Category Archives: Accumulated Knowledge

Accumulated Knowledge, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Bits ‘N Pieces

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Today is going to be something a little bit different. Rather than focusing on a single main topic, we are going to do something in between that and quick hits. The main advantage to this format is that it plays into my attention-deficit diso-*logs onto Hearthstone*.

Two Different Spikes: There were two spikes this week (at least as of me writing this- Wednesday morning). The first was a prime example of an artificial buyout; foil copies of Retract skyrocketed overnight. The pucatrade value increased to roughly $80, and according to the pricing app I keep on my phone, that’s a steal.

RetractFoil

 

There are some telltale signs that this is an artificial spike. First and foremost, it is important to know where the card fits- Retract is only played in one deck (to my knowledge), Puresteel Paladin Combo. The characteristics of the Puresteel deck are also indicitive of an artificial spike: it’s a fragile combo deck that goldfishes well and (with the exception of Mox Opal) is pretty easy to put together (and therefore easy to foil out). The person(s) behind this spike saw a lynchpin card in a combo deck that was last printed in Darksteel and isn’t likely to be reprinted anytime soon. The irony, of course, is that Retract is infinitely less important than the deck’s namesake, Puresteel Paladin- Retract can always be replaced by Hurkyl’s Recall in a pinch (it’s definitely suboptimal, but going from 1 mana to 2 is better than replacing Puresteel Paladin with Vedalken Archmage). This deck had a good finish recently (according to the deck tech that I linked to), but it is a lot like the Amulet deck- it can have a good finish when a player who knows the deck like the back of their hand gets hot on the right weekend, but this is not going to be a significant percentage of the environment moving forward. Honestly, it looks pretty sweet, and Puresteel Combo lists have been floating around for a while now, but this a deck only a speculator could love.

The second spike was much more sobering. Blood Moon looks like it is going to settle around $50 for most versions, and I honestly can’t say I’m surprised. If you read last week’s article (of course you did), then you know that Blood Moon falls squarely into one of the camps of cards that WotC’s developers are hellbent of keeping out of Standard (and would like to push out of Modern). Blood Moon, unlike Retract, sees play in multiple archetypes in both Modern and Legacy. The card is also an enchantment, which is a very hard type of permanent to remove when your lands can only tap for R. The scariest part is that the two most printed versions of this card were very likely Chronicles and either Modern Masters 1 or Ninth.

I mentioned Magus of the Moon a few weeks back, and it seems like this is as good a time as any to thoroughly evaluate the pros and cons. Unlike enchantments, red is very good at killing small creatures, which Magus of the Moon is. When the 8 Moon decks were in standard, some of the (what we would now call) Esper Control decks would run some burn spells in the sideboard to kill off Magi. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was pretty poetic. Something that is important to understand about Blood Moon (the effect), is that if you don’t have any sort of threat, then just casting the card isn’t going to win you the game. I’ve seen a lot of people cast a Blood Moon and just expect the game to end — only for their Tron opponent to make every land drop, play a Wurmcoil, and lock up the game. The upside to Magus of the Moon is that he is able to swing for two, and can at least apply some pressure until you’re able to find something to close it out.

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It’s worth mentioning that I played a lot of 8-Moon in standard, and the deck really wants the redundancy of playing eight copies. The conventional wisdom is that “if you want to see multiple copies of a card in a game, play four,” but the real answer is “play eight.” For critical effects (playing a mana dork on turn 1, or a Blood Moon on turn 2-3), you typically want all eight, although the math is not that much worse if you go to seven (which I typically prefer when talking about mana dorks- that extra slot can be a finisher instead). Even though Blood Moon is viewed as a sideboard card, I think people are going to realize that it is good against so much of the field that the technology will transition into something like the old 8 Moon lists.

I made Chicken and Waffles for dinner the other night: and it was really good. Just thought I’d share.

Kolaghan’s Command: This card has gone from bulk to $6 in an impressive amount of time. When I wrote about the Commands way back when, I said that Kolaghan’s was the toughest to evaluate because it is so much more contextually dependent than the others. The card is certainly strong, it’s just costed one mana too high to be truly great. Dromoka’s and Atarka’s Commands are both insane, and a big reason why is their cost. The two mana Commands will be Standard staples for their lifespan, and both will find homes in Modern, Kolaghan’s Command is a maybe (but has stiff competition from former stud Blightning), and the other two won’t make the leap. There will be some market for foils of all five in Cube/Commander/Casual crowds, but not enough to lift the lesser ones from irrelevancy. I don’t feel safe buying Kolaghan’s Commands right now, but when Magic Origins comes out, the price may drop to $4 or less: that’s the time to snatch up an extra set or two if you think you’ll need them.

Spellskite and Noble Hierarch: I am going to be looking to buy these by the gross pretty soon. They fit in a lot of different decks, so I expect their prices to rebound more than something like Fulminator Mage, which is expensive, but also basically a Stone Rain. The trick is to find cards that are good in multiple decks, because a bigger pie-slice of players will want them.

