By James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)

One of the most common misconceptions about folks involved in MTGFinance is that we are constantly manipulating the market and feeding players misinformation to help fuel achievement of our personal goals.

It recently occurred to us here that though we dole out a good deal of advice, most of you ultimately have very little insight into when we actually put our money where our collective mouths are pointing. As such we’ve decided to run a weekly series simply breaking down what we’ve been buying this week and why. These lists are meant to be both complete and transparent, leaving off only cards we bought without hope of profit, where appropriate. We’ll also try to provide some insight into our thinking behind the specs, and whether we are aiming for a short (<1 month), mid (1-12 month), or long (1 year+) term flip. Here’s what we were up to this week:

Buying Period: March 29 – April 4, 2015

Note: All cards NM unless otherwise noted. All sell prices are net of fees unless noted.

James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)

BOUGHT (Dragons of Tarkir)

• 26x Sidisi, Undead Vizier @ $3.70 per: Short to Mid
• 7x Snapcaster Mage @ $35.00 per: Short to Mid
• 9x Collected Company (Foil) @ $9.25 per: Short to Mid

SOLD

• 2x Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver @ $13.50 ($7 cost)

My buy list was pretty concentrated this week, with a lot of money dropped into my belief that Sidisi, Undead Vizier will continue to play a strong role in Standard as a 2-3 in multiple decks heading into summer. With supply rising at present, it could be next fall before this card has a chance to push towards it’s likely $8-10 upper limit, at which point I’ll be looking to trade out or leverage Pucatrade to exit. The likely presence of Eldrazi spawn in Return to Zendikar should keep the card relevant into 2016.

Snapcaster Mage can easily hit $60-70 this year, so I can’t pass up on a $35 entry point from a friend who chose to reward me for turning him on to the spec 18 months ago. A great example of the value of building community and working karma when pursuing your #mtgfinance objectives. Given that I can out the Snapcasters to Pucatrade for the equivalent of $50 immediately, this is just a solid all-around play.

Collected Company took down a mid-sized Modern tournament in Europe during it’s debut last weekend, and my ears perked up at the prospects on foils for this DTK rare card. In a world where power creep on low casting cost creatures is very real, this is a card that just keeps getting better as it finds more interesting aggro, tempo or combo oriented pieces to go searching for. The deck in question was even running a couple of copies of Garza’s Assassin so I snagged a few copies to test with.

Ashiok was a sell for me since Sultai has fallen of my radar for Standard and his price is surprisingly high given his pending fall rotation. I actually think Ashiok has potential legs in Modern, so I’ll be looking to re-enter around $5 come October.

Douglas Johnson (@rose0fthorns)

BOUGHT (Pucatrade)

Note: Points roughly equal USD/100. e.g., 700 points equals $7 in card purchasing value.

• 8x foil Nyxathid @ 435 Pucapoints each
• 9x non-foil Nyxathid @ 257 Pucapoints each
• 1x foil Necrotic Ooze @ 644 Pucapoints
• 1x foil Olivia Voldaren @ 1905 Pucapoints
• 30x Coldsnap Snow-Covered Swamps @ 66 Pucapoints each
• 1x Extraplanar Lens @ 991 Pucapoints
• 1x Maga, Traitor of Mortals @ 262 Pucapoints

Douglas says:

“As noted in my article this week, I believe Nyxathid is a solid example of a spike waiting to happen. The card has casual appeal, minor competitive play, and has never been reprinted. I think non-foils can hit $6-7, and foils could go as high as $15. i want to have these so that I can list them on TCGplayer into future hype. 

The Olivia is for my Marchesa EDH deck that I’m slowly in the process of foiling out, and the rest of the mono-black EDH pieces are to complete a local customers’ order who buys singles from me. Always nice to turn Pucapoints into cash at a 1:1 ratio and be the hero who has stuff that no one else does!”

Jared Yost

• 3x Dragon Arch (foil) @ $6 plus shipping

Jared says:

“Similar to Dragonspeaker Shaman, Dragon Arch is another way to accelerate dragons into play in casual formats. Even though it only affects the multicolored ones, we just received a ton of them in Dragons of Tarkir and I feel that if the card becomes more known then more players will look to pickup copies. There is only one printing, so it also has that going for it.  It’s just a very solid overall card. It can even act as a slightly worse Quicksilver Amulet since it can put any multicolored creature into play.”

Ross Lennon

• 20 Dragonlord’s Prerogative @ $0.30 per
• 26 Pitiless Horde @ $0.33 per

Ross says:

“DP feels like the exact kind of card to break out at a Pro Tour, and at ~30 cents each, it’s low risk and even if it tops out at $3-5, I’m still in at the ground floor. I plan to buy even more soon.

