By: Cliff Daigle

I imagine that most of the people reading this have, at some point, carried around a binder full of unneeded Magic cards and have traded some of those cards for other cards which you did need.

Ideally, you found a partner, both of you found some cards you wanted, you agreed on values, one of you added or took away from the pile, there was an agreement, perhaps a handshake, and you both walked away happy. That is how most trades go. It’s why I love trading! I get rid of what I don’t want and get what I do want!

Unfortunately, as much as it pains me to say it, trading Magic cards with someone else can also really suck.

Let’s talk about some of the behaviors that can not only make a trade difficult to complete, and in some cases, can prevent people from trading at all.

If these are behaviors that you exhibit, don’t worry, I’ll help you change your terrible ways.

 

Symptom #1

You have lots of cards in your binder that are not for trade. 

So if you’re ever been flipping through a binder and you see something you’re interested in, you should ask about its availability. It’s okay if that card is not going to be part of a trade…to a point. I can understand if you are thinking of building a deck, or it has sentimental value, or some other reason it’s not for trade. But please, please, please, I beg you, don’t keep them mixed in with the cards you do want to trade. About the third time you tell me something isn’t for trade, I want to slam your binder closed and hurl myself through a window.

I will still respect you if you don’t want to trade that card for the measly pickings in my binder. I’m an adult. I can handle being told “There’s nothing in here I’d trade my foil fetches for.” That’s perfectly acceptable. That’s honest and clear. Don’t use “That’s not for trade” as a euphemism for your lack of interest.

The cure: Get a different binder, and put the special cards in it. It’ll be up to you if you want to bring that binder around. Turn the special cards upside down, or put them all in the last page of the binder behind a spacer page, clearly marked as NFT.

Symptom #2

You don’t look up prices or get impatient with those who do.

Though I’ve been writing here for a while, I don’t have every price of every card memorized. Therefore, I look up prices! I imagine almost all of you do. But if you did bother to memorize every price in Origins in time for the prerelease, don’t expect me to take you at your word. Prices change, people want to be sure, and if you’re in a hurry to close a deal it can look awfully shady.

Generally speaking, people are cool with trade partners checking a price on their phone but I’ve met some who aren’t, and that’s someone I don’t want to make a deal with.

The cure: Learn to be patient. Even professionals have to be patient when dealing with amateurs. Understand that no one wants to be taken advantage of.

Symptom #3

You fixate on one card.

The worst offender in this category is the person at your LGS who fancies himself the next great financier by only trading for fetchlands right now. You want his Obelisk of Urd, he picks out your Polluted Delta, and then it’s off to headache-land because he won’t consider small trades. It’s really easy to burn someone at your store by being relentless about these things, and you have to remember that you are making an impression with every interaction.

It’s fine if you need that Polluted Delta and the Obelisk is the starting point, but needlessly escalating a trade is something that will turn everyone off from you rather quickly.

The cure: Be okay with small trades. Recognize that you’re building valuable friendships. The Delta might not be traded today, but there’s always tomorrow.

Symptom #4

You try to set up both sides of the trade.

Let’s go back to that guy’s Obelisk and your Delta. You say “You don’t have enough that I want to trade away the Delta,” a perfectly reasonable statement. He says, “don’t be silly. I will add a playset of Hero’s Downfall and now it’s a dollar in your favor! Are we good?”

Did you ask for the Hero’s Downfalls? If you didn’t ask for that card, why is he proposing this? If you’ve ever worked at a restaurant, you know that the chef’s special is something that is about to go bad and the kitchen needs to get rid of it. In this case, the Downfalls are about to rotate out and it sees almost no Legacy/Modern play. This guy is trying to move cards he knows are going bad for a card that has nowhere to go but up.

The cure: Let people decide what they want. You’re allowed to propose things, especially if you’ve established that there’s a certain deck being built. Don’t offer cards they don’t need just because the numbers theoretically line up. You’ll build a reputation as a shark and someone to avoid.

Speaking of people to avoid…

Symptom #5

You have ever been a ‘Value Trader.’

There have been more than a few infamous people who wear this label with glee. Because you have a card someone else wants, you feel privileged enough to ask for more than that card’s value. This is much more than asking for a markup when trading your dual land for their Collected Companies and Siege Rhinos. This runs a wide range of behaviors, from the slight one of always making sure your side of a trade is $3-$5 more, to the extreme, of putting their values at buylist while yours are full retail.