Modern Masters 2015: Stores are getting opportunities from Wizards to reorder product, which didn’t happen last time. Granted, it’s not a full reorder, but it’s something. It will be interesting to see how many more of these opportunities stores are given, since absolutely nobody is going to say no. I’m a little surprised that more MM1 hasn’t started cropping up, given how much the distributors (supposedly) have ferreted away.

The Wild West Days of Modern: are not going to last forever. Eventually Wizards will have reprinted enough of the format to start to assuage demand, and I have to assume that the player growth booms of the last few years will begin to plateau. I don’t think there is a single Modern card I have faith in five years down the road, which is both good for the game and bad for hobbyist financiers/”speculators”.

The only thing that scares me about the future of Modern, however, are things like Blood Moon, that clearly don’t fit in the modern (lower-case ‘m’) development philosophy. Think about something like Candelabra of Tawnos in Legacy — there are so few copies of Candelabra in existence, that you could play in Legacy events for a year and never have to worry about it. Of course, there is only one Legacy Grand Prix in North America (or Europe or Asia) every year, so you’re typically JUST playing Legacy for cash prizes- not to try and climb a tournament ladder. If WotC manages to “push” something like Blood Moon out of the mainstream in Modern, without banning it, then it’s going to create a weird subset of Modern decks that will be similar to the “niche” decks in Legacy (like Candelabra decks).

I know there has been a lot of forum talk about Abrupt Decay, and I think the day it gets reprinted will be the unofficial end of Modern’s boom phase.

Abrupt Decay: would make a good GP promo, for what it’s worth.

The possible end of Community: was very heartfelt and bittersweet. I love that show, and can’t wait for the movie to come out. The tags at the end of the episodes this season were insane.

7th Edition: is seriously an interesting set. So much of the art that was commissioned hasn’t been reused, and the fact that the foils are black bordered in the old frame really scratches an itch for the die-hard collectors. The only problem is that the set isn’t Modern legal, so you need to make sure that you double check the legality of cards before you pounce on them (the set has a lot of those color hosers we mentioned last week). There are TONS of foils worth $3 or more, and stores are actually buying them. Pacifism, a card that is reprinted CONSTANTLY, was at one point $9 for a 7th foil version. 7th Edition foils exist as this strange wormhole where they are sometimes the most unique version of a card possible. Although the price pretty much mirrors other foil copies, the 7th Edition foil Evacuation features unique artwork (and old frame). Sustainer of the Realm, an unplayable uncommon, is $15 for 7th foils, and under $2 for Urza’s Legacy foils (which may be a steal, when you think about it). Multi-format staples like Birds of Paradise and Wrath of God are worth over $100 for 7th foils, which is pretty much the best you can do before venturing into foreign foils or Alpha/Beta. Static Orb, a card that is played in nothing but the past, is buylisting for $21 and retailing for $25!

The last I’ll say about 7th Edition foils is that I’ve looked at a lot of price charts for individual cards, and their buylist prices have almost all gone up over the last year. This is worth a closer look, and I expect the forum discussion to be lively.

I’m super excited: about the Fantasy Football league we have brewing in the forums. We’ll have to set up a league and draft soon. I know it’s a little hokey, but I like doing it on NFL.com, because they have a lot of cool bells and whistles, and they do that very professional-looking “draft analysis” at the end.

I’m playing Abzan Aggro in a tournament tomorrow: and I really like the deck. I went up to the full four Dromoka’s Command main, and all I keep thinking is “why the hell didn’t I do this sooner?”. Obviously their futures aren’t the same, but the last time I said that, it was about Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Nothing else in the list worth mentioning, aside from two Pitiless Horde. That card is good too, just not as good as Dromoka’s Command or Jace.

I have a secret project: that I am very excited about.

Tarmogoyf: is probably not going to get below $100, but hopefully some day. I really wish they would just go ahead and put him in a “real” set- he’s honestly not THAT good. Even though I profitted on selling all of my Goyfs forever ago, I’m definitely feeling the sting of not having access to any now. Oh well, c’est la vie.

Next week: we will finish the Mirrodin block with Darksteel and Fifth Dawn. I know, I’m excited too.

Tell me in the comments: if you liked this format. It won’t be an every week thing, but sometimes. Also, tell me your thoughts on Community. I think my favorite episode this season was the heist one.

Accumulated Knowledge, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Arrested Development

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Magic players, like any community of fans for a thing, has a wide knowledge spectrum in terms of understanding the game. There are people like Patrick Chapin who are able to analyze the game at such a crucial, fundamental level that they are able to write literal books on playing the game. There are also people who can’t tell a state-based effect from a hole in the ground. For most hobbies, this doesn’t preclude people from enjoying it—you can have fun watching a football game even if you can’t spot a blitz.

 

With Magic, however, it’s a little bit different. Newer players, and very casual ones1, don’t want to play against a Pro Tour champion or the local ringer. Even outside of the game, players of different skill levels can have vastly different views of what is going on in the Magic world—if Abzan Aggro wins every FNM at your store, the more casual players are going to assume that it is winning everywhere else, too. There is a demonstrable gulf between the more and less enfranchised players in terms of play skill and understanding what the wider Magic world really looks like. Those in the Magic finance community, whether they play frequently or not, are incentivized to be as ahead of the game as possible. Not only should you know which decks are good, but you should try to have an understanding of why and how they are good. While Magic finance is far from a science, your anticipations and speculations will be grounded by rational reasons, which is a great way to feel about something you’re spending money on.

