By: Travis Allen

Consuming Aberration is a $4 card. Consuming. Aberration. Is a $4 card. Are you really reading these words? Do you understand what they mean? Read them again. Think about them. Consuming Aberration is a $4 card. Huh. What does that mean?

Well, it means we should take it out of our bulk boxes.

I’m not sure how I stumbled upon this. I remember plugging it into MTGPrice for some reason and seeing a price of $4.10. I assumed it was a mistake. The site is great, but there are always algorithmic problems and such. I flipped over to my magiccards.info tab. I plugged it in. $3.72 mid.

Huh.

I flipped back to MTGPrice. The buylist was $2.32. ABU Will give you $2.32 for copies of Consuming Aberration. ABU Games will give you more than two American dollars for a copy of Consuming Aberration.

Huh.

Where is the demand for this card coming from? Who is driving the price up to $4? It’s not an old, out-of-print diamond-in-the-rough gem. It isn’t on the reserved list. It’s a Standard legal rare that sees absolutely zero play in any constructed format.

Think about your local store. Have you ever, since Gatecrash released, heard someone unironically ask if you had any Consuming Aberration for trade? 

Nobody wants this trash. It’s complete and utter garbage. It is the absolute worst kind of rare. 100% bulk. (Or so we thought.) The next time you’re at your LGS, yell out “does anyone want a free Consuming Aberration?” It is entirely possible that not a single person will want the free card. Think about that. In a room full of Magic players, you literally could not give this card away. This will not be true of every store, but it will certainly be true of some.

What else in Standard costs $4 right now? Supreme Verdict, sweeper du jour and playable in the four largest constructed formats, is $6. A bit more, yes, but it’s still in the same ballpark. It’s a lot closer than most of us would have guessed without looking. Desecration Demon, scourge of the skies and bane of green decks everywhere is $5. This is a card that has a good 70% chance to win any given Standard GP and it’s only $1 more than Consuming Aberration. Puzzled yet?

Most of the Scrylands are around $4 to $5 as well. Temple of Enlightenment isn’t, but the rest are hanging around there. The most important lands in the largest sanctioned format are about the same price as Consuming Aberration. That tells us something curious.

Price is a factor of supply and demand. For the most part we can assume that Consuming Aberration and any given Scryland should have the same supply. (Really, the Scrylands should be lower supply right now if anything. Gatecrash has come and gone, and there are virtually no new packs being opened. Theros and BOG are still being drafted, so there is still some flow of Scrylands.)

If you assume that the supply is equal between the two cards, and their prices are still just about equal, what does that mean for the rest of our equation? It means that the demand for the Scrylands is equivalent to the demand for Consuming Aberration. Consuming Aberration is just as desirable as the Scrylands. If everyone at your LGS is looking for Scrylands but nobody wants Aberration, just where is this demand coming from?

Welcome to the invisible majority. All of us – the tournament grinder and speculators, the heavy traders and constructed players – are the minority of Magic players. Of course, we FEEL like we’re the majority. We’re all loud, we talk on every form of social media, and we’re the ones represented on official coverage. Wizards isn’t broadcasting kitchen table “anything goes” four-Sol-Ring four-Tolarian-Academy Magic on their Twitch channel. But the reality of the situation is that you and I and everyone like us comprises a far smaller portion of the Magic world at large. 

Obviously the price swings on tournament staples is nobody’s fault but our own. Casual players aren’t making Sphinx’s Revelation and Voice of Resurgence $30. But they are capable of making Consuming Aberration a $4 card, with absolutely no help from any of us. It requires some serious demand to move a Standard rare to $4, and by golly they did it. When the the casual market can push a bulk Standard card that hard, we need to be paying attention. The market force is bigger than any of us, but if we hop on the wave we maybe be able to ride it.

Price behavior is going to be quite different than we’re used to. Most of us have come to be familiar with the wild nature of constructed staples. Cards rise and fall by factors of ten semi-regularly. We understand rotation, we understand “constructed playable,” and we understand ban lists. This is all irrelevant when dealing with casual cards though. There are no rotations. There aren’t “staples” or fear of reprints or ban lists. There’s a large, quiet group of players and there are cool cards. Column A wants Column B. It doesn’t matter whether its March or September or whether the card is legal in Modern. Players want cards and they order them online or purchase at their LGS from the total finite pool available. Slowly the supply dwindles, and as it does, prices rise. Occasionally copies make it back into rotation if a player sells their collection to a friend, but for the most part the supply is evaporating. The result is a plodding, semi-smooth rise in price.

