Category Archives: Conjured Currency

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Sibling Rivalry

4 Comments

Douglas, the Returned

Wow. It feels like I’ve been gone forever, but it’s only been a week. A mixture of a stomach bug and huge workload at school joined forces, so I took the week off from writing and tweeting about Magic cards. Now that we’re up and running again, I want to pick up where I left off, and continue to focus on collection buying. I don’t want to pretend to know what I’m talking about by bringing up Commander spoilers, even if it is the only format that I play anymore.

I went to Twitter two weeks ago to crowd source a collection buying topic to talk about, and Scott Munro wrote in with this gem:

tweet

While I’m lucky enough geographically to be one of the only cash buylists in a 45-minute driving distance, most of the people reading my articles and trying to level up their finance game probably don’t have that luxury. Some of you guys live within an hour or two of a huge LGS that has an iron grip on a lot of the collections that come through your area. Some of you have to compete against, well, people like me. Heck, some of the locals reading this article might even be reading it to learn how to compete against me. That’s fine, too. The content of this article originally had a lot more references and metaphors for treating your competition like your brother or sister, and how sometimes you have to give each other space and sometimes you have to work together, but… meh.

Rivalry

Anyway, there are two prevalent strategies that I want to bring up that can help you build your own personal brand as a buyer and seller of cards, without encroaching on another established buyer’s territory. One focuses on flying solo and trying to learn the weak areas of your competition, and the other involves cooperation between you and the buyers that you’re “competing” with, for lack of a better word, so that you can both end up winners.

Anytime, Anywhere

Let’s say that for argument’s sake, you have an LGS within walking distance of you. We’ll call them CardGarden, or CG. CG is a great LGS, and you love to play FNM there every week. They have solid enough buy prices that a lot of your local players will regularly sell their cards to CG when they need cash, and fair sell prices such that you can’t really catch them unawares by grabbing cards that should be priced much higher. All in all, CG is a quality LGS that you enjoy attending and playing at, even if you personally don’t buy or sell with them.

How do you buy cards locally at buylist prices when most of your players default to a known constant? Well, a brick and mortar store inherently has limitations. They can’t stay open 24/7, so there’s a window of opportunity when their doors are closed. Again, we’re going to come back to Facebook because it’s one of the hot spots for buying and selling cards locally. If it’s a Sunday evening at 9:00 p.m. and your LGS is closed, Bill might post his Modern deck on Facebook in the local group in order to pay his rent, insurance, or whatever. If Bill needs cash ASAP, you can send him a PM and he’s much more likely to negotiate with you.

While you obviously don’t always have a ton of windows where your LGS is closed, there’s also the possibility that the person selling their binder or deck doesn’t have the transportation to make it to CG. If you have a car or are able to meet the person without them putting in any actual effort, you can step up your game where the LGS is rooted to one specific location. The magic words, “I have cash in my hand and can drive to you right now,” have sealed the deal on many collections in the past several years for me, and adds an extra convenience factor to sweeten the deal even if you’re not paying as highly as the LGS.

Pure // Simple

Now, this obviously isn’t always going to work: no method here is a guaranteed get-rich-quick scheme that will leave you with thousands of players swooning at your door trying to sell collections next week. A relationship and brand take time and trust to build up, and it took me years before I had people messaging me saying, “Hey, my brother’s friend told my mom to tell me that you buy Magic cards.” With enough time and effort (and a bit of luck), I do think that it’s possible for anyone to pull it off.

Back to Bulk

Does your LGS buy bulk commons and uncommons? Most don’t, at least in my experience. Some shops also pay less on even the higher-end Legacy staples, just because there’s really no market for them in the area. I’ve seen a store offer a mere $40 for a minty Force of Will to a kid that found it in his dad’s shoe box collection. Because the owner had no experience running Legacy events, he knew that it would sit in his stock forever, and he didn’t sell on TCGplayer at all. Even if you have no way to move that Force of Will locally, it doesn’t take a brick and mortar store to message the guy on Facebook later and give him the option of $55 or $60, then flip it on TCGplayer for $85 later.