The most important thing to know about Magic, fittingly, is also the hardest to know: the future. I seem to say it weekly, but Wizards of the Coast is very private about internal information. You’ve read my ramblings about the Zendikar Boom for weeks now, but perhaps the most public acknowledgment of it was Mark Rosewater’s podcast episode on 2009. I’m not going to go back to that well today, but I want to talk about one aspect of WOTC’s behind-the-scenes operation that has gotten much more public recently: development.

BRIEF ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS ASIDE

It’s worth briefly mentioning how Magic design works for those of you who don’t know (this is going to be the very abridged version). All new Magic sets begin in what is called pre-design, where the focus is on the very basics in terms of style and flavor. Then it moves into design for a year or so, where the mechanics are fleshed out and designers start to come up with rough drafts of cards. Once the set is through all of the rough drafts (and a middle process called “devign”), it makes its way to development. This is where cards get things like more accurate converted mana costs, and where cards are tweaked to better fit the Standard environment that they are entering. To sum up the impacts of both processes: design knew it wanted to make Siege Rhino a splashy Abzan card, and development did the pricing and tweaks to get it there in light of the format it was entering (or rather, the format they expect it to be entering).

Of the two major processes, design and development, the one Magic finance enthusiasts should be most interested in is development. Mark Rosewater does a lot in telling us how design works, and quite frankly, anything we don’t already know would just be spoilers of future sets (like finding your Christmas presents in May, but knowing they are still months away).

With development, you can see what the pushes are towards (or away from!) in terms of shaping games and formats. Last week’s article by Sam Stoddard did an excellent job of spelling out some of the trends that we can expect to see in the future. I’d encourage you to go and read it (and the rest of his stuff), but I’ll give you a bit of a brief rundown, interspersed with my own examples and wry wisdom.

I Think They Call That a Reuben?

Development does not “test” Modern the way it does with Standard or Limited (the team realistically couldn’t, even if they wanted to). While Standard as a format has existed for many years, the formats themselves are radically different from year to year, and cards leave. With non-rotating formats like Modern and Legacy, however, you are only ever adding more cards to the heap, bannings aside. Design and development philosophies have changed radically from the days of Mirrodin (the first one), but (most of) the cards from that era are still in Modern. There are some types of cards that development just doesn’t want to print anymore, and trying to shift away from these cards is the team’s best tool to driving a change in Modern. Here are the three that Sam talked about, followed by one or two that I want to talk about:

Cheap and efficient card filtering: These are your Ponders and Preordains. Even though these types of cards are popular with control players and tempo decks, the elephant in the room is combo.

Modern’s earliest days were plagued by extremely aggressive combo decks that don’t reflect the style of play that Wizards wants to promote. If you remember Worlds in Rome from 1998, then you’ll know that WOTC isn’t eager to create another professional level environment where the coin toss is considered a key part of the match. Banning combo pieces offers diminishing returns in terms of effectiveness at managing the format, and so it is in WOTC’s best interest to get rid of the egregious enablers rather than all of the engines. Serum Visions and Sleight of Hand are allowed to exist for now, but you will see more cards like Anticipate printed in the future. There is a reason why Telling Time was the selection spell included in Modern Masters 2015. Hitting the best cards of this type is also one of the better sneaky ways to nerf Storm.

Anticipate

Fast mana (a.k.a. rituals): This is the much more blunt way of killing Storm. It also kills off the (extremely annoying) fringe archetype of All-In Red, which is basically presenting an early threat (in the form of Deus of Calamity or a bunch of Empty the Warrens tokens) and seeing if your opponent can answer it in time. It is miserable to play against, miserable to watch, and not the kind of interaction Wizards wants to promote.

darkritual

Super powerful hate cards: This category best exemplifies the sophistication that Magic design has cultivated. While a card like Deathmark cleanly and elegantly demonstrates black’s core conflict with white (and green), Gloom just straight-up locks most white decks out of the game. Cards like these are less of “tactical adjustments” and more like punching your opponent in the throat between games. Most of these are in Eighth and Ninth Editions, because the worst offenders are reprints from early Magic. I’m not sure how good any of them really are, since the ability to splash a second and third color in Modern is very easy.

choke

Birds of Paradise: This is one that I have observed personally. While ramp in the form of Elvish Mystic is acceptable on turn one these days, it seems like development really wants to push “of any color” to the two-drop slot, as we’ve seen with Rattleclaw Mystic and Sylvan Caryatid. While these cards are both better than Birds, they are also in the two-drop slot—compare this with Stoddard’s rationale on the card-drawing spells.

sylvancaryatid

Wrath of God effects: These are starting to get pushed to five mana instead of four, which gives aggressive decks more potential to compete. Supreme Verdict cost 4, sure, but multicolor spells are typically “undercosted” because of the built-in downside of needing multiple colors.