With the recent influx of players in the last few years, there’s going to be growing demand on old casual staples. This is why Vigor is $20. Yet there is stilll profit to be made. There’s plenty of other old casual cards that haven’t adjusted their price. While they may not spike as often, and they aren’t sexy, they’re going to be practically guaranteed profit. Buying quiet casual allstars means you can’t brag about looking like a genius because you bought ninety Heralds of Torment at $.40 before they jumped to $7. But you can fill your collection with $1-$5 casual cards that are virtual locks to double or triple (or more?) in price within a year or two.

By: Travis Allen

Speculation is the sexiest of all Magic money-making endeavors. It is the perfect mix of the American dream and the allure of making a quick buck. Get a great idea or an inside lead on a card, dump a ton of cash into it, and make a 600% profit in two weeks that most stock portfolio managers would quite literally end the life of another human being to make. Not only does this require little effort to achieve, with the total sum of your hard work being putting cards into envelopes and taking them to the post office, it makes you look like a genius. Every time the topic of speccing comes up there’s that one guy that never fails to mention how he bought out Snapcasters at $6 during preorder or some such.

Of course, the reality of the situation is nowhere near that easy or glamorous, as few things are. Finding an angle on a card that nobody else has seen yet is tough when there are thousands of other people staring at the same finite card pool you are. Selling the cards is sometimes easy, but not always. If you don’t mind taking a smaller profit and just buylisting them it isn’t bad, but if you want to squeeze out every penny or the lists haven’t caught up yet you’re left spending time listing on eBay and dealing with overhead costs. None of that is too bad if you bought a few copies, but the times you make real profit is when you have hundreds of a given card. 

Knowing all this, how do we succeed in picking good specs? What is the magic formula for identifying the next hot thing that is going to go from $.80 to $7.99?

You already know the answer to this. There isn’t a magic formula. It requires constant awareness of the market, a pulse on multiple information sources, and no small dash of luck. After all, even if you get ahead of the market and buy 300 Krark’s Thumb, there’s no guarantee they’re all getting shipped to you if the price rises before the cards leave the warehouse.

Today we’ll look at a few factors to consider when trying to decide if you should go deep on a card. The important thing to remember is that all of these headings are factors, but not necessarily deciding factors. Sometimes cards rise in spite of particular circumstances. If you have an eye on a card that looks great in most of these categories but not all, don’t immediately toss it out the window. Just be sure that you’re making the decision for the right reason.

Power

In a vacuum, how powerful is your card? Does it do something inherently broken, such as Birthing Pod? Is it just an excellent rate for its effectiveness, ala Tarmogoyf? Does it tutor as well as Infernal Tutor does? This is always one of the most crucial questions when evaluating a card, and also one of the most difficult. This is the one where you really get to say “I saw things different from the rest of you, and I made money because of it,” and it’s also the one that gets egos involved the most.

A lot of money can be made when you see things differently from others. Chapin saw the power of Jace and bought something like forty copies at $25 apiece when it was spoiled. More recently, there were people out there that realized Desecration Demon was a dangerous threat only being held back by the presence of Lingering Souls. They were rewarded after rotation for recognizing the card as being very powerful, even if the meta hadn’t borne it out yet.

Powerful cards aren’t always expensive and expensive cards aren’t always powerful, but in general the better the card the more likely it is to be expensive. If you spot a powerful card that isn’t already expensive, ask yourself why not. You may look at Isochron Scepter and think about all the dirty things you can do with it in Modern, but remember that artifact hate is all over the format, as is Abrupt Decay. Without even considering the quantity of copies available we already see why an inherently powerful card is basically metagamed right out of Modern.

Meanwhile, there are definitely very powerful cards that exist in that format that just haven’t been figured out yet, or whose crucial combo piece has yet to appear. If you can look at Vampire Hexmage in the spoiler and immediately realize Dark Depths is sitting out there at $2, you’ve got a leg up on the rest of us.

Quantity Printed

What’s the major difference between Precinct Captain and Auriok Champion? Thousands and thousands and thousands of copies. The price of a card, of any good, is a factor of supply and demand. Demand is an incredibly complex component but at least supply is easy to figure out. There are so many more Precinct Captains than Auriok Champions it’s no wonder they are separated in price by a decimal place. If demand for the two cards is equal and there are ten times more Precinct Captains out there, then it isn’t surprising that Captain is about 1/10th the cost of Auriok Champion. The more copies of a card that exist the harder it is for the price to rise astronomically. This is why very old cards rise much easier than new cards. 