Arms Dealer

The point I’m trying to make is that there are probably some things your LGS (or other local finance grinders) try to stay away from. Maybe it’s outside of their comfort zone, or maybe they don’t know the intricacies of the outs for it. This works in your favor. If nobody else in your area buys bulk commons and uncommons, pick up that banner and make some room in your closet. If there’s something that your LGS or other buyers want to stay away from, that’s a chance for you to move in and find the person who wants that particular product without stepping on any toes.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

In that same vein, it’s entirely possible for you and other local buyers to work together. Let’s keep going with the assumption that your LGS doesn’t buy bulk. It can’t move it because it mostly sells to competitive players for Standard/Modern nights, and it’s way too much work to deal with 50,000 cards in bulk that the store owner has at his house.

Now this sounds like an opportunity. If that bulk has been sitting at his house from cracking boxes over the past few years to sell singles and he’s not going to move it, why not make an offer so that you and him can work together? Pay him $200 to get those 50,000 cards out of his basement, or maybe work out a deal where you give him cards equaling a bit more than that in value. Hell, if he knows that he has a constant out flow to incoming bulk, it gives him a reason to start taking it in at the store if he knows that he has a low-effort out that will guarantee a profit margin. He buys it from locals at $3 per thousand, then you swoop in and pick it up at $4 or $5 per thousand.

Icatian Moneychanger

End Step

Before I make my exit for the week, I just want to talk really quickly on what you don’t want to do to play the finance game with other local buyers. Getting into a bidding war with your LGS is not a good way to secure repeat customers and a positive reputation, even if it nets you a few collections or decks in the short term. Name your price, and let the customer decide where he takes his supply.

Even if you pay lower than the other buyers, you can find areas where you can make up for the raw cash with a convenience factor. If someone responds to your offer with, “CardGarden is paying $130 on this lot,” after you offered them $100, so be it. Don’t just one-up them and offer $140 just to steal the business—stick to your original number and let the seller make the call.

Being able to meet up at 11:00 p.m. in a Wal-Mart parking lot on a Saturday night to buy a collection when no one else in town wants to do so has its perks. Being open to buy anything and everything from bulk to basics will allow you to access markets that other vendors and buyers don’t want to get involved in, and it will secure you future lasting relationships that can help build your brand name. Good luck, and let us know if you have tips of your own!

Conjured Currency

Started from the Bulk and Now We’re Here

5 Comments

So has anyone found interesting lots on Facebook as a result of last week’s article? I’m curious to see if anyone found some nice decks, piles of staples, or anything else at a significant discount while using the methods I described.  That article was a sort of flashback/addition to one from almost six months ago, so I figured I might as well repeat the trend. Does anyone else remember this personal anecdote that I wrote up back in June? I wanted to explain my evolution from “random high school student and FNM grinder” to “that one guy who buys all of your Magic cards and has most of what you need for your deck.” I felt that it was successful in doing so for the most part, but it lacked in a pretty significant area that I’m surprised nobody called me out on.

Starting from (Almost) Nothing

I never really actually explained anything in detail with hard numbers about how much cash flow I started out with, how I used that initial cash flow to get cards, and the methods that I used to recycle that money into more cards and money, then into more money and cards, and slowly build a house of some sort. Almost like a house o—oh, forget it. I actually got the idea to write this article thanks to @LengthyXemit on Twitter, who just recently  put out a floor report of GP Madison for us. The afterthought at the end is actually what sparked this for me: what would you do with $100 if it was all you had to start your MTG finance portfolio?

Bonus Question:
If you had $100 to start your MTGFinance portfolio what would you buy?

“Collection at buylist” – Ogre
“Original Zendikar Lands at a quarter or less” – Ryan Bushard
“Bulk Rares at 10 cents as long as I had an out”- CoolStuffInc Buyer
“Bulk C/U at 3 per K” – Floor Grinder.
“A collection from a local player” – This editor

“Most of the above.” –Douglas Johnson

Personally, I’d try and diversity my investment a little bit, but my answer incorporates most of the above responses. I’d want some bulk commons and uncommons at $3 per thousand, a good chunk of bulk rares at a dime a piece, and a couple of small starting local or Facebook lots at approximately  buylist prices. I disagree with Ryan on the Zendikar lands, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Now let’s hop back in that time machine to when I was an FNM grinder in high school. I was lucky and had literally zero bills to pay, so any income from my unpleasant job at Kmart went straight into my only hobby.