endhostilities

Moving interaction to the battlefield from the stack: The two smaller points are really just examples of this larger one. Worlds ’98 (the Rome tournament I mentioned earlier) was really what marked the beginning of Magic‘s change in focus (it would take a few years to fully change, but this tournament was in many ways a black eye that WOTC was looking to not have repeated).

glenelendraarchmage

While there have been some bumps along the way, Standard now is a perfect example of what Wizards wants Magic to look like. Rather than having counterspell wars over resolving an effect that is going to either win or sway the game, the interaction between players occurs more in attacking and blocking, or knowing when not to. All Magic tutorials start with teaching players how to attack and the value of having creatures in play, but the professional scene in the late ’90s was totally devoid of that style of play.

What This Means For Us

The only problem with moving complexity and interaction to the battlefield is that it becomes more difficult to evaluate cards devoid of context. Boros Reckoner was not the most hyped card at the release of Gatecrash, because it was difficult to analyze in a vacuum. Courser of Kruphix suffered similarly, as did Goblin Rabblemaster and Siege Rhino. All of these cards went on to be major role players in Standard, with opportunities to buy in cheap before their prices shot up based on demand. It’s easy to evaluate cards with clear historical precedents (Satyr Firedrinker is a Jackal Pup!) or that are clearly pushed (who didn’t think that Abrupt Decay would be a star?), but moving forward, I expect there to be more Standard formats like the one we are seeing now.

Specifically, the type of Magic that is being played in Standard right now is the kind that Wizards wants to be able to promote, and I imagine it’s partially why the company tried to axe Modern Pro Tours. It is very difficult to overhaul Modern to be shaped in the image that WOTC wants, and the backlash of banning all the cards it would take to do so would likely be insurmountable. It could happen eventually, but it would be over the course of years, probably by pushing people to play decks similar to the ones they played in Standard.

I say all of that to say this: knowing the direction that the development team wants to take Magic is an important way of knowing where Magic finance is headed. The things that get pushed the hardest now are the ones with the most safety valves: creatures. It’s important to know what to look for, and when Magic Origins starts to roll around, I’ll go through the spoiler with you. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find the next big thing.

Hope all of you who are playing in the GPs this weekend have a great time.

Best,

Ross

1 Shout-out to the Invisibles.

Accumulated Knowledge, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Modern History 101 – Eighth Edition and Mirrodin

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BRIEF TEMPORAL ASIDE: I’m jealous of all of you who are reading this, because you are living in a time when Modern Masters 2015 has come out, while I am currently trapped in the past. Are you gonna crack some packs? I know I am! Cracking packs is so much fun.

Rather than talking about Modern Masters 2015, I want to talk about Modern itself. A lot of writers have done individual set or block reviews (myself included!), but I don’t think there has been a narrative overview of what Magic was like when those sets were out. We are going to do that, and compile some information that often gets discarded. You’ll see what I mean as we go along.

 

Eighth Edition

This was the first set to feature the new card face that would later go on to kill Magic1. The set, like all pre-M10 core sets, was comprised entirely of reprints. The selling point, though, was that this set would contain one reprint from every previous Magic set that had not been in a core set already. Neat!

And while several of those reprints are underwhelming on the order of Vexing Arcanix and Skull of Orm, there are some good cards in this set! Blood Moon was first reprinted here (and later again in Ninth), and Eighth Edition put such gems into Modern as City of Brass, Intruder Alarm, and Ploooooooow Uuuuuuuuuuuundeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer (I really like casting Plow Under).

Other finance gems worth noting include Planar Portal, the Urza-tron lands, and foil copies of Fecundity, Merchant Scroll, and Vernal Bloom. The first Standard format that Eighth Edition came into was Odyssey/Onslaught/Eighth, and neither of those expert-level blocks are Modern legal—if you want to see what the format looked like, check out the 2003 World Champs. Oh, and they made a big deal about the prerelease (even though the promo was Rukh Egg), and I won mine.

Non-Foil Cards of Note

Blood Moon – This card is in good Modern decks and bad Legacy decks.

Ensnaring Bridge – Modern, Legacy, Cube, Commander, Casual.

Bribery – Commander only. [Editor’s note: Cube would like to have a word with you, Ross.]

Grave Pact – Commander only also.

Lord of the Undead – I’m beginning to sense a pattern.

Defense Grid – Mostly Commander, some Modern.

Elvish Piper – Commander, and the eventual inverse of Tiny Leaders (Okks?).

Coat of Arms – Commander and any weird tribal format.

Choke – Modern, Legacy, and anything that is dominated by blue.

Foils of Note that Aren’t Just the Same as Above

Birds of Paradise – I’m not entirely sure why, but this is one of the most expensive printings of Birds. Seventh Edition foils blows these out of the water, though.

Storm Crow – I hate that the Storm Crow people have made this happen. Retail “price” of $32, best buylist price of $4. One of those prices is off, and I think it’s the first one.

Merchant Scroll – Vintage!

Teferi’s Puzzle Box: Casual favorite, I suppose?