• 1x Dragon Hunter @ 52 points
• 1x Zurgo Bellstriker @ 300 points
• 1x Tasigur, the Golden Fang @ 774 points
• 1x Dack’s Duplicate @ 105 points
• 1x Craterhoof Behemoth @1197 points

Danny says:

“These were 100 percent Cube pickups, but if you read my introductory article, you know that I carefully consider all my pickups, even ones to play with. Dragon Hunter and Zurgo Bellstriker are both examples of me not being patient, as they will both likely be available for about half these prices at some point in the next year or two. I sucked it up because I can never have enough one-drops in white or red, and these ones are easy includes.

Tasigur, the Golden Fang has proven its power in Standard and Modern, and I would not be surprised to start seeing it more often in Legacy. It’s only a rare, but it’s from a small set, so even its floor is a little lower, it can’t be that much lower. I would start stockpiling these if they dropped to $6 or lower.

Conspiracy wasn’t hugely opened, so Dack’s Duplicate will probably never go lower, even if it never necessarily goes up from here. I’m going to try it out over Prophetic Bolt. Haste on a clone is pretty big game, and there’s even more upside here, so I’m hoping for big things.

Finally, Craterhoof Behemoth was a $6 boat I missed, but after hitting the $15 to $20 range at one point, this seems like a fine time to get a slightly better price before some Legacy Elf win causes the hoof daddy to jump overnight. Plus, it’s insane in Cube and it was impossible to justify not having it in my list.”

So there you have it. Now what were you guys buying and selling this week and why?

James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.

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Greetings! Today is a big day for me: my first article on MTGPrice. I am humbled and honored to be part of this top-notch team of some of the best minds in MTG finance.

Goals and Expectations

When I first started writing about MTG finance, I felt woefully inadequate compared to many of my peers, and to some extent, that’s still true. Many of the writers on this site make a living exclusively by buying and selling Magic cards. Others have experience in real-life finance and stock trading. Some are funding their college educations through MTG.

By contrast, my primary goal in MTG finance is just to play for free. That’s it! Sure, every once in a while, I’ll buy in to a card and make some real-life cash profit. Those times are nice, but they’re not frequent, because constant speculating is time-consuming, and most of my free time is taken up by this little dude:

The time I do have outside of my full-time job is precious, and the fact is that constantly buying and selling Magic cards is a pain. Maintaining a large inventory, the daily packaging and shipping of cards, having to travel to large events in far-off locations every single weekend… these things can be rewarding and profitable, but they’re a grind. Could I do it? Maybe. Do I want to? Not in the slightest.

I’ll tell you straight up: the perspective I’m bringing is of someone who worries over when the best time to buy a single copy of a card for my cube is, or maybe a playset for a Constructed deck. My definition of “going deep” on a card is 20 to 30 copies. If you’re a store owner or someone who goes hundreds deep on most speculation targets, I like to think my insights will still be applicable, but  there may be other columnists on this site whose objectives more closely align with yours.  Rather than feeling inadequate compared to those other writers, though, I’m just going to own it: my goals are different than theirs.

Namely, I’m looking to spend as little time as possible on Magic finance so I can spend the most time possible actually playing Magic without spending money to do so. Does that sound similar to what you want? Then we’ll get along just fine. Read on.

Why MTG Finance Matters

If you’re new to Magic: The Gathering, I hate to break it you, but you are going to have to spend a significant amount of money if you want to be competitive in basically any format. I know it’s rough, but unless you’re lucky enough to have inherited an old collection from a family member, you are just going to have to accept that this is an expensive hobby, and it’s at its most expensive of all when you’re just starting out.

Now, you’re currently on a Magic finance website reading an article about playing Magic for free, and that shows that you’re at least interested in mitigating these start-up costs. That’s awesome. Deciding you want to spend as little as possible to get as much as possible out of this hobby is an excellent first step.

I have good news for you new players, and it applies to the established players, too: once you have a decent-sized collection, the world of MTG opens up to you exponentially. Why? Because Magic cards are probably the most liquid, easy-to-sell assets that you own (unless you’re involved in commodities markets or drugs or something). There are buylists all over the internet, many of them featured on MTGPrice, waiting to buy your cards at a moment’s notice. Most adults don’t often work in the barter system, but trades of cards for cards happen every day in every LGS across the world. You can use a service like PucaTrade to turn the cards you have into cards you want from the comfort of your own home, or turn to eBay to try to sell individual cards for a little more than buylist pricing. There are many, many ways to get rid of cards for either cash or different cards.