When judging how many copies of a card are in the wild the first thing to consider is what set(s) it is from. Assume for now it is a single printing in an expert expansion. The further back you go, the richer the vein. My three mental bookmarks are Mirrodin, Future Sight, and Innistrad. Mirrodin is a point of reference because then the card is legal in Modern. If we’re looking at a card from Onslaught or earlier, it is limited to Legacy and Casual formats. That isn’t a death sentence or anything, but it’s important to consider. Anything printed between Future Sight and Mirrodin is excellent territory, between Future Sight and Innistrad is solid, and after Innistrad the card has an uphill battle. There were just so fewer cards printed in sets prior to Future Sight relative to today. That is a major reason why many Modern staples have gone nuts; there are just so few copies available in the market compared to how many players are now in the game. Every set from Zendikar on has seen a growth in the player base, but between Innistrad and Return to Ravnica specifically we’ve added a tremendous amount of players.

Second and third printings complicate things a bit. Again, the older the additional printing, the better. If a card was printed in Mirrodin and then again in Kamigawa, we aren’t too worried. The price has had plenty of time to settle into where it is today. If it was in Mirrodin and then Gatecrash, that’s another story. Auxiliary product, such as Planechase or Commander decks, has some impact as well. These are much smaller runs than full expansion sets, so they aren’t exactly flooding the market. Special product printings will typically slow the growth of something, but not suppress it entirely.

When considering specs for Standard play, pay close attention to which set they’re printed in. The Return to Ravnica block had a unique structure in that the card pool was split pretty evenly amongst RTR and Gatecrash, while Dragon’s Maze was opened far less. This opened the door for DGM cards to spike harder than their RTR/GTC counterparts because there were so many less available on the market.

Theros’ distribution will have a similar impact on viability of speculation targets. Theros will be heavily opened, while Born of the Gods and Journey Into Nyx will be less so. A good example is the two black Bestow cards Nighthowler and Herald of Torment. Nighthowler is from Theros, making it a much worse Standard target than Herald. There will be about three times more Nighthowlers on the market than Heralds without even counting the Gameday promo. The full ratio of packs opened across the block will be 6:2:1. Seeing that type of ratio should really help you understand why Born, and to a greater extent Journey cards will be such better spec targets than Theros.

The takeaway from all of this is that the less copies of a card in the market, the better your spec looks. That isn’t the only thing you need to consider, but it’s an important one.

Vendor Availability

This is directly related to the above topic. How many copies of your card are available at vendors? This is a good sign for your spec:

This is not:

Don’t just check a single storefront either. I’ve been burned before by seeing only a few copies on TCGPlayer, buying several playsets, then realizing there are huge stocks still available at SCG or ABU. You need to do your homework and see just how much is out there before deciding if your pick is a good one. And don’t forget about eBay either.

Quantity Needed

When considering a card, ask yourself how many the prospective player needs. Is it central to a deck’s strategy, as Living End is to its eponymous deck? Is it a one-of silver bullet? Or an occasional sideboard card?

The amount of copies players need of a given card figures into the ‘demand’ side of the equation. If I want to play Scapeshift, I may want a few Obstinate Baloth. Probably not all four though, and I can get by without them if I have to. I can’t play without owning four Scapeshift, though.

The general rule of thumb is that sideboard-only cards make poor specs. That isn’t to say it can’t happen, but the card typically has to be ubiquitous in sideboards to make a solid run. Spellskite is the most well-known sideboard card that has done well for itself, and even in that case it only went from $6 or $7 to $16 or $17. A $10 increase is nothing to sneeze at, but if it was somehow central to a strategy the card would be $30+.

Cards that need to be in the maindeck as a full set are a good choice. Cards that appear as a one or two-of in sideboards are not as appealing. Artifacts that every single EDH deck will want are universally desirable. Cards that are only useful to an unpopular general are less so.

Snowflake

How many other cards do what your card does? Restore Balance and Living End are the only things that accomplish their particular goals. Nobody is building a Living End deck that doesn’t run Living End. On the other end of the spectrum, Obstinate Baloth isn’t exactly unique. Sure, it’s very useful against Blightning and smaller aggressive decks. But so are Kitchen Finks and Loxodon Smiter. If the card you’re considering could be pretty easily replaced by a much cheaper option, you may want to look elsewhere.