Ambition’s Cost: Only foil printing of this card.

Noteworthy Standard Decks

NONE.

Now, I do love me some UG Madness2 and some Goblin Bidding, but that’s not really what this section is going to be for. As we roll into future sets, I’ll mention any decks that I think may be worth having on a resurrection radar—maybe an old archetype could benefit from new technology! I don’t expect much, but it’s worth looking. Also, I’ll be able to tell you if a deck was the real deal (like Karstenbot) or bogus (like Ghost Dad).

Analysis

There are a lot of foils in this set that are worth money, and there are fifteen rares worth $3 or more. The downside is that the set had 111 rares, so only about ten percent of the rares are worth the typical price of admission. There are some major wins if you hit on a foil, but I’m not going to tell you to buy a bunch of old packs to hopefully open a foil rare.

This set, despite its gimmick, was not super popular, since most of the marquee cards at the time (Persecute, Birds of Paradise, Wrath of God) were cards that enfranchised players already owned. Sealed packs look to be between $5 and $8 (ignoring shipping), so that’s not quite low enough to look appealing. If you are a gambler, and your local store has had these on a shelf since 2003, maybe they’ll take $3 each just to clear up space, but even then, 111 rares is a lot. To compare, there are 73 rares and mythics combined in M15, and only 68 rares and mythics combined in Dragons of Tarkir. If you open a box and each rare is different, you are only going to open 32 percent of the rares in the set, and only about three to five of them are expected to be “hits” (versus the lower price of entry, if you can even get it).

The prudent thing to do is to stay away, which means that these cards are going to slowly keep creeping up in value. All of the cards in here are prime candidates for reprinting in a future Modern Masters or Commander product (it’s already happened for some), although some of the more powerful cards, like Plow Under, are unlikely to ever be put in Standard again.

Oh, and I’ll mention this now since we were talking about packs: don’t forget that the foil distribution process didn’t change until Planar Chaos (where the foil replaces a common), so if you open a foil rare, that is also your rare. You can’t get two rares.

Parting Words

Don’t buy packs, do look up any foils that you see in longboxes where you don’t already know the price.

Mirrodin

This was the first expert-level set to feature the new card frame, and, to be fair, did a pretty good job as a block trying to kill Magic. This was also the first set to leave Dominaria in a long time, and we wouldn’t return until Time Spiral. The block’s theme was “artifacts matter,” and the books were terrible. I don’t want to talk too much about the block as a whole, since we are going through sets individually, which will probably help me limit my hateful vitriol to Darksteel where it belongs.

Mirrodin introduced affinity, equipment, and Mindslaver to Magic, so it certainly has had an impact. The set definitely had hype going into release, and the massive amount of design space devoted to cool artifacts has definitely given the world several casual favorites. The prerelease card, Sword of Kaldra, was a big hit with the Timmy/Tammy crowd, and the only reason it isn’t worth more is because I doubt most newer players are aware it exists3.

I remember Mirrodin pretty well, because it was around the time I started FNMing weekly as a priority. Like Eighth Edition, much of the analysis of this set in terms of Standard is going to be warped by the inclusion of sets that aren’t Modern legal (in this case, just Onslaught, one of the coolest blocks ever), and also by the fact that several of the best cards in this block got banned. I remember FNMs were getting pretty big around this time (I hopped between a few different stores). If only they knew what was about to happen…

Non-Foil Cards of Note

Chalice of the Void – Took off as anti-Treasure Cruise technology, and hasn’t come down since. The card is very good in older and more cutthroat formats like Legacy and Vintage, since there are more aggressive forms of “fast mana.” This card was a player in Old Extended with the next card on the list.

Chrome Mox – It should not come as a surprise that when WOTC uses the word “Mox” in a name that the card is very good. This card is considered to be too good for Modern, but it’s about right in Legacy, since going down an extra card when you play it is more taxing. Something to notice on Chrome Mox and some of the other top cards on this list: the buylist prices are all very good. Often a smaller spread between a buylist price and a retail price can mean copies are viewed as easy guaranteed sales, which you can extrapolate as expressed confidence in the card in the long term. If the big dealers like something, then you probably should too.

Oblivion Stone – This card went from zero to hero with the advent of EDH, and has cemented a place in Modern with the consistent success of Tron decks. Two big populations like this card, and it’s pretty good in Cube, too. This is basically Nevinyrral’s Disk to a generation of players. That’s a good thing.

Glimmervoid – Some versions of Affinity play lots of spells of different colors, so this is pretty much their best land.

Tooth and Nail – If you resolve this in Constructed, you win. There are lots of different two card combos to find with Tooth and Nail, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Mephidross Vampire and Triskelion. For a while, Tooth and Nail was an easy twenty bucks, so don’t be surprised if the current price of $8 balloons up again.

Duplicant – Popular EDH card and actual spot removal spell in Vintage (you can cast it off Mishra’s Workshop!). Yes, this is why the foil price is insane.

Platinum Angel – Despite a couple reprints, this is one of those marquee cards that is always going to keep a respectable price. “You can’t lose” is pretty appealing to most Magic players and/or Parker Lewis.

