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Hits and Misses

Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir has come and gone, and it has uncovered a lot of key information in the tapestry that is DTK Standard. I am assuming, of course, that this format (and all smaller, and therefore solvable, formats) is a game of Tipsy Tourney from Mario Party.

TipsyTourneyMP1

Some of the obvious winners were Dragonlord Atarka and Den Protector, while the two prospects I personally had the most vested interest in (Pitiless Horde and Dragonlord’s Prerogative) largely failed to deliver1.

Den Protector already appears to be sliding ever so slowly back down, and I suspect that its price coming out of the tournament last weekend is its ceiling for the remainder of its life in Standard. Den Protector is the type of card that is very good in terms of potential in-game value, it’s pretty good on rate, and it develops your board (which is why it may be “better” than Restock2). On the other hand, Den Protector is not likely a four-of in more aggressive environments, it is not likely to trade up at three mana (and even less so at five), and in a pinch can always be replaced with something else (nobody’s deck needs Den Protectors, in the sense that they need Nykthos to gain buku mana, or they need Mastery of the Unseen to gain insurmountable amounts of life). Those factors (as well as rarity) are what I expect to keep Den Protector largely grounded for the time being.

Dragonlord Atarka, however, is about to get paid. You know that a card is good when three-color decks are splashing to be able to play it at a Pro Tour. We talked about him (her?) last week, and apparently my read on the card barely scratched the surface.

Want to hear that bad part? I didn’t pick up any extras going into the weekend. I know, I’m bummed. I really want to play that Atarka Abzan deck. So why didn’t I buy in? Because I’m an idiot. Let me give you a long-winded response why:

My Magic finance philosophy is largely defined by something that I first spelled out in January of this year.

MyPhilosophy

The highlighted part is the most important, but I included the rest for a little context (it was B&R update time) and also because I liked The Office.

I try to approach Magic finance from the perspective of someone who is not a store owner (with the powerful ability to buylist), and has a fixed amount of Magic-dedicated capital to spend at any given time. While my two big buys prior to the tournament (Pitiless Horde and Dragonlord’s Prerogative) haven’t moved since the weekend, the buy-in for them was negligible. Had I bought Dragonlord Atarka in the days leading up to the tournament, they would have individually cost me anywhere from seven to ten dollars (my order of 26 Pitiless Hordes and 20 Dragonlord’s Prerogatives cost me about $17, shipped). Let’s say, just for fun, that I did buy 20 Dragonlord Atarka for $10 each (most places would upgrade you to free shipping at that point) the day before the event—the current best buylist price (as of Wednesday, April 15) is $11.75 to Troll and Toad. This means that if I want to make $1.75 (before shipping costs and ignoring any PayPal fees), I have to send these cards to Kentucky and hope they make it. The other choices are to try and sell them piecemeal on the internet or to PucaTrade them away for “value” (even though this means I won’t get any of that $200 seed money back in my bank account).

But let’s now say that the card didn’t break out over the weekend, either because of some unforeseen metagame wrinkle, or because the people with the best Atarka technology bombed out in Draft. In this case, I have spent $200 (a lot of money for me, and presumably most people) on something that I am about to have a very hard time recouping on. Even if that was all “Magic money,” suddenly my future buying power is hamstrung by the fact that I have a lot of money tied up in a card that I need to move at or above its current retail price.

Insurance and risk management professionals typically assess need by something called “MPL” or “Maximum Possible Loss.” If your $2,000,000 building burns down, blows up, or gets attacked by some kind of Cloverfield monster tomorrow, you have suffered the MPL ($2,000,000). While the technicalities are different, you should always approach an investment knowing what the MPL is. If I bought the dragons on Thursday, the best possible buylist price on Friday was $6.50, a loss of $3.50 on my initial cost of $10. In our worst-case scenario, Atarka bombs out at the Pro Tour as bad as that StarCraft guy they invited that one time, and the buylist price hovers around $5.50 (Thursday’s best price) to $6.50 until Magic Origins. If I want access to any of that $200 I just spent, I have to eat a loss of at least $70. Heck, I could have just bought a Wasteland at that point! Compare this to the maximum possible loss of the purchase I did make:

  • 14 Pitiless Horde at 30 cents, total of $4.20
  • 20 Dragonlord’s Prerogative at 38 cents, total of $7.60
  • 12 Pitiless Horde at 43 cents, total of $5.16
  • Grand total of $16.96. Shipping was free on all of these.

