Category Archives: Casual Fridays

Casual Fridays

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: How I’m using CardSphere

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Here we go, prerelease weekend! I’m planning on attending a midnight prerelease, because I am indeed crazy like that. I hope yours goes amazingly, you open well and play better, and that you trade everything away as fast as you can this weekend.

That’s basic advice that I give every time a new set comes around, and it remains true. Some of the Hour of Devastation cards are going to spike, eventually, but I am bad at that guessing game.

I know prices are at their max for most of these cards, and they are going to fall. I’m looking to out them pronto.

Which leads me nicely into today’s topic: Cardsphere, and why you should be using it too.

Full Disclaimer: I am not an employee of CS. I am going to give my experiences and my viewpoint. I have bought value on this site, I have sent and received cards. I’ve been a user for about six weeks. I advocated for Pucatrade, and I’m advocating here too. Your experience may be different than mine, and I hope you have as good an experience as I have had.

Now, I want to refer you to an interview that MTG Fast Finance did with the founders of Cardsphere a while back, but that was before it went into public launch. The interview is worth a listen, for the philosophy and the backstory, but let’s get to how you should use it and what is happening there.

If you’ve used Pucatrade at all in the past couple of years, the idea is the same: It’s a trading environment. You send off your cards for currency, and you can get cards for that currency. The primary difference is that the currency in CS is straight cash, US dollars. You can get your dollars out of their system and into your account, for a fee.

Otherwise, it’s a similar economic system. Because it’s in real dollars, the offers tend to be adjusted downwards, where they were going up and up and up in Pucatrade, since that was in a currency locked into their system. It’s an interesting flip: On Puca, the question was ‘How many extra points do I need to offer for someone to send me this card?’ On CS, it’s ‘How low can I go with my offer and still get the card I want?’

Philosophically, the experience with CS is that you’ll have to decide how far off of retail you can go. You’re setting your own wants, and how much extra you’ll give/take away. Then, when sending cards, you decide how much you want to get.

Right now, here’s what is happening. Granted, this is only my experience. I’m not trying to trade up for things (yet) but I have been getting cards for my uncommons Cube, building a Standard deck, and building a new Commander deck.

The experience has been amazing.

I am someone who did very well off of Puca in the salad days. I bought low, sold high, accumulated points. I got SDCC walkers, I got a Gaea’s Cradle, and a judge foil Sol Ring. Future Site hit, and the values tanked. Inflation is going mad there. I’ve gotten myself down to 92 points there, and while I’m monitoring the site and the subreddit to stay informed, I’m no longer putting cards or a subscription into that economy.

I say this so you’ll get what I mean when I say that the CS experience is wonderful. I can’t keep credit for more than a day or two. I have had a range of wants filled, and while I haven’t chased any foils, or any high end cards, I’m having a steady churn and it’s fun. I’ve been asking for uncommons and commons at about +20%, to make it worth sending, and most of my wants for Commander are between 0% change and -20%. I got a Deadapult for +50%, because that’s a crap rare and I wanted to make someone feel good about sending it.

I am seeing that there are two categories of offers on CS: The full-value (or nearly) or higher, for people that want to get stuff right away, and there’s the lowballers, the ones who are literally offering buylist prices plus ten percent. I’m finding that the offers at 90%-110% get filled fast, and the 60% and less offers take a lot longer to be sent.

Which is fine and the freedom of the platform, quite frankly. I would surely have a standing order to buy foil Thought-Knot Seer at $15 if someone wanted to sell them at that price, and then that person pays for the shipping to send it to me? Done and done.

Cardsphere is also doing an excellent job with transparency and feedback. The founders and other admins are very active on Discord and Reddit, the home page shows exactly the userbase and flow of cards, the most wanted and most traded, plus weekly updates on how cards are being traded. Here’s an example post. (It’s Reddit, while this post is safe for work huge swaths of the site aren’t, be forewarned.)

This image shows the quartiles of the trades being made, by % of value, for the month of June. Someone listed a card that was a dollar or less and put it at 224%. Someone else sent a card at 21% of that value. Hopefully that was part of a package. Someone listed a $5-$10 card at 7% of its value…and someone else sent the card at that price.