Let’s say for argument’s sake that I only had $100 to spend on cards back then, and was starting from absolutely nothing.  We have to try and grind this $100 into $200, while keeping both cards and cash liquid at all times. Nothing loses a returning customer faster than the phrase, “Sorry, I don’t have cash at the moment. I can’t buy that.”

If we start at $100 cash, then we want to stick to getting as much bang for our buck as we can. We might not want to jump in the big pond by buying Force of Will from a local higher-end player for a buylist of $70 (even if he needs the money)—that runs the risk of the same guy coming back with another Force or equally high-end card while we have almost all of our initial hundred tied up in a single card. While there’s a chance that  we could flip the Force for $90 on TCGplayer (or more likely, Facebook) for instant return, I think it’s much more wide to go wide instead of tall with our initial investment.

If I’m a young teenager with a hundred dollars in a pool full of larger fish with big pockets, I want to attack a smaller market that they’re not bothering with. Don’t be the guy chasing after everyone else’s Expeditions lands. There are tons of competitive players with thousands of commons and uncommons sitting in their basements from sets and blocks in the past. Does your LGS even buy bulk rares? What about bulk commons and uncommons? These are common blind spots of some tournament grinders, because they just don’t want to take the time and effort involved in picking, piecing, and sorting out their cards. There’s a physical space constraint on bulk, as well, and some significant others don’t take kindly to their living rooms being full of white boxes of cardboard.

This makes bulk one of your more attractive options when starting from a low cash level. Instead of sitting on your hands for four months waiting for your Mantis Riders to jump from $.50 to $3, you could be processing thousands of cards over and over again.

Immovable Object

Another reason why we’re sticking with bulk is that there’s really no risk of it ever going down in price. Unlike buying singles, a thousand bulk commons and uncommons literally cannot go down in price. The invisible non-competitive players out there outnumber us financiers and grinders on a scale that’s probably somewhere around 10:1. Those players just want a bunch of cards to jam decks with, and you can be the one to help them do that.

How much bulk can you get for $100? Well most larger vendors at Grands Prix only pay $3 per thousand, so you’re going to want to beat that to at least be an attractive option. I personally pay $4 per thousand as long as it’s a mix of commons and uncommons, mostly English, and near mint. I know, I’m a stickler for details. If you have an out ready and waiting, you can pay $5 per thousand, like Xemit, in order to aggressively accumulate as much bulk as possible. At that point, though, people will start bringing you more bulk than you can handle. Remember that we’re on a budget here and only want as much as we can handle without having infinite number of people try to overload us. Let’s stick to $4 per thousand.

So that’s 25,000 cards, assuming we do decide to burn all of our allowance on non-rare bulk. What do we do with that many cards? Well, first, we pick them. I’m not going to go over how to pick because that’s another five articles by itself, and a lot of picking ability just comes down to first-hand experience. I will go over one of my favorite ways to get rid of bulk though, and that’s the ever so useful Craigslist.

Easily Movable Objects

Untitled

The above picture is my personal listing, which reminds me that I need to update it because it’s about to expire. My rules are very clear, and my customers knows exactly (well not exactly, because it’s 1000 randomized cards, but you get the point) what they’re getting. I realize now that I’m writing this that if you want to mirror my strategy exactly, then you need to invest a bit more in additional 1000-count boxes, but you don’t really have to use the white BCW boxes. You can use old Fat Pack boxes (they hold around 600 cards each), empty cardboard booster boxes, or even make your own out of scrap cardboard.

Did you notice that my binders, pick boxes, and that 12K-count card house are in the picture? That’s not on accident. Non-competitive players who buy your bulk commons and uncommons want to make their decks better, and you can use your own personal collection to sell cards out of to help them with that goal. This is why I believe combining bulk rares with your C/U is ultimately the best starting point, because you give your customers so much more cards per booster pack than they would have experienced at Wal-mart, and they even get to customize their decks before dropping the cash.

