage in the other top-performing lists either. It turns out that the mana engine represented by Nykthos, Sylvan Caryatid, and Courser of Kruphix is enough to get people to play four seven-drops in their decks. This won’t be the last we see of this going forward, and while the number will vary between one and four, I wouldn’t be surprised if most decks wanted nearly the full set. There’s simply no better creature to flip off your See the Unwritten with Surrak, Caller of the Hunt in play. Green Devotion is going to be a contender right up until October when Theros rotates, and even once it does, people won’t forget how strong Atarka is. Her current price tag of nearly $20 is still on its honeymoon, but I doubt we see prices below $10 in the near future. I’m a seller today, though once we’re at $10 I’m happy to start picking up copies in trade. The omnipresent casual demand for huge awesome dragons quietly exerts quite a force on cards like this.

The known dragonlord coming into this weekend, Dragonlord Ojutai, did alright, if not quite as well as Atarka and Silumgar. We saw two copies on Sunday and five decks in the top sixteen played him, as well—four of them control and the fifth Wescoe’s Bant list. All said, that’s six high-profile decks he appeared in, though five were the same archetype. What’s that mean for his current price tag of nearly $20? I’m selling into post-tour exuberance. A $20 price tag usually indicates a card is the best or second-best card in the set, and I’m not convinced yet that it’s Ojutai. I seem to be in the minority on this, though, so if you want to hold, I guess I can’t fault you. I’m concerned that as a blue and white dragon, he lacks a lot of the casual support that the others enjoy, which means he has to work a lot harder in Standard to sustain the same numbers.

A blue dragon we can afford to be more interested in is Icefall Regent, up to $5 on the back of this weekend’s admittedly minor showing. I didn’t see much of it on camera, though I didn’t watch all of the coverage. There were five main deck copies between two of the control lists, and people apparently latched on to that. I liked it in my set review, and I still like it now. It’s great at stopping Siege Rhinos or Surraks from beating you up, and following up a Thunderbreak with Icefall is going to be absolutely miserable to break up from the other side of the board. At $5, I feel like we’re at 75 percent of the card’s price potential, so I’m holding off, but if we see this dwindle back below $3 it’s worth getting in.

Thunderbreak Regent did reasonably well, and the $10 price tag is sticking. We’ll see variations in this number in the coming weeks, though don’t expect it to stray far south of that. Don’t feel bad trading into a set at this point if you need them.

One last dragon worth noting is the big kahuna himself, Ugin. Five of the top eight lists had at least one copy, and six of the sixteen top-performing Standard decks ran at least one as well. That means that 38 percent of the best Standard decks in the room had Ugin in them. Taking a quick peek at Modern statistics, the only cards played in more decks than Ugin is are Lightning Bolt, Island, and Spellskite. Standard has five or six cards that show up in more decks than Ugin, but still. His presence is impressive. Add to this that he’s desirable in nearly every single other format—Modern, Legacy, Cube, EDH, and casual—and you have the makings of possibly one of the most expensive cards in Standard since Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Ugin is comfortably over $30 right now, and I think it’s more likely than not that he reaches $40 while still Standard legal, with prices north of that entirely possible. I’m willing to trade for him aggressively, and if you can get foils in trade for under $100, take those deals. When was the last time we saw an iconic mythic character that pinged every single player demographic in every single format?

Halfway down the mana curve is Surrak, the Hunt Caller, who is certainly worth watching after this weekend. While not every deck capable of generating GG was running him, plenty were. It seems as if he’s going to be a frequent member of the green party in the coming weeks. With copies available below $3, I’m happy to trade for him all day. At the very least, you aren’t likely to lose any value in that transaction, and over the next few weeks we may see him quietly creep up to $5 to $6 or more.

As for cards that play especially well with Surrak, I’m a big fan of See the Unwritten. We already saw a taste of it in the top eight at the Pro Tour, with Ondrej flipping Atarkas into play off of it. Surrak turns on the ferocious trigger, and putting just about anything into play will turn on his hasty formidable trigger. It’s a match made in heaven. With dragons running rampant and Eldrazi on the horizon, I feel like you can’t miss buying into this at $2 to $3 a copy. When the first Eldrazi gets spoiled this September, this is going to hit double digits. I’m in for sixty or seventy copies right now, and I’m looking to pick up more during the summer lull.