Where I feel really great is that last column. Of the $25-$50 cards traded, there’s a real packing together. Nothing under 71%, nothing over 110%. Should I decide to go for higher-value cards, it’s nice to know they will be there.

Cardsphere is growing slowly but surely. They have increased membership by more than two thousand users since they went live on May 27 of this year. As I said before, I put in $40 at the beginning and it’s given me a bit better value than I would have gotten on eBay or TCG, but the ability to send out stuff and get stuff back…I’d forgotten how much fun it is. Go try it! Costs you nothing but a stamp.

I’m going to be sending out all I can of Hour of Devastation on Saturday afternoon. See you there!

Cliff is an avid believer in saving money for stuff that isn’t Magic, and his goal is to enjoy this hobby without paying cash for individual cards. Drafts and other events are fine, but buying singles stings. It’s just cardboard! Nothing has the EV of Cubing, though, so that’s a solace to his cold, Scroogelike heart. Find him on Twitter @wordofcommander and tell him about the three ghosts that will be visiting him.

Casual Fridays

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Devastating Preorders

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Hopefully you’ve read enough of what we write here to know that pre-ordering cards is usually a bad idea.  Cards are overhyped and usually very overpriced, but there’s something kind of unusual going on with Hour of Devastation: The preorder prices are remarkably…sane.

Today I want to look at a couple of the reasons why that might be, and if that means we’ve turned a corner as Magic vendors and players. We don’t want $40 Day’s Undoing, or $50 Chandra, Torch of Defiance.

Idea #1: We are more patient

We all know that a set’s value goes down over time as more and more packs are opened. That’s true of any set, for any of its time as the set that’s being opened at FNM and Grand Prix events. Even the Masters-level sets that are only reprints, those follow the same curve most of the time.

We’ve learned that unless you’re going to be using these cards the very very first weekend, you’ve got time.  Even waiting a week or two can be worth a lot to someone who isn’t a pro player. Preordering cards is devastating from a feel-bad perspective, and hopefully people who have done that have learned their lesson.

Imagine being someone who looked at the Amonket previews, and saw Gideon of the Trials. You know he’s good with the Gideon, Ally of Zendikar deck you’re already playing. You think, “It must be worth this much or people wouldn’t be paying this much!” and you plunk down $160 for a playset.

That card, one of the banners of the set, a three-drop planeswalker, can be had for $40 a playset now. So that’s a painful lesson to learn.

Is this permanent: God, I hope so. I fervently want to believe that players will not break their bank trying to get out ahead of the new cards, but I doubt it in the long-term.  New players might not listen to others who have learned, and new cards are always going to sucker us in.

 

Idea #2: We are stretching our Magic dollars

This is something that Wizards/Hasbro has been doing to us for a couple of years now: We are getting more and more Magic products each year, each designed to suck our wallets dry.

Have you seen this list? That’s a murderer’s row later this year, and that’s before you take into account all the stuff we’ve already had this past seven months, which includes a Masters set, three regular sets (I’m including Hour of Devastation) and two different Anthology releases.

I don’t think there’s a market for those who buy every single product released, but that’s a lot to spend money on.

Is this permanent: Unless the company decides to slow it down, apparently this is the world we live in.  Let’s also not forget that the Magic Digital Next program is also coming, and that might be a whole new siphoning off of money. Heaven help us, they are going to keep making a zillion products a year.  Budget accordingly.

 

Idea #3: The cards aren’t that powerful

I’m not saying that they aren’t good, but they sure aren’t backbreaking. The set (so far, the full set should drop the day this article is published) has a cycle of undercosted ‘exert sorceries’ where your lands don’t untap for a turn, but everything else looks to cost a little too much for that effect.

Perhaps this is the overcompensation of stuff like Smuggler’s Copter being two mana? Perhaps this was meant to be part of an 18-month Standard which was more midrange-focused? I don’t know the answer, or if from time to time, we just get a slightly clunkier set.