Sculpting Steel – Another card that is good because of Mishra’s Workshop, although this has largely been co-opted by Phyrexian Metamorph.

Goblin Charbelcher – Best card in Magic.

Foils of Note that Aren’t Just the Same as Above

Solemn Simulacrum – This is the original set foil version of this card. Sad Robot, perhaps, but at that price, I’d be smiling.

Lightning Greaves – EDH staple, or at least it used to be. Also original set foil.

Mindslaver – The other best card in Magic.

Thoughtcast – Again, original set foil. This card is crucial in Affinity decks, since playing your entire hand at once typically becomes a disadvantage if the game goes on for much longer.

Sylvan Scrying – Original set foil, finds Urza lands and other toolbox effects. Played as a 4x in a few Modern decks.

Talisman of Dominance – Played in Legacy, believe it or not.

Molten Rain – This card hasn’t been in either Modern Masters set yet, which is surprising. This card is very good, and I’m surprised the foils are only $10.

Noteworthy Standard Decks

Broodstar Affinity – It didn’t take long (by 2003 standards) for Affinity to be uncovered as an extremely unfair mechanic. The five artifact lands, in concert with Disciple of the Vault and Atog (yes, really), helped enable some extremely degenerate strategies.

The decks also featured Broodstar, a heavy-hitting beater that would get in large chunks of damage coming down extremely early. Broodstar was a serious threat, and is probably the only Affinity-era star to not get serious consideration in Modern. The reason why is likely because Affinity decks now lean towards strategies that better support Cranial Plating, which encourages a wide threat of small artifact creatures, rather than just a bunch of artifacts. I’m not sure if Broodstar adds anything to existing Affinity strategies or if building a new version around the flier is worth exploring, but Broodstars are currently dirt cheap and Affinity is very popular in Modern (and Legacy!). Much of the other stuff that was in these lists was later replaced by better cards in the other two sets (sorry, Scale of Chiss-Goria).

RDW – Red decks are always going to try to be as lean and redundant as possible, so it’s hard to find something that is “hidden” in terms of red deck technology. Molten Rain is probably as good an example of a hidden gem as red decks can get, which should tell you how little meat is still left on the bone. Arc Slogger does not belong anywhere near your Modern red deck. Slith Firewalker is probably not even good enough, which stinks.

Analysis

Looking through the foil prices on Mirrodin, I started to realize how many good cards there are in this set. While you can never truly judge a book or a Magic set by its cover, I think it actually makes thematic sense that Mirrodin has a wide variety of cards with casual appeal. Artifacts, by their nature, are accessible to decks of every color, so the demand is more widespread—if something is good, it’s a card that all EDH players want, not just ones playing blue (like Bribery) or green (like that dumb creature that does a thing). Put a pin in this topic, we’ll come back to it in a bit.

Anyway, boxes look to be about $250, which puts packs just shy of $7. There are only eleven cards that beat that mark (or come super close, like Sculpting Steel), so buying packs is a losing proposition once again (this is often going to be the case). There are a few uncommons and commons of value in the set, including Wrench Mind, which is the closest Modern is ever going to get to Hymn to Tourach4. This is a great set to pick through when you are looking at bulk, and there are a handful of cards out of this set that may be worth a closer look (I’ll be changing the way I do my set reviews to better fit this new series in the future, so they are complimentary pieces rather than basically writing the same thing twice).

It’s worth mentioning once again that Mirrodin on release was a very popular set. Standard was still heavily defined by Onslaught, but that set, while it featured some pretty powerful strategies, wasn’t so strong that it overshadowed new tech. There were a lot of people, myself included, who were just happy that Odyssey block was gone, if you can believe that. Those sets were cool, but rewarded thinking in a way that was only clear to very good players.

Coming up next: the set that would send the tournament player base into a nose dive.

Two Sets Down…

Let me know what you thought of today’s article. It’s fun to go back and parse out what we didn’t know when all this was happening, and I try to interject what I remember personally (this will get easier as we progress and sets are more recent in my memory, except for those years where my LGS was next to an Outback Steakhouse that did happy hour right before FNM). If there is something you’d like to see me add, or you’d rather me just stick to our old set reviews, let me know. Thanks, and I’ll see you next week!

Best,

Ross

P.S. Word is that it is possible to reseal Modern Masters 2015 packs. Do not buy packs from someone you don’t trust completely, and be extremely scrupulous. Also, as a way to be respectful to other players, don’t discard the packaging in a way that other people may be able to reuse your packaging. And make sure to actually recycle them! That’s what this change was for in the first place.

P.P.S. Sounds like cards are coming out of the packs with scuffing and damage. This is likely due to the new packaging method. More on that as it unfolds.