I’m sure you have a thorough rationalization as to why it’s okay for you to do this. The worst excuses are that you can get any card; that you are the one people come to for all sorts of cards. Maybe you’re trying for a pack to power, or whatever goal you have. Maybe you trade cards as a business to pay your rent.

I would probably sit through it and then excuse myself. Who will trade with you twice when you do such unfair things? I’d rather deal with actual buylists than your amateur behavior.

The Cure: Understand that at this moment, everyone’s cards have value. Theirs are not worth less just because it is currently in their binder. You are not a special and unique snowflake who gets to rip people off. Learn to trade for future value, and grow your binder that way instead of making uneven trades today.

By: Cliff Daigle

I have spoken before about my love of not only foil cards, but foreign language foils. You may not agree with me, but I am really in touch with the collector nature of my soul.

Until relatively recently, I had two options when it came to picking up foreign foils. (Busting open foreign boosters does not count.)

1) Browse eBay continuously. I admit, I have a number of weird alerts set for eBay. There are probably not five other people on this earth who have a alarm set for when a French foil Vindicate shows up on eBay.

I have been known to lose a lot of time in the evening just clicking through the many pages of four and offerings on eBay, with some bids and purchases making Commander decks a little more exotic.

2) Magiccardmarket.eu and its sellers. For quite some time, this was the only organized way to look for non-English cards. Star City would list when they had such versions of a card, but it was very hit-or-miss. MCM runs much like a TCGPlayer for Europe, allowing players to sell cards at a price of their choosing, and taking a cut of sales.

There was a big problem, though. Shipping was pricey, yes, but international shipping will never be easy. MCM did not allow for American residents to join as buyers or sellers. Instead, you had to sign up with the admins and basically pay shipping twice. Once for the seller to ship to the admins, and then they would send to you, for an additional percentage.

I went through this process once, and while I got the cards I wanted, I paid a significant markup that left me unwilling to do it twice. I argued, unsuccessfully, that they were losing out big time, but they wanted to remain Euro-centric.

TCGPlayer now allows sellers to list foreign-language cards, and this is amazing for those of us with a magpie’s eye. It also offers a unique opportunity to test the presumptive value of the individual languages.

It’s been said by myself and others that Korean, Russian, and Japanese are the more expensive languages, with Italian, French, Spanish, and other Continental languages often going for less than English.

Many sites don’t bother with foreign cards, but with many individuals able to list their singles, TCG offers a marketplace more defined by what people will pay, as opposed to what some think a card ‘should’ be worth.

I’d like it best if TCG offered a version of eBay’s ‘completed sales’ but that’s me being greedy.

Let’s get to an example. I want to use a recent card (higher supply) that gets Modern and Legacy play (greater demand for exotic foils) and compare what the sites offer. Monastery Swiftspear makes for a useful comparison point.

First up, magiccardmarket.

208 foils! I can, with a couple of clicks, narrow that to non-English ones…still five pages of listings! So here, for comparison’s sake, are the first page and the last page.

Look at that selection. Lots and lots of shiny Swiftspears, in just about any language.

Sure enough, Spanish and French foils set a low bar.  Eight Euros is less than $10, but we will get to the conversion rate and why it’s important in a moment.

Let’s jump to the end.

Japanese, Russian, and Korean top the list, though there’s a wide range for any of the languages. Still, that’s what we get when we allow people to set their price.

Now, TCG’s low on foils.

Now, the cheapest English NM foil is $14, noticeably under the cheapest foreign foil…though that’s a Spanish foil, not really the chase version.

Let’s uncheck the English box…

Wow. Only three non-English Swiftspears on TCG. That’s a surprisingly low amount of stock. Or is it?

There’s a problem with my method, in that I can’t tell if TCG just moves more cards. This is a snapshot, not a documentary. I don’t have access to the sales that have happened. It could be that people have simply bought a lot more of these cards from TCG than MCM. It could be that the prices were better. I wish I could make a definitive statement about why MCM has more than a hundred available, and TCG has three. Note that TCG doesn’t currently have anyone selling Spanish, Italian, German, or French foils, but I can’t say why.

Just for the comparison, let’s look at eBay.