Let’s assume that none of these cards ever get outside of a bulk box, and the best I am ever able to recoup on these is a dime each—the best case then is that I’m getting $5 in trade somewhere or a free value menu lunch at Taco Bell. Comparing this to the Atarka scenario, I’m getting back 27 percent of my initial investment, versus 65 percent for the Dragonlord, but the buy I made is diversified (two cards instead of one), it had much less investment of capital, and I got significantly more cards. Even if I get literally nothing out of either purchase, it’s much easier to justify losing (and subsequently make back) $17 than $200.

That’s why I’m fine losing out on things like Atarka: I’d rather kick myself for missing a winner than for picking a loser.

I want to touch quickly on a unique topic that has been pretty popular in the ProTrader forums the last week.

Brief Marketing Aside: By the way, if you aren’t on the ProTrader forums, you really should be. I know this is going to read as me towing the company line, but I really think it’s the best value in terms of subscription for Magic content (especially with all the cool stuff coming soon!). I was using MTGPrice before it was cool to use MTGPrice. Alright, alright, alright.

RossLincolnAd2

Anyway, the first hot topic has been the new prerelease foil treatment. Ultimately, the debate has come down to actual scarcity versus perceived demand. Prerelease Tasigurs are much rarer than set foil Tasigurs, but how much extra is that gold lettering worth? Currently, it’s actually a detriment to the card, with set foils being worth roughly $30 and the promos going for about $25. Siege Rhino promos are worth about two bucks more than the set foils, though, and both versions of Anafenza are about the same. The similarity in all of these cases is that there is more demand for set foils than promos (according to the “Wants” tracker on PucaTrade, at least). Part of this is going to have to do with uniformity for playsets—it’s a hedge against narrow corner cases, but competitive players typically want their cards to all match to avoid giving away information unnecessarily. If someone absolutely has to own the rarest version of something from this (and presumably future) block(s), then they need to own the prerelease foil. Ultimately, however, I expect the prices to largely resemble the set foil prices, since it will be easier to find complete sets of set foil Rhinos than prerelease ones, but the prerelease copies won’t be too undervalued since they will still have appeal in singleton formats like Cube and EDH. It’s going to be a learning lesson moving forward, but any prerelease foil that is ever significantly cheaper than the set foil is probably a good buy.

Well, that’s going to be all for today. As always, feel free to reach out in the comments if you have any thoughts about this week’s article, and I’ll see you next week! Oh, and don’t forget to submit your questions for the mailbag article! I’ve gotten some good ones already, and it’s been tempting not to answer them right away!

Best,

Ross

1 Prerogative did make a few appearances, though, and my genuine expectation is that it will get more attention after Khans (and with it Dig Through Time) gets rotated out of standard. Remember that DTK will be in the format longer than KTK.

2 It still amazes me that this card sees zero Constructed play. It was kinda popular last time!

Prediction Review

By: Cliff Daigle

From time to time, I like to go back into my archives and look at predictions I made, and see if I was right or wrong. Self-reflection is an important part of the process, and anything that improves my ability to gain value is good.

The Curious Case of Time Travel (Jan. 16, 2015)

At the end, I made these statements:

  1. If you open the foil alternate-art Ugin, hold on to it. This weekend will represent the largest supply of these cards and the lowest price. If Ugin ends up as an awesome card in Modern Tron decks, then the pimp foil has yet another outlet to fetch a high price. Commander players all want the card anyway! (Including me)
  2. Trade away almost everything else. Supply on Fate Reforged this week is at its lowest, and you should sell into the hype. Everything is hyped, so move it all.
  3. The exception to this rule is Whisperwood Elemental. This is an amazing casual card but it’s also pretty great in Standard, as a free source of card advantage. I think it has room to grow, and multiple sites are increasing their preorder price on it.

I was right by about 50% on #1, mostly right on #2, and spot on for point #3. I’m actually a fan of picking up Whisperwood right now, because it’s just good. It’s six power and toughness for five mana, and is likely to be important for the coming year. Getting it now around $12 is okay, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it hit $15 or $20 around the time of Battle for Zendikar.

The Fate of Dragons (Jan. 9, 2015)

I told you to pick up foil Dragonspeaker Shaman at $8, and it’s gone up to $12. We might not be done watching it rise. I also called Utvara Hellkite, which has doubled.

I did not make good predictions about Dragon Roost, Dragonstorm, and perhaps worst of all, Scion of the Ur-Dragon. That one really stings. I seriously thought we would get a new 5-color dragon to play with, and that would preclude a run on Scion. The nonfoil has gone from $2 to $16, and the foils have gone from $50 to about $80. That’s a lot of value that I missed, because I wanted a new dragon.

The lesson here is that I need to make sure I don’t lose focus on what is, in my quest for what could be. Perhaps I was too bullish on a new 5-color legend, and lost sight of the fact that the old one would still be very good.