I want to reiterate that point, though: Just because we don’t have a ‘pushed’ card doesn’t mean these aren’t going to be players in formats going forward. Right now, though, only a few of the mythics and none of the rares are preordering for more than the retail price of a Fatal Push.

Is this permanent: Likely not. There will be undercosted, overpowered cards again. None of them have been shown in this set, though.

Idea #4: The cards are just worth less due to Masterpieces

This is an idea that’s been explored several times, and the summary is as follows: When Masterpieces are in a set, they account for some of the value of the set. If cards have a total value that’s higher than the cost of a box at the distributor’s price, then retailers will crack those packs themselves and sell the singles.

We saw this recently at work, with Battle for Zendikar block and Shadows over Innistrad block.  The Expeditions helped push the prices of other cards down, except for Gideon and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. Basically, more packs of BfZ block got opened to find those lands, and that meant a lot more of the other cards were released into the world. When the Masterpieces weren’t present, we had a more even distribution of value.

Is this permanent: We already know it isn’t. While the Masterpieces are helping make Standard be the cheapest it’s been in a while, they are running out of cards quickly. There’s some real clunkers in the Invocation series. Divert? Super niche. Diabolic Edict? Who was clamoring for more copies of this? They have already announced that Masterpieces won’t be in every single set going forward, so this effect will certainly vanish.

 

Cliff is an avid player and frugal financier. His love of unusual Cubes and formats is resulting in some very interesting Magic experiences, and Grand Prix events have been offering him all sorts of new ways to play this amazing game.

Casual Fridays

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Amonkhet Stock Watch

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There’s a lot of reasons why Amonkhet prices are falling as fast as they are, from Invocations to peak supply to a lack of new toys to play with, considering we’re about to get all of Hour of Devastation and we know a lot about Ixalan already.

With the Hour upon us, and prereleases next weekend, it’s time to take a look at the trajectories of some of these cards and see where they have to go. There are still packs of Amonkhet being opened, and while that’s going to exert some downward pressure, the historical data tells us that most prices won’t fall too much further.

Want some examples? Sure. Let’s start with a rollercoaster of a card: Panharmonicon.

 

So it spiked to $10 right away as people tried brewing midrangey value decks with it, and those were sweet. They were not winners, and Panharmonicon had been trickling down ever since.

I didn’t highlight when Aether Revolt came out. Looking at the graph, can you tell when it did? Maybe you know release dates off the top of your head.

See that spike in January? That’s when Aether Revolt came out, and there were decks trying to brew with this again, and it tapered off quickly. (I think this card is a steal at $2, which you can find on eBay. Foils at $10 or less are even better value.)

How about something more basic? Botanical Sanctum.

You already know when the second set came out, and you can see how the price barely moved. The demand was pretty steady, until pretty recently when everyone figured out that Marvel was the best deck, and now it’s banned.

 

With this data in mind, let’s look at some Amonkhet cards and see where they might be going.

 

Rhonas the Indomitable ($13 nonfoil/$23 foil/$52 Invocation) – What’s interesting is how little play this is currently seeing in Standard. It’s become a spicy one-of in assorted Collected Company decks in Modern, as a powerful attacker and also another way to use infinite mana if you haven’t drawn the Duskwatch Recruiter. If something comes along to make it good, it’ll spike (generically useful advice!) but barring that, this will continue to trickle downwards and will likely end up at $10 or so.

Gideon of the Trials ($12/$24) – Oh how the mighty have fallen. This was preordering for $40! I hope you’re not preordering anything from Hour of Devastation. Just don’t do it. Haven’t you learned? That’ll be its own article soon.

Anyway, Gideon v6 (I’m counting Kytheon, Hero of Akros) was heralded as an unstoppable force in Legacy, as a combo enabler in Modern, and as a three-mana planeswalker, shouldn’t be underestimated in Standard.

He’s played mostly in Modern now and is making no waves in Standard at this time. He’s going to end up at $8 or less, and hopefully you’ve learned your lesson.