Sticking to cards red in cost and spirit, I don’t see much beyond Zurgo Bellstriker worth discussing. As is often the case, the format’s burn decks are often comprised heavily of commons and uncommons. It seems as if Zurgo was a two- or three-of most of the time, which doesn’t surprise me. While UB control may not mind getting stranded with an extra copy of Silumgar, or Abzan midrange with an extra Elspeth,  a small red decks is really going to feel it when one of its cards is legend-locked in its hand. His price is currently around $3, which feels about right. There’s upside here in the $5 to $6 region if it turns out that cubes and casual players alike take to dash, but without that additional demand, he should stay at $3 and below.

The top eight composition tells a story. While that story is one many will read, it’s not the whole story. Only one player in the top eight had a top-performing Standard deck; the rest got there in no small part due to their draft records. If these eight decks weren’t the best Standard decks of the field, then what was?

Six of the top sixteen were various flavors of Abzan. The breakdown leans in midrange’s favor, though both aggressive and controlling builds were represented. Siege Rhino, Anafenza, and Tasigur were the cornerstone threats of these decks, with Dromoka’s Command making a healthy showing as well. Both Siege Rhino and Tasigur being as cheap as they are is an anomaly and every single time I sit down to open another’s binder these days, I’m scanning for them. Getting them at $5 and $6 in trade is going to pay off this fall unless Wizards decides to totally hose me by putting them at uncommon in Origins or something. I also don’t really understand Anafenza at $4 or $5 right now. She’s a premier threat in Abzan Aggro, which I guess we’ve decided is a real deck. I’m happy to trade for her as well right now. I don’t think you stand to lose much here, and there’s a definite upside near $10 as a mythic.

Dromoka’s Command is showing up in lists all over the place, from Abzan Aggro to Bant Heroic. Tom Ross wrote a well-deserved love letter to the card last week describing that it seems to do far more than it reasonably should. With copies pushing $10, I can’t advocate acquiring any at all, though if you need them to play with, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. The ship has basically sailed here: sell ‘em if you got ‘em, and stay away otherwise.

The rest of the top sixteen was a mix of UB control, various similar types of green devotion, and a clever Collected Company brew out of Bram Snapvendragoners that looked to flip Avatar of the Resolute and Reverent Hunter into play. It seems like everyone and their brother wants Collected Company to be good right now. I’ve seen it floated as an engine in more Modern decks than Heartless Summoning already, and even in wacky UG Standard decks with Shorecrasher Elemental and Silumgar Sorcerer. That $4 price tag is going to hang strong for a while as people try their damndest to get it to work in every format imaginable. There’s a possible jump to $8 on the horizon if it really does get cracked, though that level of success seems remote at this juncture.

Den Protector had a solid showing on camera this weekend, which drove it upwards of $5. It plays well as a method for combo decks to Gravedigger lost components, midrange decks to buy back Downfalls, and aggressive lists to keep up the threat density while presenting a semi-evasive clock. Overall, it’s a very reasonable creature, though I think we’ve found its price ceiling. The effect is useful, but morphing is a high cost, and it’s not splashy or exciting as “just” a two-for-one. I’m selling my spares.

On lands: fetches should stay steady and rise down the road. I take them in trade anywhere I can get them. It looks like the pain lands started dropping off recently, which is to be expected. Get rid of them soon. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is just going to keep rising. Trade for it. Haven of the Spirit Dragon’s price remains intransigent at $4. That’s a nut I expect to crack this summer.

One of the juiciest parts of Pro Tours always comes in the two weeks after, when pros begin discussing the decks they landed on, but more importantly, what they didn’t land on. Some of my favorites to watch include Sam Black and Zvi Moshowitz. While the Pro Tour does an excellent job of fleshing out a metagame for the rest of us, it’s easy to forget that it’s only a single event on a single weekend. Decks that were not viable at the Pro Tour may be excellent two or three weeks later.

For instance, with the success of control this past weekend, expect to see a lot of Foundry Street Denizens in the near future. As red decks beat up on control, midrange strategies such as GW Devotion lists will rise in strength, and then combo decks like Jeskai Ascendancy will be able to beat up on a midrange-heavy format. Lee Shi Tian and MTG Mint Card were on the deck this weekend, and while he tweeted that the format took the wrong turn for them, it doesn’t mean we won’t get there eventually.