Alright, so let’s say that instead of buying just 25K in bulk, we only found 15K and spent $60. We also picked up a hundred or so bulk rares from BFZ and Khans block and spent $10, leaving us $30 or so for random cheap singles that we might happen to come across. We throw up a Craigslist ad and get a hit, someone looking to return to the game with three other friends without breaking the bank. If we sell them 10K of the bulk and 30 of the rares, we get $76 assuming we sell bulk rares at five for a dollar, like I do. Now we have $106, 15k left, and 70 or so rares, and that’s assuming we picked the bulk clean and found literally nothing. Simple math aside, you can see where we start to ride the value train and grow a collection. If we rinse and repeat this process several times, we can start grabbing singles that are worth selling on eBay, Facebook, and TCGplayer.

End Step

While we’re on the topic of bulk rares, sometimes you end up getting lucky once a rotation happens when you re-dig through your boxes of cards you once paid a dime for several months ago. I managed to find seven copies of Hidden Dragonslayer in my white bulk rare box, and that’s a multiplier you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. The same thing happened with Crackling Doom and Mantis Rider, so be on the lookout for potentially playable bulk rares from BFZ that could do the same. I certainly don’t hate buying Blight Herder or Felidar Sovereign for dimes if you can find competitive players looking to pawn off the remnants of their non-Gideon lottery tickets to support trading for your fetch lands.

 

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Facebook Acquisitions, Part 2

5 Comments

My definition of when I buy a “collection” has always been loose at best. I classify pretty much everything as a collection, because it’s just easier to have a category in place for when I mark it on my spending spreadsheet for the month. Even if I just buy someone’s EDH deck at buylist prices, I label it as a collection. Four thousand commons and uncommons that a Legacy player was looking to move from his basement? Also a collection in my book. Maybe I should start to refer to the smaller pickups as “acquisitions,” because I’m not buying out their entire accumulated (or collected, if you will) lot of cards. I’m just buying what they don’t need at the moment.

Lik Dis If U Cri Evertim

Back in May of this year, I wrote about my first few lots that I had purchased through Facebook at buylist prices. I’m not referring to that guy from high school on your friends list who happened to see one thing in his feed about Magic, so he sent you a private message reminding you that he still lives in the area and has a collection of cards he wants to sell you from 2003 to 2005. While those are nice and lucrative (albeit rare), I’m talking about having someone from California ship me two of her tier-one EDH decks at buylist prices. You don’t have to spend time sorting through bulk, and you just get to immediately throw the cards up on TCGplayer, eBay, or another buylist that you know will pay just a little higher than what you gave the seller.

Are these acquisitions an every-day occurrence? No, definitely not. I will say that they’ve been a more frequent find than Craigslist nowadays, and I find myself sending messages to sellers at least a few times a month on average (compared to less than once a month of finding a Craigslist ad worth sending a reply to). Not every seller is willing to take your offer of approximately buylist prices, and that’s okay. We’re there to give them options, not force-feed them our Cutco knives.

I’m going to go through my most recent collection  acquisition step by step, and try to show you how both sides can leave the conversation and transaction without being ripped off, and without feeling like you’re being ripped off.

Where Do I Find Them? 

Well, you want to be a part of a lot of Facebook groups, for one. Does this result in a somewhat unsettling amount of garbage posts that you really couldn’t care less about? Yeah, definitely. Thankfully, you quickly learn who’s a frequent poster, who to “hide” posts from, and how to immediately recognize if a post is worth your time in the first few words. To get started, I recommend joining all of the groups that I listed in the first article. All of those groups are still active, and I’ve picked up (or sold) cards in every one. In the past several months since that article has gone live, I’ve found a couple of new groups that you can also find some value in:

MTG SICK deals (Magic: The Gathering)

sickdeals

Magic: The Gathering (Buy, Sell, & Trade)

(buyselltrade)

The SICK deals page doesn’t have nearly as many “buylist”-esque posts, but I highly recommend joining it if you’re a player who still occasionally wants to buy cards for personal use. The prices are always cheaper than TCGplayer or eBay, and can be very close to buylist sometimes.

Although these are the most prominent groups that don’t correlate with a specific region, I still highly recommend networking with your local area and joining most of the region-specific groups on Facebook. Finance aside, they’re good ways to make friends, carpool for events, learn about new sales your LGS might be having, etc.