Company

Part of what made Living End such a juicy pick was how cheap the rest of the deck was. Aside from the manabase, most of the deck is commons and uncommons. If a player can pick up fifty-six cards of a sixty-card deck for $100 then they’re going to be far more willing to spend ten or twenty or even thirty dollars on the lynchpin of the engine. However, if the deck is packed with Goyfs and Cliques and Snapcasters the list is already going to be atrociously expensive to buy into. Player’s willingness to fork over serious cash for some novel new tech is going to be far lower.

Siblings

I don’t recall exactly what the first card to spike because of Nekusar was, but I know it has happened to several by now. Cards that force your opponents to draw extra cards are all prime candidates at this point, especially ones that attach penalties to them. When Seizan popped up on my MTGPrice insider email, I knew the card would be rising soon. It makes other players draw extra cards and gets them for a few damage at the same time. It hasn’t fully taken off yet, probably because the effect is smaller when compared to things like Wheel of Fortune, but I expect it to eventually make a full jump to $8+.

Price History

Price history is an excellent way to spot cards that are moving up and possibly poised for big jumps. A card may seem underpriced, but is its price graph flat for the last year? Or has it in fact been slowly rising for awhile? A flat price history doesn’t doom the card, but it does mean that there hasn’t been much interest in it for awhile. However, price graphs that have been trending up indicate growing demand for the card, a big indicator for price spikes. Keep in mind the old legal disclaimer of “past results do not guarantee future returns” though.

Spikes are for Spikes, Climbs are for Casuals

What is the market for your card? Is it a Sphinx’s Revelation type of effect that is pure raw efficiency but otherwise an entirely boring card? Or is it a Vigor, something that your average PTQ grinder will scoff at but your younger cousin will be in awe over? 

Tournament staples tend to spike harder. The players with their fingers to the competitive scene will get whiff of a major contender on the rise, buy in early, and soon after the rest of the market will realize what is happening and finish off what’s available. The card will relist at ten times what it was, and eventually settle to its real price point, whether its actually ten times the old price, or only $.50 more than it used to be. Demand comes quickly, and it leaves quickly too. Rotations crush cards like Sphinx’s Revelation because once it’s off the radar of the grinder there’s no market left for the card. These are the types of specs that you immediately sell into the hype because there’s no way to tell where the card is going to land and you want to make sure you capitalize on the frenzy.

Casual cards, on the other hand, are guaranteed slow burners. There are less severe spikes on these types of cards because there are no tournament results or rotations to worry about. There are simply millions of players in their kitchens, collectively buying a playset of Consuming Aberration at a time, never trading or selling them, slowly but surely driving the price up. These cards do still spike on occasion when the MTGF community gets ahold of them and speeds the process along, but for the most part they get there on their own.

Knowing which market wants your card and what to expect out of its projected growth pattern is important for identifying short-term and long-term holds. Even if you know for a fact a given card is going to triple in price, if it’s going to take a few years, you may rather operate in a faster market.

Reprintability

I could (and did?) write an entire article about how easy or difficult it is for a card to be reprinted. The long and short of it is that the easier a card is to reprint, the less secure your purchase is. A card like Spellskite was juicy pickings because Phyrexian mana is unprintable outside of a Phyrexian block or smaller-run auxiliary product. Vendilion Clique is a tough reprint because it’s a named legendary creature with a specific creature type. Linvala, on the other hand, is not tied to any specific plane or keywords. She’s a generic angel which show up in nearly every single set. That isn’t to say that Linvala is getting printed in Journey Into Nyx, but it’s far more likely we’ll see her there rather than another printing of Birthing Pod.

Check Out That Gap

Take a look at the gap between the lowest retail price and the buylist. MTGPrice shows you this automatically on every page. The narrower the gap, the better your odds are. If the highest buylist is 30% of the lowest price, it means there isn’t demand from vendors to get copies into stock. They’re selling so few copies of the card that they aren’t in a rush to get more. A narrow gap means vendors are eager to have any copies they can in stock, and a rise on the purchase price is probably close behind. You’ll see a lot of MTGF types on twitter always talking about the gap on a card, and this is usually what they’re referring to.

Always Have an Escape Plan

Assume your spec bombs terribly. What is your out? How badly do you lose, and what can you do to mitigate it? If you’re buying your spec at $3 each and the best buylist is $.50, you’ve got a long way to fall. You’d basically be committed to holding onto the card indefinitely, until either it does actually spike or the buylist rises. If the buylist on those $3 cards is $2.25 though, you’re in good shape. Even if the card fails to do anything, you can get out having lost only 25% of your purchase. Obviously nobody wants to be in that boat, but it’s nice to know that you have an out that isn’t going to be soul-crushing.