Knowing what decks just missed the meta is good, especially when they’re new brews. Maybe Sam will tell us that his team was on a Sarkhan Unbroken list right up until the night of the Pro Tour, when they realized it just couldn’t beat UB Control. That type of information is excellent—we get confirmation of cards and interactions that are definitely strong enough for Standard but that just didn’t have the weekend they needed. Insights into decks that weren’t chosen and why they weren’t chosen gives us a crystal ball through which to see into the future. We can’t be sure that our supposed Sarkhan Unbroken deck will assuredly take over Standard at one point, but we can at least know that it’s capable of it. Watch for “almost played” lists for insight into what may take over the next Standard GP.

By: Travis Allen

Back when Zendikar came out, I attended the release as a casual player at his first store event. I was mostly hoping to open Lotus Cobra, because what could be more fun than generating boatloads of mana? Nothing. (In fact, to this day, I hold the same belief.) At one point I asked some players if they thought Cobra was the now the best green two-drop, taking the throne from Tarmogoyf. I had a lot to learn. At that prerelease, I also traded the fetch lands I opened for boosters. I didn’t need fetches; what I needed was more packs. Just think what could be in the packs! Why, maybe even fetches!

It was a terrible decision. Trading for packs was, and is, a great way to rapidly disintegrate your collection’s value. You’ll trade real cards for packs, open the packs, end up with $4 in rares, and be down $10 in value. Repeat this cycle a few times and it will be as if you ground your dollars into dust and blew them into the wind. Not only is it a bad idea, it’s one which countless new players engage in. In an effort to provide some of our newer friends with known financial pitfalls, today will be a non-exhaustive list of things you should not be doing when trying to keep your Magic collection’s value intact. You can find my previous article intended for novices on the topic of trading over here. If you find this article helpful, you would be wise to take a look at the previous installment as well.

Don’t Open Packs

A quick rehash of our introduction: don’t open or attempt to acquire packs. I’m not going to get into the math, but the long and short of it is that over time you will lose money if you open boosters. This includes trading your cards for boosters, which is a similarly poor choice. Here’s an excellent example:

Back when Dragon’s Maze released, I watched a casual player come into the store and buy a single pack of DGM. He opened it there at the counter and pulled out a fresh new Voice of Resurgence, whose price tag at the time was somewhere north of $25. What more could you ask for? You crack a single pack and open the best card in the set. The thirst was strong though, and he wanted more. He immediately traded the Voice into the store and used the credit to buy several more packs. After opening all of those, he traded the rares in for more store credit (less than he spent on the packs, of course) and bought more packs. This cycle repeated a few times, until eventually he had a pile of commons and uncommons and maybe a bulk rare or two the store didn’t want. Had he walked out after the first pack, he would have gotten a $25 card from a $3 purchase. Instead, he converted that $25 Voice into a pile of worthless pack filler. Regardless of whether or not he was pleased with the end result, those of us playing at home know the score: he got lucky out of the gate, and then pissed his winnings away over the next twenty minutes.

Never trade for packs. In fact, don’t even open them. Does your LGS (local game store) give out pity packs? Did you win some packs for 4-0ing FNM or a prerelease? Don’t open them! They’re worth far more sealed as a sort of unscratched lottery ticket. Rather than crack them yourself, either use them to draft, or if that’s not feasible, trade them away for real cards. Four packs should be able to buy you a Flooded Strand from someone who knows less than you do. Imagine you had opened those four packs instead, and you found three bulk rares and a Strand. You’d consider that a win, right? So why gamble against the odds when you can just trade for the useful cards outright?

Stop Foiling Standard Cards

I enjoy cool foils. They’re flashy, they’re special, they’re ostentatious, and they tell other people that you’re cool (well that’s the idea, anyways). What they also are is a luxury product. In a hobby that is entirely a luxury activity, these are the most luxurious of the luxury items. They are the $10,000 gold iWatch in a sea of $400 iWatches. Both are a luxury good, but one of them is way more excessive than the other.

When you have a large collection and you’re heavily invested in the game, foils are fine. They feel much more special, and it’s a pleasurable experience hunting down key foils for your EDH or Modern deck. As a newer player, though, they represent deep cash sinks that will tie up large portions of your collection’s value for no real reason. What do I mean by that?

These are the rare creatures (and planeswalker) from Chris VanMeter’s Syracuse-winning  RG deck. Notice that if you foil out just the main deck rare creatures, it costs you an extra $197—nearly doubling the cost of the deck! Foils creatures don’t have extra stats or cost one less mana. Non-foil Thunderbreaks kill just as fast as foil ones do. Why sink an extra $200 into your deck that you don’t need to? This isn’t a timeless EDH deck that you’ll play for months and years to come. It’s a Standard deck that will be hanging around for a few months at best.