However, certain areas might have your juicy Facebook acquisitions on lockdown without you even knowing it:

scam

Derek bought up an excellent point that I had never really run into (at least that I know of): some area Facebook groups may be moderated by the same people who buy and sell collections as a source of income. If the group settings require posts to be submitted to an admin before they’re accepted, then we may very well be missing out on a lot of the sweeter deals before they even go public. While there’s unfortunately nothing we can really do about that, you’ll probably notice eventually if there just don’t happen to be any good deals at all on your local Facebook group.

Fool Me Once…. Or Not At All

Any of you who were previously aware of the Facebook MTG market are probably familiar with horror stories of players being scammed out of cards, not being paid, or their trade partners blocking them and never getting the cards they were supposed to. It sucks and it’s definitely a risk that we take anytime we deal with someone who we don’t know personally through an unregulated, third-party channel like Facebook. I’m lucky enough to have never been ripped off throughout my experiences buying on FB, but I believe that’s partially because I’ve learned to be very cautious in the steps I take before a transaction.

Before I first send money to someone else over the internet, there are a couple of basic precautions I take:

  • I want them to name me at least four out-of-state references, who I will then message and confirm the legitimacy of the person I’m trading with. The reason I try to specify out-of-state references is because it’s not too terribly difficult for any old Scamming Sammy to be a fine and upstanding citizen at his LGS or be well-known as a great guy at his local PPTQ, but turn into a ruthless shark on the pseudo-anonymity of Facebook. Sammy can easily ask his Facebook friends from the LGS or PPTQ to be his references for his online trades, and they wouldn’t be the wiser to his cheating. I want references who have dealt with Sammy through the mail, preferably those who are unbiased and have never met him in person.
  • I want physical pictures of the cards themselves before and after packaging, a tracking number, and/or shipping label receipt before I send any money. It’s easy for someone to ask Sammy for a tracking number, and he types 5479678564156469896 (or something that actually looks similar to a legitimate Paypal/USPS tracking number), and have the number “not work” during the first day or so before it gets processed. Can they still technically get around my request by taking pictures of the cards, packaging up a bag of rocks and shipping them to me with no return address? Sure, but then you’re getting into mail fraud territory and I think the number of people who are willing to go through all of that trouble is a lot lower than you’d expect.
  • packagereceiptLastly, I really recommend paying through the PayPal Goods & Services option if the cards you’re buying get to be in the hundreds-of-dollars range. At that point, you’re always better off protecting yourself, even if it is an extra three percent out of your own pocket. If I’m paying $850 for a small pile of cardboard being sent through the mail by someone that I’ve never seen before in my life, I want the support and dispute resolution of PayPal on my side.

Options

Now we’re getting to the part that you probably hoped I would start out with. Negotiating a price to buy other people’s cards at buylist prices from the comfort of your home or smartphone. Let’s look at my most recent Facebook acquisition, and how I broke the ice with my seller.

Unfortunately I didn’t save the initial post before I got the idea to write this article, but he provided a list and initially said that he was looking to get $1000 for the entire lot.

fb1

fb2

FB3

First and foremost, I always take everything to a private message discussion. I don’t want to start a bidding war in the comments section, and I don’t want to get a hundred notifications from other people commenting their offers. I comment with “PM sent” (or “PM me” if their privacy settings are too high) to ensure we can discuss everything between the two of us.

FBconvo

Thankfully this seller was very realistic about the options he had, and was very pleasant to deal with throughout the entire process. It’s not always this easy, and some sellers don’t take kindly to offers, either due to delusions of grandeur or refusing to accept the true cash price of their cards.  You don’t want to message someone who’s selling organized singles at 10-percent off of TCGplayer mid and try to offer buylist—you’ll just be wasting your time. You want to look for a post similar to this one;

FB example

Although this particular person ended up wanting way too much and was expecting an unrealistic price, you want to look for those types of key phrases. “Getting out of the game,” “need to sell soon,” “$XXX or best offer on the lot,” and “have to sell for X” all immediately set off green lights in my head.

When you’re negotiating and presenting your initial offer, you need to present yourself as an option, and make it clear that you’re not necessarily their only or their best option.