*The author personally owns some number of Seizan, Vendilion Clique, and Herald of Torment

By: Travis Allen

Last week I got everyone real angry about Legacy. I failed to clarify one particular point though, which I’ll start with today. When I implied that Legacy was going to fade away I wasn’t explicit about what that meant. It doesn’t mean nobody will play the format anymore. I expect it to eventually end up as Vintage is today – enjoyed by a core group of dedicated players, occasionally responsible for odd cards being hilariously expensive, but overall not something most players concern themselves with. People will still have their pet decks and Legacy events will continue to fire at local stores and Grand Prix side events. But there will come a day when SCG no longer runs it as a major event at opens and you can no longer win Pro Tour invites playing the format. That is the eventual fate of Legacy, not a total abolishment from the minds of mortals.

Anyways, on to today’s topic. We haven’t talked Standard in a while, and GP Cincinnati just occurred, which seems like a good reason to take a look at the format. Where is the money to be made? What should we stay away from? What do we sell? Is everyone sick of Pack Rat yet? (The last one is easy: yes.) 

Kyle Boggemes took down the whole event with a soup du jour Esper control list. The first thing that jumps out at me is the full twelve Scrylands. If you haven’t figured it out yet, these are powerful lands that are going to be relevant for their full course in Standard. What’s most interesting is how resilient the prices have been on the Theros lands. Typically we see the current fall-set lands get quite low. The Innistrad checklands behaved this way as well. These seem to have kept their prices a little better than I anticipated, with the exception of Temple of Mystery. Their floor will be between May and June, so whatever they fall to, that’s as low as they’re going to be.

The Born of the Gods temples are still doing quite well too, especially Temple of Enlightenment, clocking in at nearly $9. UW was clearly going to be the best Scryland from the outset and the price reflects that. The BOG scrylands should fare better than their Theros counterparts overall, and the Journey lands will be in a position to sit at the top of the financial pile. More on this at the bottom of the article

Three Elspeths is also worth noting, and she’s been prevalent in many of these lists. Her price continues to be a stubborn $20, which is impressive for a fall Planeswalker. If she gets below $15, I’d start trading hard for her. We will definitely continue to see her after rotation.

If you haven’t moved your Desecration Demons, Nightveil Specters, Underworld Connections, or Pack Rats, get on that soon. Their peak has come and gone.

A playset of Herald of Torment showed up in the Top 8, which is good news for his long-term prospects. He’s still about a dollar, and could pretty easily climb to $3+, maybe even $7-$10 depending on how things shake out. I haven’t bought any myself, but if I could get twelve or more copies for $1 each shipped, I would. We’ll still have Bile Blight, Hero’s Downfall and Thoughtseize after rotation, which basically guarantees he’ll always have a shot at being good. I’ve been wondering if you could actually build a Hero of Iroas deck with Fabled Hero, Agent of the Fates, Herald of Torment, and Nighthowler. It’s probably an FNM deck, but it sure sounds fun.

As I warned, Pain Seer is down to under $1 at this point. She’s a pretty low-risk pickup, but I like her less than I like Herald. She’s just so much more conditional than Herald is.

Naya Auras made the Top 8 as well, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot there we can work with. Most of the deck is rotating soon. I do see a whole lot of Scrylands though.

In the Top 16, Adam Jansen showed up with three copies of Ashiok. I still am a fan, and while Ashiok hasn’t been tearing up the tournament scene, at least s/he’s putting up occasional results. As a $7 pickup, you can’t really go wrong. I’d be surprised if s/he didn’t end up north of $10 at some point this fall for at least a slim period of time. 

Ari Lax was the darling of Cincinnati, piloting a GB “dredge” deck. He had some hot cards for sure. I was about to start listing the cool creatures he was playing but then I realized it was basically just all of them. I don’t think we’ll see Jarad make any moves, as the Duel Deck made sure that even if he’s playable there will be plenty of stock to go around. If you don’t have your Nighthowler promos yet, grab them now. The card is definitely powerful enough, and the full art version is leagues better than the pack foils.

What may be the most interesting card here is Satyr Wayfinder. While he isn’t going to be a $4 common, this list is proof that he is definitely capable of helping enable an archetype. Be on the watch for more graveyard-friendly cards and strategies in Journey and M15. Whip of Erebos will be around this September as well. The seeds are sown for a graveyard deck. The question is whether or not Wizards will make it rain.