Foiling our your Standard cards is a complete waste of money. It doubles the cost of the cards, making it harder to put together a deck, it makes it more expensive to keep up with weekly metagame changes, the cards fluctuate in value rapidly as they are highly dependent on being good from week to week, and you stand to lose huge value when single-format staples rotate and hemorrhage value, as Stormbreath Dragon or Thunderbreak Regent will.

Obtaining foils once you’ve established a solid collection and are ready to invest some money in eternal decks is fine. Buying into foils for Standard decks, especially when you’re new, is a fool’s game.

Keeping Multiple Decks Isn’t Sustainable

When reading articles by Chapin, you’ll notice he talks about a gauntlet. The idea is that you have available to you the top three to six decks of a format so that you can test your deck against what you expect the room to look like. This is a great tool for those testing for the Pro Tour. For those grinding LGS events to win store credit, it is a less great idea.

Maintaining a deck costs at least a few hundred dollars in cards, especially if you’re trying to keep it updated from week to week. When you start trying to do this for multiple decks, you’re rapidly going to deplete your resources, and instead of having one complete and battle-ready deck, you’re going to have three knives to choose from when everyone else is showing up with a gun. Don’t handicap your weapon of choice by trying to maintain too many decks at once. Instead, pick a single deck and focus on that. Acquire the cards for that deck, not other decks. Yes, that guy may have an Ojutai, but that doesn’t mean you should trade your three Siege Rhinos for it because you “may want to play UW at some point.” Hold your Siege Rhinos so that when someone has Thunderbreak Regents, a card you actually need, you have something to trade for them. Focusing your efforts, and your trade fodder, on a single target means that you’ll be able to keep a complete, competitive deck together. That complete, competitive deck is then capable of winning you events, and hopefully will start growing your collection.

I’ve watched people try to build the top three Modern decks and it’s painful to see them flounder. They’ve got most of Abzan, but they’re missing most of the shock lands and a few Tasigurs. They’ve acquired most of Affinity as well, although they don’t have any Glimmervoids or Etched Champions yet. There’s also a UR Twin deck, but they’re missing the Blood Moons for the sideboard that are integral to the deck’s strategy in multiple top-tier matchups. The end result is that none of these decks is capable of performing well. Meanwhile, they’ve got the value they need to finish any one of the lists, but it’s tied up in cards for another incomplete deck. A half-built Affinity deck is essentially wasted money. What is that $400 worth of artifacts doing for you if it isn’t playable? Wouldn’t it be better off as the last several cards you need for Abzan so that you can actually play it?

You will meet a lot of people with a lot of cards. There’s always a player at my LGS that’s amazed how varied and deep my collection is. I can field most any Modern deck, and plenty of Legacy ones. Do you know how long I’ve been playing though? Over twenty years at this point. You don’t end up with this many cards within a year of playing. Focus on one deck for Standard, build that deck well, and let your collection grow as it will.

Don’t Invest Too Deeply

You’ve been playing for nine months and you’re enjoying the game. While watching a streamer jam Legacy queues online, you decide that the latest Stoneblade list looks awesome. You decide to start working towards the deck so that you can have a Legacy list together and begin playing in local events. Two weeks later at FNM, someone has a Tundra in her binder. It takes thirty minutes of negotiations and several playsets of Standard staples, but you’re successful. You picked up a Tundra. Awesome! Now only…74 more cards to go. Oh. Nice $200 bookmark you’ve got there.

Modern and Legacy are great formats, and I enjoy playing both. There’s lots of articles about how to get into Legacy, and in fact a series even runs here on MTGPrice. It feels like every other week there’s an article about budget Legacy decks, or how Legacy is cheaper than Standard, or how to trade into Legacy staples. These are all fair pieces, but one thing they tend to gloss over is the opportunity cost and loss of liquidity that goes with trading into Legacy.

After you trade for your very first Tundra, what next? You had $500 worth of cards in your trade binder and you just used half of it to acquire a card for which you will have no use for another nine months. Even if it was a fair deal—heck, even if it was a great deal—that still represents a major loss of liquidity. All those Siege Rhinos and fetches and Ojutais that you could have used to keep up with Standard and make trades with to grind your collection are instead gone, replaced by a single monolithic Tundra that you can do exactly nothing with. You now have way fewer cards to trade with, and you’re still a million miles from actually playing that Legacy deck. How are you going to acquire the other $1,500 in cards you need if you’ve only got $200 left in your binder to work with?