One sold listing for Russian foils, six weeks ago.

Korean had one in June, Japanese has six in the last two months.

If you can find it on eBay, you’re likely to get a better price than TCG, but hopefully that’s not news to you.

So what can we take away from all of this?

First of all, if you are in Europe or have a friend that is, you should be on MCM. If I had someone I trusted on the continent to be my letter drop, I’d do that in a heartbeat. The selection and price are the best you’ll find, most likely because of the additional costs and headaches of being an American or Canadian buyer on the site. Because they have limited their market, there’s more available at a lower price.

It bears mentioning that the euro has fallen dramatically against the dollar recently. Just a handful of months ago, it took $1.40 to get one euro. Now it’s down to $1.10, a price that means conversion gets us more.

For example: there’s a Korean foil Swiftspear for €60 listed. Forgetting shipping and admin costs, that would have cost us $84 at the beginning of the year. Now it’s $66, just because of the fall in conversion rates. That $18 is a big fall as exchange rates go, so this might be the lowest point for currency exchange, but that’s not my field of expertise at all.

Second, the price hierarchy for the assorted languages is still holding even when marketplaces are at work. People are paying more for some languages and less for others, even in the absence of hard data about the print runs. I’d love to dive into that information. Does Portugese really outsell Spanish? Are there that many more German cards than Russian?

Finally, TCG is apparently a more popular method of moving non-English foils than I thought. Looking at other cards, there aren’t many with a huge selection of languages, but again, I’m not sure if that’s a lack of supply or cards getting snapped up as soon as they are listed.

So if you see what you want on TCG, you should get it. Stuff isn’t staying there for long. Get out there and buy some foreign foils!

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By: Cliff Daigle

About two and a half years ago, I finished foiling out an EDH deck without paying cash for a single card. I was really proud of this. It’s a Grixis deck, tribal vampires with a lot of control elements. Foil shocks, filter lands, everything but duals and fetches, all traded for.

Recently I sold the three foil filter lands for $125, which is about three times the trade value I gave away to get them. This has taught me an important lesson: decks have value.

A lot of the MTG finance you read about deals with speculation. What will go up? What will go down? There’s an easier way to gain value, and that’s simply to put cards that are currently cheap into a place where you won’t remove them: decks you play.

Your cube will slowly grow in value. Your Commander deck will grow in value. Your Legacy burn deck will grow in value. Being in a deck just makes it less likely that you’ll take value out of it for a while.

Let’s get to some examples.

For anyone who wasn’t playing during Innistrad four years ago, this is annoying and amazing. A dozen Snapcaster Mages has about the same retail price as an Unlimited Mox Pearl.

Snapcasters were regularly found at $20 or $30 for the longest time. Really, that should have warned us. Tiago being a four-of all over the place in Eternal formats is an indicator too.

But if you played during Innistrad, and you put a Snapcaster in your Commander deck, or your cube, or a set of them into some wacky 60-card deck, then your value has gone up tremendously.

Lesson learned!

Today I want to try and look ahead four years. What’s (relatively) cheap now that could quadruple in value by 2019?

Before I get to my picks, a word of warning: Wizards is getting more and more aggressive with their reprints. It’s often been said by people that Wizards makes no money off of the secondary market, but while that’s directly true, it’s also indirectly false.

Wizards makes a lot of money off of selling packs. Booster packs mainly, but Intro Packs, Clash Packs, Fat Packs, etc. all add up. They raised the MSRP of boosters on Modern Masters 2015 to $10 from $7 simply because they could. This is the purest of profit, as their design and production costs didn’t change appreciably.

When Wizards puts together a set with reprints of expensive cards, they know what they are doing. They know not every card should be expensive, and some cards have to be saved for next time. Innistrad block cards in the next Modern Masters will be an example. What will Snapcaster be by next summer, or perhaps mid 2017?

So these predictions are hinged on the cards not being reprinted, reserved list cards obviously excluded from that possibility.

Diamond Valley – At Worlds 2011, I traded ChannelFireball three Snapcasters and two Liliana of the Veil to get one Diamond Valley. The Innistrad cards have just gone up and up, while the Valley has just crept upwards. Considering what cards like Angus Mackenzie, Invoke Prejudice, and Guardian Beast are at, this is kind of undervalued right now. It’s got a ridiculously low supply and is a reserved list card, yet it hasn’t seen the mega-spike. Eventually, though, it will.