Let’s make up an imaginary scenario to demonstrate how I go through these situations. Jason has $500 TCGplayer mid worth of singles that he wants to move on Facebook as a lot and makes a post asking for $350 OBO. He gets a few comments on the thread asking for prices on certain singles, but Jason would really just rather avoid the hassle altogether and ship one package. That’s where we come in. Once we get confirmation on the important card conditions, potential foils, and other information that wasn’t visible in the initial picture, we present our offer.

“Thanks for helping to clarify with that information, Jason. $350 is a really good price and I’m sure someone else will probably pick it up at that number, but it’s just a little too high for me personally. I was going to offer $270 for the entire lot, and I can PayPal today if that makes a difference. If you end up changing your mind, you’re always welcome to message me. Good luck with the rest of your sale :)”

Instead of shoving a number down his throat, we gave him an option. A price of $350 isn’t too bad—someone might actually decide to buy at that number, and that’s okay. We didn’t want to bid against that person, anyway. However, it’s more likely that the seller won’t get another offer over the next couple of days, even if he does bump his post. We gave him the power to make a choice between taking our immediate offer, and holding out to try and get more from someone else, with no pressure or strings attached.

Sometimes, I’ll take it a step further and outline all of a seller’s other options to them as well, especially if I get the sense that they’re trying to maximize their value in selling off their collection. Explain to them that if they want to squeeze the most value out of their cards, they should probably list the higher-end singles on TCGplayer or eBay, or price the cards out individually to sell on Facebook at ten percent below the cheapest matching condition copy. Let them know about other buylists like Card Kingdom, ABU Games, or Strike Zone, and explain the process of buylisting to them if they’re foreign to the concept.

The key is to be blatantly transparent, and present them with as many options as possible. Most of these options involve getting paid more than you would pay them, but that’s fine. Fortunately, this transparency has two advantages for you in addition to giving your seller information to make their decision. The option you gave them is probably the only one that would pay them within the next day or two, and cash in hand is king. If they list their cards on eBay, they won’t reap the full benefits for multiple weeks, or even months. Buylists can take a while to process, but you’re a buylist with a very quick payment process.

The other benefit of this transparency is that it smooths the air between buyer and seller, and tension goes down. You’re no longer seen in their eyes as the “guy who’s trying to lowball me and rip me off,” because you’re the one who just told them about all of the other ways they could make more money instead of selling to you. You’re just one of their options, and you have a serious advantage on all of the seller’s other choices as long as you follow the steps to protect yourself as mentioned earlier.

I hope this helps. Happy hunting!

End result of the list earlier in the article :)
End result of the list earlier in the article. You can do this too!

 

 

 

 

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Colorless Transparency

24 Comments

(Credit for the cover photo alterations goes to Sean, @SeanOhhhh on Twitter.)

So, uhhhh… how about that Jace, eh?  Actually, I really don’t care about the card. I’ve never even owned an Origins Jace, and I certainly don’t plan on buying in at $80. You’ll hear about the mono-blue mind master in much more detail from several of my colleagues this week, so let’s move onto something much more interesting.

Something Much More Interesting

You know what? Let’s check out “today’s most interesting cards” from this past Monday, because that sounds like a fun day that I definitely picked at random.

nointerestingcards

Oh, darn. According to my ProTrader email, nothing interesting happened that day… OH, WAIT.

spawnsire today

spawninterests

So that finally happened, although I don’t think it’s a coincidence that last week’s article was literally all about Spawnsire of Ulamog and why I thought it was a good spec target at $3. When I wrote that article, the card had crept up to $4, and I even advocated *not* buying in anymore if you were trying to make a profit. Parroting last week, buying in at $4 means that you’re hoping for the card to hit $8 or $9 before you can start to see worthwhile and noticeable margins. As a personal rule, I don’t buy unless I’m confident in my ability to at least double up.

As you can see by the pictures and timing of the whole thing, my article looks like it was the final stroke required to convince some number of people to buy the last 30 or so copies that were available on TCGplayer, and the half dozen left on eBay. I seriously doubt that these people are going to make any money, if it’s any consolation to you.

