By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

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Don’t miss this week’s installment of MTG Fast Finance! An on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important Magic economy changes.

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Eternal Masters spoilers wrapped up last Friday, and general reaction has been quite favorable. While not every card made it in – I’ve seen no shortage of jokes and hand wringing regarding Damnation and the lack thereof – people are all-in-all pleased with the outcome. While people weren’t exactly clamoring for Chome Mox or Vindicate, cards like Mana Crypt, Karakas, Natural Order, and Sneak Attack are great “accessibility” reprints, and Gamble, Force of Will, Entomb, and Shardless Agent provide opportunities to pick up foils that otherwise didn’t exist, are ugly as hell, or were exorbitantly expensive. All in all, Magic is better for the release.

The question now is how should we approach it? This is tough, especially because what each one of us wants out of it is different. Is your intention to sit on sealed product? Are you looking to spec on targeted singles? Or maybe you’re more in my camp; mostly interested in just picking up a few personal items for as cheap as possible.

Sealed Product

Three years ago, Modern Masters hit the shelves. Supply was constrained and while you could occasionally and briefly find product at MSRP, there wasn’t much of it. I saw a few boxes floating around the $220 mark, but there weren’t many, and it was limited to local pockets.

In February I wrote an article about what to do with sealed MMA product. I concluded that it was getting time to start selling, and that cracking for singles was probably the right idea, but that leaving boxes sealed was only marginally less profitable, and accounting for time, probably a better idea overall.

Quite recently, the equation has begun to shift. Sealed MMA boxes have seen an uptick in sale prices. eBay completed auctions jumped into the $370 to $400 range, and the TCGLow has similarly moved, and in fact, there’s only a handful of boxes under $400. The two boxes I’ve had sitting there since I wrote the article suddenly sold for around $375 each. Before fees that’s about $150 profit on a box. (After, it’s a lot closer to $100.) $100 profit on a $220 investment is a little less than a 50% return, in the span of three years. 50% ROI over three years is pretty great, especially when you consider that it’s a lot easier to put thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into – and get back out of – boxes than it is one dollar rares.

Modern Masters 2015 had a different print run; one which was considerably larger. Today, a full year since release, boxes are still available at $240. That’s MSRP; 24 packs at $10 each. I don’t recall exactly how much MMA boxes were one year later, but I know it wasn’t MSRP. This is no doubt due to a few factors. I don’t expect that the natively higher MSRP on MM2 was a culprit, but the overall lower quality of reprinted rares has certainly stymied interest. In addition it had a much larger print run than MMA. It’s really difficult to put a ratio on that, since we don’t get official sales numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if MM2 had anywhere between 30 and 100 percent more boxes available than MMA. I’ve even heard projections as high as fives times MMA. That glut of supply, combined with a less-exciting rare slot, has kept prices from rising. Of course, it’s only been a year. How will boxes look after three? I don’t know and that’s not today’s article.

Those Vegas GPs played no small part in the supply of both sets either. MMA had Las Vegas, while MM2 had Las Vegas, Chiba, and Utrecht. With a player count just south of 8,000 for Las Vegas alone, there were roughly 2,000 boxes of MM2 opened in the main event. If each store was allocated maybe 20 boxes of MM2, that means Las Vegas accounted for 100 stores worth of product. How many states worth of stores is that? I’d guess New York has what, 50 stores maybe? This also doesn’t account for all the side event product, or the other two GPs. All in all, I’d guess the entire GP weekend cracked enough MM2 packs to match a large portion of the entire eastern seaboard’s distribution.

Of course, EMA has no such GP. That’s thousands of packs going uncracked. And given distributor numbers so far, it looks like we’re getting far less EMA than we did MM2, and possibly even MMA. There’s also an expectation that distributors and local stores are going to hold product a lot closer to the chest this time around. With diminished supply and a built-in pedigree of distinction, there’s an incentive to slowly dole out your allocated boxes. I’m reminded of the diamond market.