P.P.P.S. Remember when I said to put a pin in what we were talking about before? Here’s the elevator pitch version of every Modern block in three words. Tell me which jump out as the best sets for casual cards:

  • Mirrodin: Lots of artifacts!
  • Kamigawa: Lots of legends!
  • Ravnica 1: Ten color pairs!
  • Time Spiral: Sure, why not?!
  • Lorwyn: Lots of tribal!
  • Shadowmoor: Lorwyn minus tribal!
  • Alara: Now three colors!
  • Zendikar: Lands and Cthulhu!
  • Scars: Mirrodin plus poison!
  • Innistrad: This is Halloween!
  • Return to Ravnica: You loved Ravnica!
  • Theros: Remember Homer’s “Odyssey”?
  • Tarkir: Wedges and dragons!

1 Clearly it didn’t, but that was the assumption.

2 This was also the name of one of Magic’s few webcomics. I really liked it, and it’s where I got my Mise shirt.

3 The concept of exposure is something we’ve been talking about on the forums lately.

4 Although I’m holding out for an eventual “dinosaur world” set featuring a functional reprint named “Hymn to Turok.”

Accumulated Knowledge

The Fault in Our Cards

4 Comments

Hello! My name is Ross, and I am a finance writer here at MTGPrice. It is my sincere hope that many of you reading this are new to my work, and possibly even this site.

Typically, my articles are reserved for ProTraders, but I elected to make this article free as an attempt to reach a much broader audience, including (ideally) people who don’t typically read finance articles. I am writing this because there is a very negative stigma regarding “Magic finance,”1 and it has seemingly only ramped up. I believe that a lot of people have very skewed and inaccurate notions of what Magic‘s ecosystem really looks like, and that is what drives a lot of this vitriol. My hope today (and in my body of writing as a whole) is to inform and educate, and hopefully this will help to dispel some of the misinformation.

Their Problems and Ours

It’s a common sight, especially lately, to see players bemoaning speculators as the limiting factor in accessing older formats. The first and most monumental truth that many people fail to acknowledge is that Magic‘s economy is driven in large part by the simple concepts of supply and demand. However, there is a serious wrinkle on the demand side of that equation, and it is something that I typically refer to as the “Zendikar Boom.”

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Basically, the Magic population has grown extremely rapidly since the release of M10 and Zendikar (and, perhaps not coincidentally, Duels of the Planeswalkers), and that large player growth has had a radical impact on the prices of cards. Wizards has never liked to publish hard numbers, but we have a conservative estimate that there are over ten million currently active players, compared with the roughly five million from before M10. This means that the demand for Magic, in all forms, has gone up, while the supply has only gone up on newer products. Wizards prints based on their numbers and projections from previous sets, which is largely why Zendikar‘s first print run famously sold out shortly after release. They printed enough for X players, but Y showed up. Every year since, the print runs on new sets have increased, just trying to match the continuous growth in demand. On their end, it’s a great problem to have.

The problems on our end, however, are still being dealt with. Every set printed prior to the Zendikar Boom is now considered an “under-printed” set. Take, as a topical example, Serum Visions. Despite the fact that this card was a common, it currently retails for about $10. This is due, in part, to the fact that it was printed in 2004, long before the Boom2, and therefore much less prevalent than today’s commons. There are other factors that push this particular price to its current degree (chief among them being that Fifth Dawn overall just isn’t very good), but the card is not $10 because a shadowy cabal of dealers decided to make it $10.

In fact, you can tell that the demand for this card is strong because the margin between its buylist price (what a store will pay you for it) and its retail price (what they will sell it for) is smaller than average. Theoretically, a store will usually buy a card for half its retail price, and sell it for the full amount. Any time the buying price is higher than 50 percent, it typically indicates that the store sells enough of them that they just want to make sure they have enough copies in stock. If you know you’ll sell a card right away, why not pay 60 percent? The buylist price on Serum Visions has been high for a while now, and I’ve seen vendors getting very aggressive (paying higher margins) on buying them, which just tells me they don’t want to get caught without them.

Causes, Fixes, and Scapegoats

Things like Modern Masters are attempts by Wizards to get some of these older cards into circulation without warping the next several years of Standard trying to hamfist previous blocks into the mix. It is far from a perfect distribution system, however, and the lower print runs will hopefully ramp up over the next handful of iterations (you can expect these sets to come out every other year for the foreseeable future).

I’ve personally missed out on playing a lot of Modern because of card availability issues, so I sympathize with those players who have voiced similar pains. But—this is important—the problem is not caused by the finance community. Magic is over twenty years old, but in some ways, it is still experiencing growing pains: it is trying to facilitate play experiences for several different types of players with a back catalog that is nowhere near large enough to cater to them all, and there are more players coming every day. It is this universal increase in demand, enabled with the vast permeation of the internet, that has allowed the Magic finance community to blossom.

The Magic finance community has existed for much longer than many people care to admit. Even though the concept of “Magic finance” was first made popular by Jonathan Medina and his articles on Star City Games, there were people making or supplementing their living off of Magic cards long before him—it was just much more difficult. In order to trade or sell in large volumes, you needed to either travel to several large events, or have a brick-and-mortar store.