Vizier of the Menagerie ($6/$16) – No one is trying to make this work in any constructed format. This is a casual card, all the way. It started out at $10, and hasn’t fallen very far, and that’s mainly because this is an auto-include in almost any green Commander deck, and that’s absorbing the supply at a pretty good pace. I actually don’t think this will fall any farther, and it’ll stay stable until we get to Ixalan, at which point it might even start trending upwards.

Glorybringer ($4/$10) – You’d be impressed at the number of big hasty beaters who have never had a big price. Thundermaw Hellkite. Stormbreath Dragon. Either version of Kolaghan. And so on. This was $10 at first but the price has stabilized, and I don’t think it’ll go any lower. A pickup of this at $4 (or less!) is a decent one, but I’m not going to get too happy or too deep. Not many decks will seek to run a full four of these.

Sweltering Suns ($4/$6) – Yeah, take a look at that foil multiplier. I can’t recall the last time foils and nonfoils of a rare were that close in price, but here we are. The card is showing up in a lot of sideboards in Standard, and it’s a fun card to put in your UR control deck. The extra spicy tech in that deck is how Thing in the Ice is going to come down anyway, and live through the Suns. Nothing telegraphs a sweeper like refusing to play a creature into it.

It’s not common for us to see a card slowly rise like this over time. Usually, we see spikes as someone figures it out and does well, but this is getting play here, and there, and in this sideboard, and it’s possibly better in Modern than Anger of the Gods (you want cycling or you want exile, take your pick) but it’s a card that is a good contender to keep going up. Three damage is enough to kill almost everything played before turn three, and if you can get the double red, it’s hard for this to not get at least two creatures. And it cycles!

I’m not advocating buying Sweltering Suns right now. It’d have to go up in price tremendously to be worth it. I would, however, trade for them slowly and hold onto them for a while, because it’s going to be climbing more.

Cliff is an avid Cuber these days, having played far too many Commander games that lasted two hours. He first opened a pack of Revised in late 1994, and has been writing about Magic for longer than he’s been a father. He’s always on the lookout for value or weird ways to play.

Casual Fridays, ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: What We Learned (so far!)

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So I think we need to be honest: while a lot of the attention and coverage is on the triple Grand Prix in Vegas and all the associated silliness, there’s a lot still going on, especially as this is Announcements Week!

I’m not here to remind you of what’s happened. If you have a Twitter account, if you even glance at the Magic subreddit, if you engage at all the you’ll read this and not need me to tell you the base news, but there are some things worth taking away from all the stuff that’s gone on.

I’m going to be referring to this site quite often for the next year or so: the ‘Coming Soon’ page. This is a list of what’s coming out and when, though some specific dates aren’t on there, it’s at least a month/year listing.

Financially speaking, there’s a whole lot of things to be aware of. It’ll be up to you about what action to take.

The Masters Sets

We’ve had expensive times in Magic before. I don’t think we’ve had anything to compare to this, though. In one 12-month period, we will have had Modern Masters 2017, Iconic Masters, and 25th Anniversary Masters, or Masters 25 as they are calling it, and I devoutly hope a better name comes along before then. I get that it has to say ‘Masters’ in there someplace, to continue the naming convention, but wow that makes for awkward branding.

Those three sets represent 747 reprinted cards, in just one year. There might be some overlap, there might not.

Why we care: Reprint risk has been at an all-time high lately, and this is a pure minefield. Something like Conspiracy would at least have some new cards, but this is all reprints and all will likely have the one-foil-per-pack setup we’ve gotten used to.

I don’t know what they are going to print and speculation is rampant. We’ve had a lot of reprints covered in the Masterpiece series (more on that in a second) but right now, I’m taking stock of what I’ve accumulated and if the value has appreciated enough, I’m going to look at moving it. This many reprints in this short of time is a minefield, and I want to minimize what’s going to hurt. I don’t think you can escape, if you have a lot of cards you’re holding long-term.

 

From the Vault: Transform

One of the things that’s come up over the years is the logistical difficulties of printing double-faced cards, and how safe those are from being reprinted. I wonder if anyone thought this would be the solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. There’s only 92 cards that are completely double-sided, and 59 of those are from the last two years. Will they have fixed the terrible appearance of FTV? Will these somehow curl on both sides?