My hope for the rest of this article is to show two things. First, I want to be as transparent as possible about all of my suggestions to speculate on Spawnsire, be clear exactly where I made money, when and how I bought and sold each of my copies, the areas where I went wrong, and how I would change my approach in the future. Second, I want to explain the concept of the greater fool theory, a topic that Jason Alt first intertwined with MTG finance a couple of years ago back when Theros first came onto the scene. It’s been a little while since then, so I’ll provide a refresher.

Time Warp

Alright, let’s take a trip down the magical mouse-wheel and scroll back to about five weeks ago.

Pucaspawn

August 30 was the first time I mentioned Spawnsire on Twitter. I subsequently grabbed a dozen or so copies on PucaTrade, because I very rarely buy into a spec target with cash. Most of my “speccing” comes from buying large collections or lots of singles at buylist or below, and setting aside the cards that I’m anticipating will go up for later. While I don’t always get the quantity or card that I’m specifically looking for by using this method, I’m almost guaranteed to not lose money in the long run if the end result is different than my vision.

spawnsire3x

foilspawnsires

Fast forward to September 4. I noticed on my daily check of the MTG Stocks interests page that the foil version of Spawnsire had doubled, seemingly out of nowhere. I didn’t own any foils, but I did see that the non-foil was still hanging around the bottom of the interests page. At this point, I was very confident that the card was primed and ready to spike within a couple of days, following the trend of the foil.

I bought the copies that you read about in my article last week from Star City Games, because I saw a perfect storm of reasons to pick them up there: SCG was the cheapest place to buy, I could get 36 copies at once, and I was guaranteed that they would ship. I continued to check the stock on TCGplayer for several days, and it continued to teeter anywhere from 33 to 50 sellers at any given time. There were stores listing new copies, and then they would get eaten up, although I’m not sure if that was the work of non-competitive players looking for their copies, or speculators following the feed of information that I was providing.

Spawn3

And here we are about a week after I bought my copies from SCG. Unfortunately for me, they simply restocked another 40 SP copies a day or two after I cleaned them out, so it meant that there were still a lot of casual players who would need to pick up their Spawnsires at $3 to $4 before I saw any sort of profit. I didn’t want to buy anymore than I already had to force the market to move. Getting rid of 50 copies of a casual card that was likely only a one- or maybe two-of of in a deck was hard enough, so I held back.

In hindsight, I should have also tweeted here that SCG still had 40 copies in stock.  I focused too much on the TCGplayer and eBay stock affecting the price, and should have tweeted back on the 13th that SCG still had a bunch of copies, and that they were probably the place to buy them if you needed Spawnsires to play with.

That was my last tweet before the last of the supply on TCGplayer and eBay disappeared on the evening of October 5. I really wish I had written my last week’s article three weeks ago so that it didn’t coincide with the actual release date of Battle for Zendikar. I would be interested to see if Spawnsire’s available supply decreased at a similar or identical rate without my article, simply because of the set release allowing casual players to get their hands on Battle for Zendikar and start crafting their Eldrazi decks.

Similarly, I wonder if my article would have been enough of a match in the powder keg to spark a buyout three weeks ago, without the set being released in the same weekend. As things played out, though, I think it was the combination of both factors that made the buyout happen. Now, let’s take a look at what I did that night as a result of the buyout, regardless of who bought the copies that started it.

VICTORY

This screenshot was taken on the night of October 5. As you can see by checking your own TCGplayer mid prices, Spawnsire has settled since then at around $6 to $7, right where I was hoping for. Immediately after I noticed this jump, I went to TCGplayer and listed my own copies. I put up 37 NM copies for $6.99 (if you’e been keeping track, I only got 15 or so NM copies from PucaTrade. I graded all of the 35 SP copies that I got from SCG, and I personally felt that almost half of them were NM. SCG’s grading system is extremely rigid). I also put my 17 SP copies up for $6.49 and crossed my fingers.

While I waited to get lucky and hopefully sell some Spawnsires into the hype, I went to SCG to see if they had been bought out as well. Did the instigators of the buyout really grab all 40 of SCG’s SP copies? Well, not exactly.

spawn7

SCGpostspawn

While the cheapest copies of Spawnsire on TCGplayer were my own at $6 to $7 and eBay was completely empty, SCG still had 40 SP copies on their website sitting at $3.35 each. Huh. While this is definitely a risky move and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to sell all of these, I felt that I would be able to slowly move them on TCGplayer or through trades at $6 to $7 a piece, eventually making a strong profit. It would take a while and tie up my money, but I didn’t really put a lot of time into thinking about it. I was concerned that someone else would snap them up before I did, so I hastily jammed them all into my card and swiftly made it through checkout.