The sum of all this is that if you can get boxes at MSRP, it’s basically a slam dunk. I’m pretty sure the expected value is over MSRP at this point anyways, so essentially you’d be a fool not to buy it at that price. What about north of MSRP though? I’m seeing boxes in the $300 to $350 range, which is already 50% over MSRP. That’s, well, brutal. Remember I made 50% profit on my MMA boxes over the course of three years. At the same time, there’s simply less EMA out there, it will generally be more desirable, the cards are less likely to be reprinted, and if they do run back another Eternal Masters, it will be missing many of the cards it has this time around. Sure, you’ll see Force of Will and Wasteland return, but what about Gamble or Mana Crypt?

Overall, I’d say paying less than $300 is reasonably safe. I can’t imagine how you lose money on that, so the worst case scenario is that you end up outing it to someone local for basically what you paid. Boxes at MSRP are a home run, and if you find one at that price that you can’t afford you call your friend and tell them to get their ass to the store. The possible upside on boxes is also large, as if the distribution numbers end up landing where we’re predicting them to, prices could end up in the $500+ range in a few years. For those of you looking to make some real money on Magic investments, you could do a lot worse.

All the Single Ladies

Here’s a photo that was shared by fellow writer Jim Casale. (No idea who created it.)

Those are all the cards, as of probably a week ago, that are worth more than the cost of a pack. Prices have begun slipping on the low end, with Shardless Agent, Vindicate, and Maelstrom Wanderer beginning to fall below $10. Of course, single prices will be at their absolute highest right now, since we’re in maximum hype/minimum supply territory. In about a month we’ll probably see several more dip beneath double digits.

Here’s roughly what we can expect:

Across the top ten or so MMA cards, most saw their local valleys between mid-October and early December. I’d expect EMA singles to follow a similar pattern. Most sets usually see their floors several months after printing, and it just so happens that a set released in June hits that time period during the shopping frenzy ahead of Christmas, when wallets are thin and attention is directed elsewhere. That’s when I’ll be shopping for my singles, and I’d recommend the same for you too.

Although really, I’ll be looking for foils, and waiting may not be ideal. Here’s a handful of foil price graphs, to contrast the non-foils above.

It would seem that while non-foils enjoy a cooling off period over the span of several months, we shouldn’t hold our breath for the same thing on shiny copies. Prices will be erratic as people try and figure out what foil prices should be in the days leading up to and directly after release, but once they find their foothold, I don’t foresee any dramatic drops in price. In fact, if we’re modeling our predictions on MMA, you’re far more likely to get blown out by waiting. Most MMA foils were close to their floor in the weeks and months following release, and then experienced various rates and severities of growth. It would appear that the lesson here is that waiting is a fool’s game. By the end of July, you should have already begun to acquire any foils you’re seeking. It may be burdensome attempting to trying to cover the cost of several large ticket foils early on, but you’re likely to save yourself money in the long run being proactive here.

Specul8’n

I’m not going to pick out exactly what cards you want to spec on quite yet. I’d like another few weeks of price data before we begin honing in on specific targets, and with some time before non-foils settle down, we can make informed decisions. As we just discussed, the floor on non-foils tends to land in mid-fall. If you really feel compelled to start jumping on the EMA train today though, I’d look for uncommon foils like Hydroblast or Pyroblast, or inexpensive rare foils. While there’s a lot of attention and excitement around big ticket cards, these small foil items may experience dramatic roller coasters over the next few weeks, especially without reliable price data. Use your best judgment while seeking deals and you may manage to get your hands on some foil uncommons for what ends up being below buylist.