 

Gaea’s Cradle – Let me balance my bad trade with a good one. At GP Anaheim in 2012, I traded two Commander Scavenging Oozes for enough store credit to get a SP Gaea’s Cradle. At the time, Cradles were about $80, and this was a card my token deck desperately wanted. If there’s even a chance that you’ll want a Cradle for a cube or a deck or for Legacy play, get them now. Having the judge foil version helps a lot to give collectors a target, but the nonfoil at $180 is reasonable by today’s standards. This has a very good chance to just keep climbing up and up, likely doubling in the next 18 months.

 

Cavern of Souls – This is a mortal lock to get reprinted…eventually. Its current price is based on how often decks want a playset, its use in eternal and casual formats, and the underwhelming sales of Avacyn Restored as a set due to crappy limited play. It will go back down to the $15 range when it’s printed, but who knows exactly when that will be. Until then, it will keep climbing upwards. Seeing this at $100 at the start of 2017 wouldn’t shock me if it avoided a reprint before then.

 

Mikaeus, the Unhallowed – I think that given Magic’s history, we are 2-3 years from FTV: Zombies and this will be a $30-$40 card by then. It has a human ability that might not fit into many sets, as well as undying, a very specific ability. Reprinting this in Commander is much more likely, fitting this into a set with foil possibilities is much trickier.

 

 

Foil Shocklands and Fetchlands – I’ll keep banging this gong until people listen. Both of these are at their lowest points, for the Khans fetches and for the Return to Ravnica shocks. Get them now. Put them in every deck you can. You’ll thank me later, when these have done their own impressive rise.

 

 

MPR cards – I think that Wizards has done players a disservice by discontinuing the Magic Player Rewards cards, but they represent an opportunity. Some of the cards are dirt cheap, but other reprints might cause them to go up, as happened to Sign in Blood this past year. Picking up the textless cards on the cheap is an easy way to sock away value. Textless foils are also excellent targets, as they resist the financial hit of reprintings well.

By: Cliff Daigle

There’s no doubt that Commander is one of the prime forces at work when it comes to the prices of a lot of cards. There’s a combination of factors that make Commander a format that can be almost as expensive as Legacy:

• Singletons – I’ve said that this is one of the great lies of EDH; that you only need one of a card. The truth is that if you build multiple Commander decks, you’ll need more of certain cards, especially sweet lands.
• Age of Players – Commander has a powerful effect on older players: it enables the entirety of their collection. To someone with boxes of cards from playing years before, Commander is one of the only ways to play with those cards.
• Eternal – Aside from bannings, the cards don’t change, and you can keep cards in a deck forever.
• Battlecruiser Magic – I’m using Sheldon Menery’s term for this, as it’s accurate: EDH is where you go to cast Time Stretch and copy it twice, or Genesis Wave for X=43, or whatever expensive setup you want!
• Magpies – I’m trying out this term for those of us who collect shiny and unusual things, but don’t necessarily have a way to display the card/use the card. Where else are you going to put that SDCC Garruk, Caller of Beasts?

All of these elements come together and make Commander a format that can be surprisingly expensive. There’s not a lot that causes spikes in Commander prices, at least not all at once. Two years ago, with Nekusar decks becoming quite popular, there were spikes in a lot of cards like Wheel of Fortune (but not Memory Jar?) but that’s the exception.

Excepting, of course, the EDH ban list. Remember, Commander is a format that is not strictly official. The EDH Rules Committee maintains the ban list, and while some members of the committee work at Wizards of the Coast, it’s a small group of guys who make the ‘official’ decision.

Those decisions can cause some large and fast spikes when a card is unbanned (Staff of Domination) as well as some craterings when a card is removed from the format (Griselbrand).

This week, there were no changes to the banned list, meaning we have some time to think about what changes might be in store. It’s worth remembering that they don’t like to preemptively ban cards; they prefer to let players have the new toy for a little while and see how bad it is. Worldfire and Griselbrand come to mind as examples: it was clear they were probably no good for the format, but there was still a couple of months of play.

Let’s start with the current banned list and see what’s a candidate to be let out of the doghouse. I’m not going to go over every card, just the ones with a shot.