I’m not anti-Legacy or anti-Vintage. I think they’re great formats that offer play experiences unlike what Standard or Modern have to offer. However, they represent money pits that make it very difficult to drag value back out of later on. Instead of sinking half of your collection’s value into a handful of Legacy staples that you are unable to use, keep your binder fresh and agile. Use that binder to grow your collection’s value and then, once you’ve got a healthy stash built up, convert it into a Legacy deck in one fell swoop.

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By: Travis Allen

Dragons of Tarkir became tournament legal this past Friday, and players jumped into the format with both feet at the SCG invitational. Invitationals are great for spurring players to put effort into building real decks, because the payout is high enough to be worth it. This makes these week-zero events a great barometer of the format ahead of the Pro Tour. While we’re looking at it to see where the money is, you can bet your butt PT competitors are looking closely at the results as well.

I’m not going to talk about Theros cards much, if at all. They’re pretty much all a sinking ship at this point. If you own them, do so because you need to for play purposes. Other than that, if it’s from Theros block and it’s not Thoughtseize, I’d be looking to trade it away.

So what was the big winner this weekend? What new card burst out of the gates and amazed us all with its power? Siege Rhino. Big, dumb, brutally efficient Siege Rhino. Yawn. It put 12 copies, three playsets, into the invitational top eight, and another set in the open top eight. We can’t really be surprised at this point. Those stats are hard to argue with. What is surprising, though, is how cheap it still is. I’m looking at MTG Deals, an online store, and I see 89 copies at $4.94 each. $5? Really? For a dominant Standard threat that’s even making medium-sized waves in Modern?

When Khans came out, I wrote about how rares from that set would be suppressed. With fetches in the set soaking up big value, it’s tough for other rares to break through. We would expect the few big competitive mythics to take a small hit in value but remain the most expensive cards in the set, while the rest of the rares fall off fast. When we look at Khans though, that’s not what we’re seeing:

Our first mythic is three slots down, behind two fetches. In fact, of the top eight cards, only two are mythic. It turns out that Khans doesn’t have much in the way of big, playable mythics. Between the two Standard top eights this weekend, there were only six Sorins, four Wingmate Rocs, and I don’t even know how many Sarkhans. There were so few that I didn’t even bother to write it down. It turns out that all of the playability in Khans of Tarkir is in the rares, not the mythics. This is a big shift, too. Take a look at leaders of Fate Reforged and Theros right now:

Seven of the top eight cards in Fate Reforged are mythic, and Theros is similarly quite mythic-heavy at the top.

Okay, so what do we do with this information? What it tells me is that all the most playable cards in Khans of Tarkir are rare, not mythic. If mythics are highly competitive cards, it should be no problem for them to hold the highest value slots in a set. With their much-limited availability, it’s much easier for their prices to hold closer to or above $20. The fact that this isn’t happening means the KTK mythics are just unexciting on the competitive scene, which is what drives Standard prices. If the mythics aren’t that good, then we should be buying rares. And what’s the non-land rare that saw the most play this past weekend? Siege Rhino, whose $5 price tag is looking very odd right about now. This is an excellent number to be jumping in at. All I can imagine looking at that price is sitting there in November looking at $15 Rhinos and thinking, “Man, I can’t believe these were $5 awhile ago.” Even if it doesn’t jump that much, I can’t imagine you lose value picking these up at $5.

Keep in mind that Khans rotates next spring, though, about a year from now, not in the fall of 2016 as we’ve become accustomed to. This will impact how the card prices behave, although we’re not exactly quite sure how yet. Currently, rotating sets begin to see their prices really sag about four to six months ahead of the fall set. That time frame under the new model puts the price drop for cards rotating in the spring right at the fall rotation beforehand. That would mean that just as Theros is rotating and Khans staples should be skyrocketing in the new meta, they would instead be dropping ahead of their spring rotation. It’s very odd. I have a feeling that this first spring rotation is going to creep up on people and prices are going to stay high on KTK cards right until the bitter end.

Alright, we’ve managed to talk about one card so far. What’s next? After Siege Rhino, the next most common rare we’re interested in is Thunderbreak Regent. I liked Regent quite a bit in my set review, although apparently not nearly as much as everyone else. It had climbed to nearly $10 coming into this weekend, and it quite clearly deserved it as the most-played Dragons of Tarkir rare. Be wary though: it’s in an event deck, which will hamper its price somewhat. I don’t like picking up Regents right now, actually. I’d much prefer to wait until the Pro Tour to see if some other cards can pick up steam and knock Regent’s price down a few notches.