One quick aside for today: have any of you checked out the price on the original San Diego Comic-Con Planeswalker sets? They’re now selling – actually selling – for $600. Holey moley. A lot of people grabbed them in the $200 to $300 range when they were released, which means big profits for anyone that scored some. I swear I remember seeing someone that grabbed like 45 or some such nonsense…

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Man, was GP Charlotte just the biggest mess in Grand Prix history? There must be something in the water down there that results in calamitous errors. Last time, it was a “day one-and-a-half” problem where players had to play a single round at 8am on Sunday morning that would determine whether they would get to continue to play in day two. This time, the Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro Subsidiary (WotCaHS) Event Reporter (WotCaHSER) broke after round four, with the result that the following five rounds would be played with random swiss pairings. 7-0s playing against 0-7s, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. For those of us not directly involved in the madhouse, it was a source of resigned humor. WotCaHS continues to do an excellent job with anything printed on paper, but as soon as a computer is involved, they’re incompetent to the point of gross negligence. If Magic players weren’t a customer, but rather a client, and WotCaHS was a contractor, there’d be a lawsuit.

Anyways, a bunch of Modern was played this weekend. You’ll remember that not long ago (when Shadows Over Innistrad was released) that Modern experienced some large shakeups. Eye of Ugin was banned, ameliorating the broken-format-in-a-can that was Oath of the Gatewatch, and two highly impactful cards were unbanned, namely Ancestral Vision and Sword of the Meek. Now that we’ve gotten several solid weeks of MTGO grinding under our collective belt, what’s Modern looking like?

  

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, I can’t recommend highly enough that you sign up. This weekend, while answering Tumblr questions, this beauty popped up:

Within minutes the Magic twitterverse was falling over itself trying to figure out what to make of this. Were they repealing the Reserve List? Leaving it standing, but removing specific cards? Could this have to do with the new CEO? I’m sure I’m not the only one who almost immediately began thinking about the 40 Revised duals in my binder. Then, not long after, this popped up:

Whether it was Tumblr’s mistake (possible) or user error (likely), the whole tempest in a teapot was over not long after it began. It was a fun two hours though!

Aaaaanyways, over at Grand Prix Secaucus this weekend, we were treated to Sam Black making everyone get real excited because he was resolving The Great Aurora late in day two while making a run at (and missing) the top eight. What more could fans of Magic possibly want to see on one of the game’s largest stages? Competitive decks casting Seasons Past and The Great Aurora is basically all of our hopes and dreams realized; it’s the Magic we all loved as beginners and were then told isn’t good enough for constructed. Nine mana may as well be single payer healthcare, sorry buddy. Stick to one drops, incremental gains, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Really, The Great Aurora is Bernie Sanders’s campaign as a Magic Card.

While the price hasn’t moved (much) on TGA yet, it may by the time this goes live. And even if it doesn’t, that’s mostly because Black was only running one copy. Yet Seasons Past was in the $6 to $10 range shortly after Pro Tour Shadows Over Innistrad, and Finkel was running just one additional copy, for a total of two. I’m sure that the fact that it was the Pro Tour and it was Jon Finkel helped there quite a bit.

Several weeks ago, when Shadows Over Innistrad was still being cracked at release events, a UR control list showed up at the first SCG Open of the year that ran Pyromancer’s Goggles to great effect. The price exploded, and after a strong follow-up performance a week later, the price was surprisingly resilient. Pyromancer’s Goggles, a five mana artifact that taps for a single red mana the turn it comes into play. That’s a far cry from the safe choice of Town Gossipmonger.

That’s three (I guess maybe two and a half) large, splashy, “that’s an EDH card” cards that have made big waves in Standard all of the sudden, with price tags to match. Seeing cards like this become relevant in Standard is uncommon, and it feels like we’ve seen more of it in the last six months than average. Still, it seems as if there’s a strong incentive to look towards these huge, EDH-caliber cards. What if we look backwards?

I flipped through all the cards that were at least six mana and jumped out at me as specifically EDH cards over the last few years. I also included artifacts down to four mana, since there were specifically a few cheap ones I wanted to think about: Alhammatret’s Archive and The Chain Veil, for instance.

I also only included cards that had price points I considered relevant. Resolute Archangel is an awfully EDH card, but with a current price of $.25 and no upward movement, it’s not really worth considering right now. Same with Hedonist’s Trove. Hornet Queen, on the other hand, while having 0% gains, is already at least $1, saw a lot of movement at one point in time, and is subjectively a more relevant card.