Ugh. Now I had to move almost 100 of these things. I went to bed that night thinking of strategies of how I would move more than 90 freaking Spawnsire of Ulamogs. Maybe if I got lucky, one buylist would hit $4.50 or $5 and I could just sell them all en masse for a small but safe profit. Facebook would probably be a strong outlet, as there are a ton of non-competitive players in all of the groups that I’m in. I could jam a few in my display case, because I mostly market myself to EDH and newer players out of the store. I’m sure some of them will want to build Eldrazi decks, and slam Barrage Tyrants and Desolation Twins into play with Spawnsire. Hmmm…

Greater Fools

Alright, now we’re almost caught up to present day. I got out of my sports psychology class Tuesday afternoon to check my email, and I was happy to see an email from TCGplayer. I had a Spawnsire sale! The first of many, I’m sure. Although it would be a slow process, I would eventu—

TCGspawns

Uhhhhhhhh…

Well, alright then. Either this person knows something that I don’t, or he has a really weird thing for tentacles. One person bought out all 37 NM copies for $6.99 each, so I suppose that solves one of my problems. Obviously no player buys 37 copies of a single spell that’s not a Shadowborn Apostle or Relentless Rat, so this is a purchaser looking to make money. I’m assuming that this person doesn’t read my articles, because I suggested the exact opposite of what this party did. If you buy in at $7, then you’re looking for Spawnsire to hit $13 or $14 before you sell, and you plan to sell 37 of them at that price?

According to the greater fool theory, irrational buyers will set the price of a commodity when that thing’s price is not driven by its own intrinsic value. In this party’s mind, they’re not the fool. They’re going to sell to some other guy who’s a greater fool.

“I can’t wait to get these 37 Spawnsires, so I can sell them to some guy for $10 each. I’ll make like a hundred dollars because I’ll get approximately $3 profit off each one.” –Spawnsire Sam

The problem here is that you’re assuming that person exists, and that the market will still be as volatile as it was when you bought my copies. I’m shipping those Spawnsires out on Wednesday afternoon, so the buyer probably won’t get them in the mail until Monday. Do you still think Spawnsire is going to be $10 on Monday? Hell, it dropped below $10 already, and it’s probably still going to be $7 when this article goes live on Thursday.

When I bought Spawnsires three weeks ago, I had a choice when I saw the spike happen. I could either sell them immediately by racing to the bottom of TCGplayer (an option that I only have because I had the luxury of having copies in hand from three weeks ago), or I could take a greater risk and try to predict that the price would stay at $10, $11, or predict that it would go to something like $15. The choice I made is pretty obvious: I took the safer route. Move the cards, lock in the profit.

The party buying my Spawnsires had a different set of choices. They could either buy my $7 copies, hoping to sell them for $10 or $15 as soon as they get them in the mail (what they did), or they could stay out of the game entirely. The bus already left the stop, and this guy is trying to take the elevator to the fourth floor of his apartment building and parkour from the top of a roof to land on top of the bus, all so that he can hand out free Spawnsires to all of the little boys and girls. I didn’t feel confident that my copies of Spawnsire would be able to sell at anything above $7. More specifically, I didn’t expect any fools to come along and believe that there would be any greater fools to buy at $15.

Unfortunately, I’m still not out of the woods yet. I have to sell the 40 copies I’m getting from SCG in the next week, and that’s going to take, uhhh… a while. Only one buylist has hit $4 as of right now, and I doubt there will be many that go above that. In hindsight, buying these additional 40 wasn’t the best move, but at least I won’t lose money on the purchase.

End Step

Are you tired of Spawnsire yet? I hope so. It’s been a while since I’ve dissected a spec to such a degree, but it was a lot of fun writing both of these articles. I hope everyone learned at least a little something, even if it was, “Don’t buy 37 copies of Spawnsire of Ulamog at $7.”

Let me know what you thought of my article through Facebook, Twitter, or in the comments section below!