Three different cards came in with 10 copies each; Tasigur, Whisperwood Elemental, and Mastery of the Unseen. Tasigur came in across half the decks in the top eight, in fact, but only at two copies per deck. He’s an extremely powerful creature, and it’s clear that everyone that makes black mana wants to be in the Tasigur business. It seems the problem is that his legendary status and hunger for grumper fuel makes it difficult to warrant running more copies. Even at $25, I really like foils, by the way. He is seeing play in both Modern and Legacy, and Fate Reforged isn’t going to have been drafted all that much. $25 for eternal staple foils is too cheap.

Whisperwood Elemental and Mastery of the Unseen showing up at the same rate isn’t too surprising, as they’re best buds. GW Manifest has made its position in the metagame clear, and Deathmist Raptor is a powerful new tool for the deck. Even if the deck holds on at one copy per top eight, I think we see Elemental lose a little bit of steam from its current price of around $15. There are already copies on TCG around $10. $15 was his “wow, this is new and exciting” price. I’d guess $8 to $12 is his “yep, another manifest deck” price. Meanwhile, you don’t still own Mastery of the Unseen, do you?

Just behind those guys is Surrak, Hunt Caller with nine copies in the top eight. That’s a decent showing, and I wonder if perhaps we’re just seeing the beginning of what he can do. He’s got an obvious home in GR aggro types of decks. Can he break out to other strategies, though? His ability to give any of the dragons haste is quite spicy, and with Battle for Zendikar on the horizon, he may be hasting up Eldrazi this fall. At $5 a copy, I don’t dislike trading for him here. He’s shown that he’s good enough to run in the big leagues, and while we could see a small dip in price, you don’t have much to lose getting in now. Be aware though, he’s in the same event deck as Thunderbreak Regent.

What surprised me most in the other direction is Dragonlord Ojutai. During the first few rounds of Standard on Saturday, I saw a lot of Ojutai, and even tweeted that it was a good pickup with all the camera time it was getting. It ended up doubling up over the weekend, so it seems plenty of people agreed with me. Looking back though, we see only three copies of Ojutai in the invitational top eight, and three in the sideboard of Buffalo Magic player and general hater of cool things, Alex Bianchi. Even though Ojutai came out swinging and looked great at the start of the weekend, he apparently couldn’t follow through. With a price tag of $15, this is a definite ship. Compare Ojutai’s price trajectory to Whisperwood, and you’ll see quite a bit of similarity. Now recognize that Whisperwood did quite well during its inaugural weekend, and has continued to perform. Ojutai’s 95-percent best-case scenario is performing just as well as Whisperwood has, and if he can’t manage that, we should see prices back under $10. Of course, I still am not convinced that Ojutai is that good of a card, so take my advice here with a grain of salt, I suppose.

Over on the Modern side of things, Affinity’s win gives us nothing to care about. That whole deck is a minefield with MM2015 on the horizon. Infect in second place doesn’t give us much to work with either, except for Inkmoth Nexus. Nexus has climbed up towards $12. If it doesn’t show up in MM2015, I’d be surprised if it didn’t hit $20 by the end of summer.

UW Tron in third is interesting. We see an Ugin in the list, lending certainty to the theory that we’ll be seeing the spirit dragon pop up in every format here and there. My favorite card out of this list is the Gifts Ungiven. It was reprinted in the first Modern Masters, meaning it’s unlikely we’ll see it again this year. It’s been slowly climbing since, and the card’s power is undeniable. This could be $10 before year’s end.

Other than that, there wasn’t much interesting in that event. Two Merfolk lists in the top eight is amusing, and I seem to recall Corbin tweeting enthusiastically about the whole affair. There’s nothing particularly new in these lists, though, so I don’t think we’re seeing some revitalization of the archetype. I did see three copies of Collected Company over in the Zoo list, which is running 27 creatures. I’m dubious this will be enough to propel Zoo into the top two tiers of Modern, though it’s hard to argue the card doesn’t add power to the strategy. Being able to keep up Path or Bolt and then flip in two creatures if you don’t need them is welcome, I’m sure.

So far, Dragons of Tarkir hasn’t made too large of an impression on Standard. The power level is uncertain at this point. I see a lot of discussion that the set is dead on arrival, with plenty of comparisons to Dragon’s Maze, which was Voice of Resurgence and a few hundred other cards. I don’t think it’s that bad yet. Hopefully the Pro Tour will show us some more uses for DTK cards. Like, say, Descent of the Dragons.