Why we care: The quick consensus seems to be that Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy is going to be the expensive card of the set, and Delver of Secrets seems like an easy inclusion…and then what? I freely admit that I’d been quietly picking up foils of Archangel Avacyn, and that seems likely to take a hit. Are we going to get the Arilinn Kord reprint we didn’t need? There’s not a lot of value in double-faced cards, and what value there is, is about to take a major hit.

I think a Meld pairing is going to be included, but which? I think Hanweir, the Writhing Township is most likely the choice but who knows? Will we get the full Delver trilogy? Will they do something wild, like turn the Kamigawa flip cards into full transform cards? Who knows. Would we even care? I highly doubt the prices of old flip cards would budge if new double-sided versions were premiered this way.

 

The third Un-set: Unstable

I’m exceptionally torn about this. On one hand, playing with either of the first two silver-bordered sets was an amazingly enjoyable experience. On the other, I think I would pay full price to draft this…twice? Three times, tops? We have a recent example of how this model doesn’t always work: Conspiracy: Take the Crown. It’s a lot of fun, a unique draft experience, it’s got its share of valuable cards, and yet you can still get boxes dirt cheap.

Why we care: The basic lands. When we get around to opening these packs, we are going to expect some sort of unique land design. I don’t think they can match, much less excel, the standard set by Unhinged’s minimalist approach or the beauty of John Avon’s work. I do think these will look…nice. Pretty, even. But they will need to carry all of the value, since none of these cards will be worth anything else. Foils will likely not carry much weight either, as you can’t put these in Commander decks. How many thousands of Unstable cubes will need to be created for this to be valuable?

 

The beginning of single-set blocks and the return of Core sets

This might be the biggest news of all, aside from the leaked cards. We’ve had things sort of like this before, such as a standalone third set (Rise of the Eldrazi, Avacyn Restored) or the big-big-small model of Return to Ravnica block, but this is going to be interesting. Sets will be opened for three months and that’s it. No more 6:2:1 of the three-set block, or the 3:1 ratio of two-set blocks. This is one and done. Supply will be pretty clear at that point. We also get Core sets back, which means reprint mania!

Why we care: I like the single-set model because I don’t have to worry about that trickle of packs during the second set. For example, as we go into Hour of Devastation, does the small amount of Amonkhet being opened mean the price of Anointed Procession will keep trending downwards? Core sets will likely be on the modern model of some reprints and some new cards, keeping the set interesting while providing a place to reprint stuff that might not have fit, flavor-wise, into some other block. Think of Stifle or Inquistion of Kozilek in Conspiracy 2.

 

The Ixalan Leaks

So someone who’s working on test prints for Ixalan (the set is three months away, the cards should pretty much be set in their wording, barring emergencies) decided to snap a couple of photos and spread the word. This is wrong and bad but not something that we can ignore.

Why we care: We’re about to get a new tribal-based block, with some interesting color shifts. Merfolk in green. Vampires in white! DINOSAURS! We are also about to get tribal Commander decks in August, so if stuff avoids reprints in that set and this, it’s got nowhere to go but up.

The Commander decks worry me, because, again, that’s a lot of reprints. Foils are probably safe, but only if they couldn’t possibly be in Ixalan. Something like Obelisk of Urd, where the nonfoil is an easy inclusion into a Commander product, but the keyword is ruling it out of Ixalan.

 

Masterpieces becoming rarer

Someone at Wizards must have said, “Holy crap, we’re already down to printing Divert as a super-mythic alternate frame chase card? We need to throttle back.” So Masterpieces will be back, just not in every single set. FTV: Masterpiece is probably just a couple of years away.

Why we care: Standard will be a little more expensive now without chase cards goosing the value of the product. I think this is the worst side effect of a good change. We’re too used to this, and it’s in our best interest to have this be something we are excited for, a bonus, instead of an expectation.

 

Cliff is an avid kitchen table player who’s loving the Drake Haven deck in FNM. He’s been at this since late 1994 and doesn’t appreciate being called iconic, though he’s extremely likely to build a foil Unstable cube. Find him on Twitter @WordOfCommander.