While Cincinnati certainly drew the biggest Standard crowd this weekend, there was in fact an SCG open as well. I see Courser of Kruphix in third place, and I notice his price is nearly $10. This guy is definitely legit. Expect to see plenty of him next year as well. He’s a Born of the Gods rare, which is good for his longer-term prospects. $10 is a tough point of entry, but if he slips this summer, jump on that.

Cliff has talked about it before, but I want to refresh your memories here. I recommend you read his article, as it’s digestible and useful. The tl;dr is that the draft format means that we are going to open way more Theros than either of the other two sets, and less Journey than either of the other two. This means Theros cards are the weakest in terms of speculation value, BOG cards will be acceptable, and Journey cards will be ripe for unexpected spikes. It’s tough for me to recommend going deep on any almost anything in Theros, but I think BOG should have a low enough print run that it’s safe to expect movement. Journey will be your best bet, but we aren’t quite there yet.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible for Theros cards to spike, just that there will be less of them, they’ll be harder to identify, and they may not go as high as you’d like.

By: Travis Allen

I addressed this topic about a year ago on my personal blog, but now feels like an appropriate time to revisit the matter and distribute the idea to more than those poor souls who had the link forced upon them eleven months ago.

GP Richmond was a lot of things to a lot of people. It was the largest constructed event ever. It was the largest event that many players have ever attended, and it was the largest event SCG had ever run. It was the first major Modern tournament many players attended. It was the catalyst that got many players off their butts to finally put together a Modern deck period. It was also a huge, shining beacon for the entire community: Modern is here to stay.

Richmond had a huge impact on Modern card prices, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss today. Rather, we’re here to discuss the impact it will have on Legacy card prices. I’ll sum it up for you.

Legacy is going to die.

Admittedly, it will never actually die die – someone, somewhere, will be playing it. Rather, it’s going to go the way of Vintage, relegated to its own tight-knit, late-20’s, financially secure old guard that spend more time thinking about, discussing, and goldfishing the format than actually playing in sanctioned events. When Wizards announced that the reserved list had not been repealed, but instead solidified, this thin slice of history became axiomatic.

The process will be gradual. The gap between the frequency that Standard/Modern staples and Legacy staples are sold at will widen at the local level. Less people will ask if you have Forces and duals for trade. (This is something that I’ve personally witnessed.) Richmond was the first horseman of the apocalypse, and SCG adding Modern as a major format to their open series will likely be the second. It will begin with just a few events where Modern shows up as a trial to gauge demand. It will be popular. Perhaps following that they’ll switch to a 75/25 split between Legacy and Modern. Maybe they’ll run Modern alongside Legacy on Sunday, creating a division between old eternal players and new eternal players. I’m not sure, and I’m guessing Pete isn’t either. But they certainly aren’t blind to the amazing demand for the new reality. 

Think about all of this from a newer player’s perspective. I’m not talking about the guy that started six months ago and still has commons in his trade binder; I’m talking about the guy that joined up during Zendikar or Scars. Someone who came in during Scars block now has about three-and-a-half years worth of cards. They’ve got Birthing Pods and the Fastlands and a Thrun or two and maybe even a few fetches, since they were still Standard-legal (and $10) when they started playing. They just played through Return to Ravnica, so they have a full set of shocks. They did a draft of Modern Masters or two which helped procure a handful of staple uncommons and maybe even a Goyf or Confidant. Sure they don’t have a full Modern list together, but they’ve got a comfortable portion of several decks.

Where does that same player stand in relation to Legacy? He owns zero dual lands. He’s never had cause to own Karakas or Onslaught fetches or really anything on the reserved list at all. There is a far wider financial gap between a playable Modern deck and a playable Legacy deck at this point. And that’s just the cost in dollars. How about availability? Splinter Twin and Arcbound Ravager and Kiki-Jiki and Birthing Pod are in trade binders. Karakas and Counterbalance and City of Traitors are far, far less visible on a trade floor. Even if you find one, the owner is looking for a premium. After all, our junior player has no Legacy staples to trade away. That Jace is going to command an exchange rate.

Beyond the additional financial barrier, where is our budding Legacy enthusiast going to play? The Legacy scene is highly dependent on region, of course. Here in the tropical paradise of Buffalo, there are a whopping ten stores that sell Magic cards and run events. Do you know how many Legacy tournaments there are? One a month. Other areas have none. Sure, maybe you live someplace where they get thirty people weekly. That is awesome for you. But that is the exception to the rule.