This list is entirely subjective of course; Worldfire screams EDH to me even though it’s banned, and I probably skipped over something you would have listed. I’m also not sure how popular a card like Elderscale Wurm is, though it seems quite reasonable in the format. In any case, let’s call it a non-comprehensive and imperfect list.

This is all the cards, sorted by the percent gain they’ve seen since they were released. Right at the top is Pyromancer’s Goggles, one of the many gifts Magic Origins has given us. At the bottom is Ugin’s Nexus, a card whose price has basically not changed. Some of the prices here have more going on than is obvious at first glance. For instance, Primeval Bounty was played in Standard, and had some price movement back then. Similarly, Hornet Queen was more expensive than it is today thanks to Standard.

I’m going to cut out all the cards whose prices are currently predicated on competitive demand. This is cards like Pyromancer’s Goggles and Seasons Past. Those are very compelling reasons to consider picking up cheap EDH cards, but that’s a bonus, not a reliable feature, and I want to think about these cards mostly as long-term casual staples instead. I’m leaving a card like Hornet Queen though, because even though it was popular in Standard at one time, the price today is entirely due to EDH. You’ll also see The Great Aurora on here, because its price isn’t based on competitive play — yet.

Would you have guessed Boundless Realms is the most profitable EDH card printed in the last 4 years or so? I wouldn’t have! At least, the most profitable high-cmc card. 550% growth is no joke, and had you bought a few hundred of these at their low point, you’d be a richer man for it.

In order to unpack this list, we’ll look at it through a few filters. First, I want to look at card types. How do artifacts fare?

Wow, artifacts look excellent. 7 of the top 11 slots are artifacts. Is part of that perhaps that I included artifacts with a lower CMC than the other spells? I don’t think so. Only one artifact with strong gains fell below my six mana cutoff; Gilded Lotus. The other three that fall below that threshold are also the three with the smallest gains in the top half.

You’ll also notice that the older they are, the better they look. All the best performing artifacts are oldest, with the four smallest gains coming on on the four youngest copies.

Clearly there’s a strong correlation here. Artifacts as a card type do great. Is this because  they can be cast in any deck? Possibly. Probably. Aside from The Chain Veil and maybe Darksteel Forge, those are all cards I would consider fairly universal, as in most EDH decks would be happy to play any or all of them.

How about Sorceries?

These are much more distributed than artifacts, but given how dense artifacts are at the top, they couldn’t not be. We see that the best performing card in our list is in fact a sorcery, but also so is one of the cards with 0% gain. Overall, they’re evenly spread through the list.

There’s no noticeable correlation with converted mana costs amongst sorceries as far as I can tell, though I do see that age is fairly important. There’s a clear trend towards towards younger cards as you move from top to bottom, especially if you ignore Worldfire, which again, is currently banned in EDH. That’s certainly worth noting — age seems to play a big part in the value of sorceries, and probably most cards. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody of course. The older a card is, the fewer copies there are, and the higher prices are pushed.

Speaking of age, let’s look at that metric.

With age in months color coded, there’s a distinct trend. Older cards take up a lot more real estate at the top of the chart than the bottom. If you kick out Woldfire and Elderscale Wurm, a creature whose prevalence in EDH I’m beginning to question, it becomes even more pronounced. Now notice that Primeval Bounty, one of the oldest, least-impressive cards started at $3.50, making large gains tougher than if it had started at $1. Were it ever that cheap, it would be the second largest gain on our chart!

We saw trends in both artifacts and sorceries that age is an indicator of gains, and this graph serves to lend strength to that notion.

Huh, creatures have not done too well. Even Diluvian Primoridal, a creature of unquestionable utility in EDH and over three years old, still hasn’t broken a $1. This isn’t a foil/nonfoil thing either; foils are like $2. I guess Colossus of Akros did fairly well, though that is an awfully splashy creature in a way that few others are. (Cool tidbit: @deejfordicus is the model for Colossus.) Hornet Queen, another extremely powerful creature in the format, is also quite low. It’s also not been too long since a reprint either. Will Hornet Queen end up on the top end of this chart in a year or two? It doesn’t seem unreasonable, though the sub par performance of creatures in general isn’t inspiring. Endbringer is also a creature I could see show up in nearly every EDH deck down the road, but will it be enough to buoy it above $2?