Nowadays, you still need to do one or both of these two things to be able to call Magic finance a job, but there are opportunities for the hobbyist financier3. The truth is, most speculators are people like myself: I don’t own a store, but I’ve been around long enough that I know to ferret away extra copies of cards that look promising in the long term. Every “spec” I make is with the implicit understanding that this card won’t be sold for at least two years, if not more. Take, for example, Akroma’s Memorial, a card that was hitting $20 prior to being reprinted in M13, which caused the card to drop below $5. Trading for a couple of copies at roughly four bucks a piece is a great deal now, but invested as well is all of the time I spent waiting to move them now for $8 on a buylist or just over 1100 Puca Points. This is the surest and safest way to grow your Magic nest egg, but it is very slow and only pays in order of scale. Buying just one Akroma’s Memorial and sitting on it is a great way to get a free trip to Taco Bell in the future, but it’s not a living.

Speculators Aren’t to Blame!

I think one of the main reasons people vilify speculators is because they are seen as the driving factor in the ever-rising tide of secondary market prices. This is both false and true. In terms of overall market impact, hobbyist speculators are a drop in the bucket, and anyone with a larger scale operation than the hobbyist is typically some form of vendor. This is a significant distinction, because unlike hobbyists, vendors can’t wait two years for every card they buy to come to roost. While some vendors will pull the trigger on things that they don’t plan to sell immediately (typically high-end stuff like Power, misprints, etc), they need to make sure that everything else can move—the bills won’t pay themselves4.

On the other hand, the largest vendors (think Star City), have the capacity to buy more of these long-term targets, since they are doing so much business on a weekly basis (across the country!) that they can afford to buy and sit on more stuff. Star City is the largest vendor on Earth, which conveniently also makes it the largest speculator on Earth. It has both the capital and the exposure to buy everything it wants, without the concern of tying up too much in one card. I can’t buy a Mox Ruby and go about my merry way, but Star City can. And even though it’s hard to find Deathmist Raptors in my local area, Star City can buy every single one that comes across its tables (for buylist prices!) and sell them to anyone with an internet connection. Vendors have access to tools that hobbyists don’t, and the big vendors have tools that the smaller vendors don’t (you know, like their own national tournament series).

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The natural check in the system is that when people begin to out their cards, the supply on the market is being increased. One of the reasons why shock lands from Return to Ravnica have not shot up post-rotation (there are a few) is because so many of the people who went deep on them are moving them to recoup their investments to move somewhere else. The new shock lands have stayed pretty steady (there are a lot of them, after all), so most people are happy to move them and free up opportunity capital.

Not That Everything’s Peachy

Where speculating has become an issue, however, has been with Reserve List cards. (We are not going to get deep into the Reserve List debate, because I went way over my word count last week, and I don’t want my editor or his family to hate me.) That being said, the list, as well as the inherent rarity of early sets, has definitely created opportunities for individuals or small groups to profoundly impact a card’s market value. When I say the card name Animate Wall, does anything come to mind? If you have a knowledge of the rarities market, then you know that there is an individual (I can’t recall his or her name) that collects Alpha Animate Walls, and owns a sizable percentage of them. In fact, if you own 11 copies of any Alpha rare, you own one percent of all printed copies. This is the reason why even the worst rares from Magic‘s debut set are worth over $100: there are so few available that it is possible for single entities to shift the entire market.

Of course, most people don’t feel the need to own cards like Roc of Kher Ridges or Animate Wall (which is actually not on the Reserve List), but it is certainly throttling the growth of proxyless Vintage (and certain Legacy decks). It is an unfortunate situation that is exacerbated by Magic‘s incredible growth over these last few years—one without a simple solution.

The good news is that in order to move the needle on something like Underground Sea (which was printed in Revised), you would need a much larger scale investment than something that only made it to Unlimited (say, Ancestral Recall). While Sea is played in more formats and, by extension, more players, the capital required to make a serious investment in copies would be staggering, on the order of, “Maybe you should go buy some real land instead.” I don’t know how many Siege Rhinos or Deathmist Raptors you would have to purchase to own one percent of all that were ever printed, but I can tell you it is a hell of a lot more than eleven.

BRIEF BUYING ASIDE: As a tip to all of you, I recommend only acquiring things like dual lands in person. There are so few that are truly in near-mint condition that you are more likely to be able to talk down to a better cash price. I personally have never bought a dual land that wasn’t a deal, and I don’t think you should either.

dispel

Hopefully, today’s article has helped to dispel some of the anger and suspicions that people cast on the Magic finance crowd. I know that this topic far exceeds what I have written here today, so I encourage you post any follow-up questions you have in the comment section below. I am always happy to respond to reader questions, and I try to check the section frequently over the weekend. If you take one thing away from this piece, it should be the following: Magic cards are expensive because Magic is more popular now than it has ever been before5, and even though speculators and the finance community are viewed as the carpet-bagging profiteers, they are largely just the small fish in Star City’s pond. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our cards, but in ourselves.

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Independent

I hope you enjoyed my article today, and thanks for reading.

Best,

Ross

1 I’m not in love with this term.

2 In fact, a lot of players were scared away at this time- can you guess why? It rhymes with “Barcbound Bavager.”

3 I am even more not in love with this term.

4 Unless you have, like, auto-pay or something.

5 Even more so than when it was referenced on The OC! I know, right?!