So once you have a collection, it’s not hard to turn that collection into a specific group of cards you want—for play, for speculation, for collecting, or for chewing on (in my son’s case). Of course, you can only leverage your collection into the exact cards you want if you understand how MTG finance works: how seasonal price patterns work, how rotation works, how Standard pricing works, how eternal format pricing works, how casual formats impact the marketplace, the best ways to out your cards, and more.

That’s why Magic finance matters: because almost anybody can play almost any format with enough knowledge, time, and dedication. There’s no reason you need to resort to less powerful budget decks to get your fun out of this game, but there’s also no reason for you to overspend in acquiring top-tier staples in your favorite format. You just need to develop a couple important attributes.

Two Crucial Attributes for a Finance-Minded Mage

I can’t stress enough the importance of patience for the finance-inclined player.

It has been literal years since I preordered a card. Yes, occasionally there’s a Bonfire of the Damned or a Sphinx’s Revelation that blows up and makes those who got in early a ton of money, but in the vast majority of cases, cards fall steeply from their preorder prices. If we’re spending as little time as possible on MTG finance, that means just assuming everything in the set will fall and not worrying about the potential of underpriced cards.

Some players collect as much as possible from Standard-legal sets to allow the biggest pool possible when building a deck for FNM or other events. I’ve seen countless players who immediately start acquiring playsets of every card in the new set as soon as it’s available on shelves.

If you’re trying to stretch your MTG dollars to the max, though, you need to stop doing this. Between WOTC’s marketing and best-case-scenario mentality in a large portion of the playerbase, new cards are almost always over-hyped. So few of them end up being competitive staples, and those that do often still end up cheaper than their preorder prices.

Just wait. Observe what’s competitive, figure out what you want to play, and obtain the cards that apply. Picking up cards blindly—especially Standard cards—just because “I might need it someday” is a quick way to end up with a bunch of cards that are dropping in value quickly and don’t have a deck.

If you’re acquiring a card for a casual format like Cube or Commander, there is no reason to ever preorder. In fact, if a card is a Standard-only staple, I tend to not pick it up until it’s rotated. For example, Elspeth, Sun’s Champion could not be more of a staple in Standard, but at a mana cost of six, it will never see play in competitive eternal formats. This means it will drop steeply at rotation, when I will pick a copy for my cube. (Off topic: it was such a missed opportunity to go with “Sun’s Champion” instead of “Champion of the Sun.”)

Now, let me state that it’s absolutely a fair stance to take to pay more for a card because you desperately want to play with it and are willing to pay the extra cost. You also should be playing optimized decks in major tournaments, and if that means overspending on a card, you gotta do what you gotta do. And if you’re speculating on a card, then as a matter of course, you think the price you’re paying is fine and that it’s likely to go up. These are situations where patience doesn’t really apply. But if you’re looking to spend the minimum amount on Magic that still allows you to be competitive or just have a fun-to-play-with collection , it’s the most important attribute you can develop. Wait until a card is at its floor price before buying in. If you need it beforehand, sure, buy it, but until then, there’s no rush.

Speaking  of needs, the second key attribute I’ll be mentioning today is developing a good sense of the concept of wants versus needs. You need to be able to look at that Sower of Temptation foil in your LGS’s display case and say to it, “It’s you I want, but it’s [the non-foil copy] that I need.”

It’s hard to think of two less related things than playing Magic for free and acquiring foils and other high-value cards. This is 100 percent a matter of personal opinion, but to me, there’s no sense in acquiring anything other than the least expensive version of a card to play with (within reason—I’ll pay a little more for an old-bordered version of a card, for example). I believe that it’s easier to have fun with 30 cards worth $30 each than with one card worth $1000, and that’s how I treat my own collection.

Now, I’m not saying you’re not allowed to like foils, and you can even incorporate the acquisition of foils into this whole “playing Magic for free” thing, but you’re almost never going to see me talk about them or advocate buying them. They’re a facet of the market that  I don’t fully understand, appreciate, or even like. My advice is to simply focus on non-foils until you have every card you could ever want to play with and are ready to start upgrading. Until then, high-end cards just don’t make a lot of sense.

And frankly, even if I ever reach the point of owning every card I could possibly want, I’ll just keep my non-foils and spend that extra money on things unrelated to Magic, thank you. That is allowed, you know.

Pass the Turn

Again, I’m looking forward to being here at MTGPrice for the foreseeable future, and I’d love to hear your feedback on both what I’ve written already and what you’d like to see me write moving forward. Always feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter at @dbro37.  See you next week!