Finally, does converted mana cost matter?

Nope.

One thing I’d really like to look at, but don’t know how, is some sort of power level metric. I think about a card like Rise of the Dark Realms, which almost always wins its caster the game, compared to a spell like Ghastly Conscription, which seems like a much worse version of the same effect. I have no way to measure this though. At first I thought I could use EDHREC’s prevalence feature, which tells me how many decks out of their entire database a card shows up in, but it’s not accurate at all because it doesn’t account for cost. Woodland Cemetery shows up in three times more decks than Bayou, and the latter is unquestionably better than the former. Similarly, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale only shows up in a little over 100 decks — do you think that’s because it’s not a strong card, or because people can’t afford the $1,000 for an EN copy? It’s really unfortunate we don’t have a reliable way to rate cards like this, because I think it would be quite telling. This is where the MTG in “mtg finance” comes in I guess. You need to use your knowledge as a player to differentiate which are truly powerful spells.

Our rough-hewn analysis has revealed a few trends. Artifacts definitely seem to perform best, with sorceries taking a distant second. Creatures historically haven’t stacked up well — at least, not the high mana cost ones. (Solemn Simulacrum would have been at the top of the list had I included him, but he’s a touch too old. Lower CMC cards would be a different list though.) Age is certainly a factor in price, though being old doesn’t mean a card has to be expensive.

All of those charts cut the competitive cards too, remember. Pyromancer’s Goggles and Seasons Past were near the top of the chart, and Omniscience would have been first had I used it’s historical lows and highs; $4 and $40 respectively. Had you bought in right away at their lows you would have made bank, yet that begs the question, had they not broken out in constructed, would they still have been windfalls? That’s a future we’ll never know, though I’m willing to bet at least Omniscience and perhaps Goggles would have done well.

There’s another thing I want to show you too. Here’s the price graph for Rise of the Dark Realms:

That’s a slow, steady growth over time. No cliffs and walls here. Just consistent demand coupled with attrition. Most of the cards on the list look something like that. If it isn’t quite that smooth, it’s a series of steppes instead, which is basically the same thing. Given what we’ve seen about how age works — older cards are more likely to be valuable — and the price graph above, there’s a reasonably obvious answer about when to buy. We’re definitely incentivized to pick up our copies nearly as soon as the card is printed, or at least during the card’s lull a few weeks after release. Grabbing a card that’s already two to three years old may be too late, or at least, will be less profitable. Either it’s a card that’s rising, in which case after two years you’ve already waited too long, or the price is still flat after two years, in which case it may be a dud. In other words, buying any of the cards on the list above that aren’t at least as new as Battle for Zendikar may be a bad idea. I could see Clone Legion; in fact, I kind of like that one, but it’s still fairly fresh all things considered. Ugin’s Nexus though? Ghastly Conscription? No thanks.

Overall, it looks like anything we pick up we’ll most likely be in for the long haul, unless we get stupidly lucky such as with Pyromancer’s Goggles. We should definitely look at huge, powerful artifacts, or ones that do great things for your mana, such as Gilded Lotus or Chromatic Lantern. (Latern didn’t show up on our list because it was too cheap, but have you seen the price of that card lately?) Sorceries are good too, but you want ones that really do something. Boundless Realms ramps you for like six or seven. Rise of the Dark Realms often kills your opponents on resolution. Don’t worry too much about mana cost in either direction; so long as it has a profound effect, it’s good. And creatures in general are unexciting, though I admit to being drawn to Endbringer and Hornet Queen.

As for me? I’ll probably stash some of The Great Aurora, some Clone Legion, Endbringer (because I’m dumb), and possibly Alhammarret’s Archive if I can find them for a good price, because that card is stupid. I’ll also begin watching each new set closely for the gigantic EDH staples and begin buying in much sooner than I have in the past.

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