As speculators, investors, and players, it is important to keep an eye on the future. It doesn’t necessarily need to start directly influencing our actions quite yet, but we would be remiss to ignore it. What does all of this mean for our Magic portfolios? Well, it means that Legacy staples aren’t really the bastion of stability you want them to be. They’re definitely more reliant than Ral Zarek or Trostani. But they aren’t going to hold all of these numbers forever, and they’ll only get less liquid as time goes on and less new blood enters the market.

First I’ll tell you what’s pretty safe. Tier S grade AAA reserved list cards are going to be pretty bulletproof. Think Dual lands and Gaea’s Cradle. Cards whose prices are predicated on their rarity and collectability will also remain valuable, such as power, Candelabra of Tawnos, and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale.

What about the rest of it though? I flipped through the top sixteen of the most recent SCG open and here are a list of cards whose value is propped up in some considerable capacity by Legacy playability:

True-Name Nemesis
Daze
Force of Will
Sylvan Library
Mother of Runes
Swords to Plowshares
Umezawa’s Jitte
Karakas
Stoneforge Mystic
Sensei’s Divining Top
Counterbalance
Natural Order
City of Traitors
Sneak Attack
Show and Tell
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Cabal Therapy
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Vindicate

Some of those will fare better than others. Force of Will is not on the reserved list and is played in exactly one format. As Legacy wanes, so will it. Stoneforge will hold a bit better, as she’s still excellent in Cube and EDH, and some small handful of pie-in-the-sky dreamers will hold out that she’ll be Modern legal some day. Reserved list cards will be more resilient, but won’t be immune to slow declines. If at some point in the future Legacy is no longer a main event at SCG opens, how many people are really going to want Lion’s Eye Diamond anymore? City of Traitors? Take a look at Llawan and Terravore. This type of behavior will be far more common than the other direction once we cross the tipping point and Legacy begins to contract rather than expand.

As a Legacy-invested player, what should you do about all of this? I’d start by picking a deck or two that you enjoy playing and making sure you’ve got it together. Then I’d start going through your collection and making sure you aren’t hoarding things unnecessarily. Do you have a pile of Daze or Swords to Plowshares? Into the binder they go. Unlikely to ever play the type of deck that JtMS is in? Maybe you consider putting that up for trade as well. Start considering what you actually foresee yourself using, and more importantly, what you foresee yourself never using.

You don’t need to firesale any of this. The TNN or Karakas can sit quite comfortably in a binder sleeve for over a year without any reasonable offers and that’s just fine. You aren’t looking to get out immediately, because the decline isn’t going to happen immediately. You just want to position yourself to capitalize on solid trades that may not come around again.

Before everything sinks, some prices will jump. There will be more spikes on Legacy cards. This is certain. But it doesn’t hurt to put the goods out there, just to see what types of offers you get. Maybe you’ve got a single Exploration that you’ve had socked away that someone ends up offering you a Karn Liberated for. A single Exploration decaying from the forces of entropy isn’t going to help you, but maybe you really needed that fourth Karn for your Tron list. You can’t get trade offers on cards that you don’t have available to the public.

I will reiterate that this is all long-term perspective. If someone is offering you a True-Name Nemesis for two shocks, take it. Don’t be afraid to make good trades that you can capitalize on in short order. What I wouldn’t do is pick up a City of Traitors just to have it, especially if it means shipping cards you would otherwise actually be playing with in Standard and Modern.

When you’re looking at cards to consider putting in the binder, remember our chat about Bayesian principles. Think probabilistically. What’s more likely, that this Submerge is going to be $20 overnight, or that it will slowly become less tradeable and less valuable?

I especially look forward to feedback this week.

Update – 3/20

I’ve received more comments on this article than any I’ve ever written, and it spawned quite a Reddit thread as well. There seems to be a lot of miscommunication about my message. I realize I haven’t communicated my ideas fully, and for that I apologize. Allow me to expand on the topic and hopefully do a better job making my point.

First, let me be explicitly and absolutely clear – nothing is happening to Legacy anytime soon. It won’t happen in a year. It may not even start within three or four years. This is not an immediate concern. It’s more of a “looking to the horizon” topic. Legacy has enjoyed a growth period of varying degrees for the last few years, just as all of Magic has. That’s also why we’ve seen the card prices rise as they have. I’m not telling you the death of Legacy is going to occur overnight or even within 12-24 months, so please don’t walk away with that message.