Coming

Biorhythm – Hear me out. It’s an eight-mana spell that carries a lot of risk to the caster. If you’re not casting it to kill someone, it’s a dead card. Plus, it puts your life total into a possibly dangerous spot too. Insurrection and other such spells also can end the game at eight mana, so I think this gets revisited eventually. Picking up a dozen sub-$2 foils and just putting them away seems like a safe bet, one which could pay off dramatically.

Unbanning potential: 4/10

 

Gifts Ungiven – There are a lot of comparisons out there for this card, from Intuition to Buried Alive or Fabricate, but being able to search up Mindslaver, Buried Ruin, Academy Ruins, and Crucible of Worlds and guarantee that you control every turn for the rest of the game…no thanks. I think it gets looked at and laughed away.

Unbanning potential: 2/10

 

Sway of the Stars – It’s ten mana to start the game all over again at seven life. Only suspended spells will get around this (I’m looking at you, Jhoira of the Ghitu) and it’s just rather annoying. I think Sway does eventually get off the list, and as another card with foils at below $2, there’s a lot of potential.

Unbanning potential: 7/10

 

Time Walk – This is a surprising card to see banned, as Time Warp, Time Stretch, etc. are all allowed. Timetwister is not banned either, so I think Time Walk gets its day as well. Considering the price, though, I don’t think there’s a big profit potential here besides the growth of Power.

Unbanning potential: 7/10

Now, let’s talk about some of the cards that folks want to have banned and how the price would be affected.

Going

 

Sorin Markov/Magister Sphinx – These are cards that set your life to ten, undoing the starting life buffer and undoing any lifegain you’ve worked on. This is an enormously powerful effect, and each has the potential to be used more than once. Sorin, having been printed twice but not for five years, has much farther to fall. The Sphinx, even in foil, is already rather cheap.

Banning potential: 6/10

 

 

Seedborn Muse/Murkfiend Liege/Prophet of Kruphix – All three of these untap some or all of your permanents on each other player’s turn, effectively giving you extra turns. Prophet even lets you play creatures, while the other two are progressively more narrow. These are cards that are more than just powerful, they are time-consuming and grant enormous benefits, requiring instant-speed answers at the end of the turn on which they are played. I would not be surprised if Seedborn and Prophet got hit first. Murkfiend might be allowed, since it’s only specific colors of creatures, but the other two are targets.

Seedborn would take the biggest hit, likely falling from $13 to $5 or so, and the foils would take a real hit. I wouldn’t be trying to hold any of the three foils for long-term investments. Prophet has a Clash Pack foil promo weighing down its price but the real loss would be in the future value. Murkfiend would also go down by more than half.

Seedborn & Prophet banning potential: 9/10
Murkfiend banning potential: 4/10

 

Deadeye Navigator – Another card that requires instant-speed removal and perfect timing. You want to respond to the Soulbond trigger to remove whatever they are flickering. This is a card that is exceedingly easy to abuse, yet it doesn’t have much of a price at all. Banning this would take it from dollar rare to bulk rare. The foil would take a huge beating, likely falling from $10 to under $2.

Banning potential: 8/10

 

Consecrated Sphinx – I was surprised that this wasn’t in Modern Masters 2015, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t been banned yet. Just like Primeval Titan was easy to steal, copy, and abuse, this is utterly ridiculous. Copying it means that two players get to draw an arbitrary number of cards, which is what got Trade Secrets banned. It’s at $15/$45 now, and if it gets removed from EDH I think it would settle at around a third of its former price.

Banning potential: 8/10

 

Mana Crypt – Now it’s true that this card is both amazingly expensive and generates fast mana, two characteristics that the Rules Committee frowns upon. Eventually, this will get banned for the combination, though it’s hilarious to see someone take 12 damage over the first five turns from this. It’s got Eternal formats buoying the price, though, so banning in Commander will only make a small dent in the prices.

Banning potential: 7/10

 

Tooth and Nail – Even at the high mana cost of this entwined, it’s rather degenerate. It’s not that much worse than Green Sun’s Zenith or Chord of Calling or other such cards, but I’m just tired of the same combos popping up. Name your combo, and it’s been done a bunch.

Banning potential: 6/10

If I left off your personal boogeyman when it comes to cards that need to be banned, feel free to mention it in the comments.

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