Category Archives: ProTrader

Danny Brown, ProTrader

PROTRADER: A Cheapskate Casual’s Guide to the Last Three Years of MTG

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With Modern prices going crazy lately, now seems like a reasonable time to review some cards one might want to acquire before they too increase in price. As Jason Alt often tells us, a rising bite lifts all toads (or something), so there’s reason to expect that a lot of Modern stuff that is also played casually is going to increase soon, too.

If you’ve been waiting on picking up something from the last three years, now may be the time. Let’s go through in detail and see what seems primed for an increase, compared to what should be avoided at all costs.

Disclosure: While I have a couple Commander decks, Cube is my main interest when it comes to casual MTG. So I’ll try to touch on some Commander staples, but my knowledge base and interest is much more Cube-centric. Additionally, a lot of these cards are also good in eternal formats, so we’ll be looking at quite a few competitive cards today, too.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Accumulated Knowledge, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Important Matters

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Hey, happy 2016! The year is getting off to a pretty strong start with these preview cards that we’ve been getting (we will talk about them a little bit, but I’m ultimately saving strength for my set review portion). We are actually going to start this article (and this year!) off with a bit of a quick hits, just to cover all of the things that happened while I was off.

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expensive cards

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Corbin Hosler, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Buyouts, Buyouts Everywhere

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I don’t even know where to begin. I spent last week in Florida, enjoying a pleasant New Year vacation while largely disconnected from the MTG world, though I did check in from time to time.

I come home, and everyone’s gone crazy.

The Buyouts

First, I want to link to Jim Casale’s piece on the use of the word “buyout.” In most cases, it doesn’t mean what you think it means, and the negative connotation attached to the word doesn’t always ring true.

Take, for example, Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple. Sure, in the simplest terms they were “bought out.” But rather than plummeting over the next week as the race to the bottom began and people saw that the market manipulation couldn’t hold true, the prices actually held over the course of the week. That doesn’t happen unless there’s real demand for a card, and it’s another bit of proof that shows that manipulating the market is not as easily done as many like to claim. Anyone can buy out TCGplayer and move the price of a card for a day, but all that really matters is where those prices settle after a few weeks or months. Simply raising the TCGplayer average doesn’t make anyone a profit, and I’ve written before at length about The Myth of Making Money.

So where does that leave us today?

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

City of Traders, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Oh Yeah, This Series is Called “City of Traders”

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By: Travis Allen

It’s Monday evening and I’ve got the last mouthful of a 10-percent barleywine swishing between my cheeks, savoring the flavor.  I’ve been cooking my chicken chili for the last hour or so, and I’m finally sitting down for the first time today. It’s a solid barleywine, by the way. Not my favorite, but definitely drinkable. Reasonably sweet with obvious flavors. Beer Advocate tells me I’m tasting caramel and toffee. I wouldn’t buy this again, but you can do a lot worse, and if you find my typical recommendations too sweet, this backs off on the sugar content a bit while maintaining some of the strong flavors I’m so drawn to. I’ve been posting short beer reviews occasionally as I discover them in the wild, and you can find them over on my Twitter. The easiest way is to just look through all my tweets with photos. I could not be further from a sommelier if I was a dead raccoon on the side of a hot desert highway,  though I enjoy drinking beers that offer an experience, and people apparently wanted to hear about them. If you’re a fan of huge, heavy, barrel-aged stouts and rich barleywines, see if anything in my Twitter profile is available in your area.

Anyways, where was I? Right, I had just polished off a 10-percent beer 30 seconds before realizing I needed to write an article tonight, a responsibility that had slipped my mind for the last five days or so. Hrm. I’m swimming just a little right now, and I need to pound out 1,500 words good enough to warrant a ProTrader subscription. I pinged my black-ops Magic finance encrypted cartel chat (typically used for coordinating buyouts of TWoo-hyped cards) that an article needed to be written. Jeremy was quick to respond with a great idea. If you aren’t following Jeremy on Twitter, by the way, that’s a huge mistake. While he claims to attend school, I don’t believe him. What I do believe is that he spends all his waking moments grinding Magic sales and travelling to GPs and SCG events to buy and sell. For all the broadcasting I do from my writer’s pulpit, you can’t substitute hard hours on the ground, trading with the masses. His instincts are on point and you’ll make money if you listen to what he has to say. I’ve learned to pay attention to people who invest this much time and money in the field, and you should, too.

This week it’s a collaboration—he told me what cards he thinks are hot, and I’m writing about it. You get his insight and my verbosity. A win-win situation, I assure you.

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expensive cards

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.