I do not want you to run out and sell all of your Legacy cards. There is no need to unload your favorite deck or dual lands this instant. Please don’t trade Underground Seas for Chandra Pyromasters. What I’m suggesting is that you consider looking through your stock and identifying what may be excessive. Definitely keep your set of Force of Wills. Maybe you put your three extra copies in your binder though. Do you have Explorations lying around that you can never see yourself casting? Perhaps instead of resting in your “never sees the light of day” pile at home, slide them into a binder sleeve. They could easily sit there for months at which point you decide you want to use them, and no harm done. Or, perhaps they snag a wandering eye and you pick up something you really wanted for them. Remember that Magic is a commodity market. This True-Name Nemesis is no different than that True-Name Nemesis. Trading away cards now doesn’t mean you can never have them in the future. Just because you take a good deal on your Mox Diamonds today, it doesn’t mean you can never have them back. If you decide in eighteen months that you absolutely need them, there will still be copies in the market for you to acquire.

I am not unaware of the emotional bond people have with this format. I get it. I really do. I play Legacy myself and I enjoy it thoroughly. You can do the most degenerate, wildest, coolest stuff this side of a Mox. People have far more attachment to their Legacy decks than Standard, and for very good reason. It took you far longer to build and cost you way more. I’m not telling you it’s suddenly irrelevant. All I want to do is make you aware that it may not always be the healthy, thriving format it is today. Sometime. Eventually. But not today, and not tomorrow.

Yes, SCG does a lot to support the format. They make money on it. Players play it. It’s popular. But did any of you notice that in 2013 there were multiple SCG events where Legacy wasn’t available? They’re not unaware of these concerns. SCG will milk this cow for all it’s worth, but when attendance dries up too much they’ll drop their buylist prices, sell out of their staples, and shutter Legacy at opens. Think of it like this – SCG can typically only manage to run one major event on Sunday. Do they run Legacy, which attracts 150-300 people, or Modern, which attracts 800?

Llawan and Terravore are not played in Legacy anymore, you are all correct. They were a component of the metagame, and have drifted away. Subsequently, their prices dropped significantly. My point of using these as examples are that these are two cards that were not caught up in the Legacy boom. Cards like Rishadan Port and Wasteland have exploded to keep pace with the current demand of Legacy. Meanwhile, cards that *used* to be part of Legacy have trailed off significantly. It’s easy to say that Llawan simply isn’t part of the metagame anymore, but three years ago she looked like she was an important format role-player. She was trading at $20+. Merfolk was and had been popular and Llawan felt fairly stable. Then the format shifted and Llawan’s usefulness declined. This is the point at which we are interested. If her $20 price tag was somehow inherent and separated from how playable she is in Legacy, she wouldn’t have dropped much. She did drop though, and that tells us something. All of these expensive Legacy cards are supported by their demand from that format. When that demand dries up, so will their prices. It certainly feels like City of Traitors is simply too powerful to not be in Legacy forever, but times change in ways that are difficult to predict. My point with these examples isn’t to show you why or how Legacy will fall out of favor, but to show you what will happen when it does.

This last point is something that I left out of the original post that I should have included. The most important reason that Legacy is not sustainable is the reserved list. I’m not looking to get people all hot and bothered, so let’s not go down that road today. It does have a drastic and severe impact on the format though, making it hard to ignore. Here’s the deal: dual lands are the backbone of the format. Our current supply of dual lands is it. It is the total amount we as a community have and will ever have. It is impossible to add more dual lands to the market. That means only two things can happen: 1. the number available can stay the same or 2. it can decline. Given that Magic cards are flimsy pieces of cardboard, it’s a safe bet that the number will slowly decline. Cards are damaged or lost or forgotten in basements and attics. Slowly but surely, the most essential cards to the format will become harder and harder to find.

Wizards isn’t looking to one-up these either. They’ve had their chance. If they wanted to make Legacy viable, they would have taken what steps they could already. But they didn’t. Instead, they introduced Modern. In Modern, they never have to deal with any of these issues ever again. Yes, some of the card prices are absurd. For right now. They aren’t in a rush to fix things. We think on a scale of months while they think on a scale of years. Yes, people don’t have beloved Modern decks. Yet.  I’m guessing most people didn’t have beloved Legacy decks when that first became its own format either. Wizards has chose how our timeline plays out, and we’re all just left living in it.

Don’t think about Magic a year or two from now. Think about Magic five years from now. A decade from now. That’s the Magic I’m thinking of this week.