Commander 2014 Previews (Oct. 31, 2014)

So the moral of the story is this: Wizards is going to make sure that the True-Name Nemesis problem doesn’t reoccur. Each Commander printing going forward is going to produce enough stock to keep everything very reasonable to very cheap in price. I was way off for almost every card, but my advice to stick with singles could not have been better. The singles prices for this entire set are rather low, and two of my favorites (Dualcaster Mage and Feldon of the Third Path) just got revealed as judge foils.

Looking at the prices for Commanders 2013 release is even worse. You might expect otherwise, but no, this has three cards over $5. Next year, get out of the reprints and fast.

Overall, one of my worst sets of predictions. The lesson is learned, and I’m +1 to Humility.

My LongTerm Targets (Sept. 26, 2014)

In this piece, I looked at several cards for long-term growth. It’s been seven months, worth peeking in for progress:

Unchanged: Garruk, Caller of Beasts, Scavenging Ooze, shock lands, Master Biomancer, Aurelia, the Warleader, Enter the Infinite, Thespian’s Stage, Sphinx’s Revelation, Rest in Peace, Ash Zealot

Gone up slightly: Kalonian Hydra, Rise of the Dark Realms, Progenitor Mimic, Chromatic Lantern

One of the worst feelings as a writer for MTGPrice is when I advocate for a card and then that card tanks in value. I still like the cards that haven’t changed in price, and at the least, I haven’t lost any value on any of these.

I think Ash Zealot is still a great card in Modern. If Snapcaster is good and prevalent, isn’t this a fine answer for Burn decks? I’d rather be deep on this than Zurgo Bellstriker, right?

Magic 2015’s Casual Appeal (July 11, 2014)

These are always good to look at in hindsight. Did I make accurate calls? Was my reasoning good?

I underestimated the appeal of Ajani, Mentor of Heroes in Standard. Plus, he’s relatively scarce, two factors that have kept him far above my target of $10, and also why I was so off on Nissa, Worldwaker. Garruk, Apex Predator, though, he did make it down to $10 but has bounced back up to $13. I was rather wrong about Jace, the Living Guilpact, though.

Perilous Vault went even lower than I thought it would, and I can’t wait to get foils around $15 when it rotates in the fall. I was spot-on with the Hivelord going to $7, though I was a few dollars off on the foil. The foil version of the Chain Veil is also a high split, at $1.50/$8.

Going Mad – Hold Your Horses There, Kids

We had an exciting weekend of Pro Tour coverage, with many of us following the coverage live, or at least tuning into the expanded chatter that social media brings to our fingertips.

Many of us acted on what we saw in coverage and what we heard through our preferred social media channels. Some of us probably even received multiple emails telling us all the hottest cards of Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir.

Every time a card that hadn’t already spiked appeared on screen, a flurry of activity ensued. I know that I immediately rounded out a playset of Den Protectors on Friday when I tuned into multiple rounds highlighting the card.

WE HAVE TO BUY SPECS OR WE’LL DIE
–Average financiers

And now plenty of people are the proud owners of way too many Den Protectors—congrats, guys, you won! After all, nothing could possibly go wrong at this point, right?

The card more than doubled in value, so all these buyers essentially doubled their money in three days. You’ve gotten all those copies you bought in the mail already, right?

Top 8

Zero Den Protectors… but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good card, right? I bet we’ll see a lot of them in good Standard decks that people who didn’t make the top eight played, right?

8-2 to 9-1

Seven Den Protectors, but I mean, come on, right? Winning eight rounds of Standard at the Pro Tour is hard. It has the best players in the world, after all.

7-3 to 7-0-2

Two. Yes, the word “two” is a complete sentence, so get over it, grammar boy [Editor’s note: I think he means me…]. A total of two Den Protectors showed up in one list that performed 7-3 in the Standard portion of the Pro Tour.

53 Problems

So taking a look at the 56 best-performing decks in the Standard portion of the Pro Tour, only three of them included Den Protector, a fact that can’t be ignored unless CTRL+F is somehow malfunctioning in my browser… in which case, we’ll just carry on as though everything I’m saying is still factual.

When you’re looking for a rare to speculate heavily on, picking the card that appeared in less than six percent of the successful decks at a tournament is probably not where you want to be.

But the good news is that all of the folks that bought these up should get most of them in the mail around the same time the price crashes back down to the price they paid. Sorry, guys!

Thunderbreak Regent Promo

re·gent

1. One who rules during the minority, absence, or disability of a monarch.

2. One acting as a ruler or governor.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Thunderbreak Regent was never meant to be the king of the format, but in the absence of a true ruler, Thunderbreak does the job. Also, did you see how F***ING SWEET that promo looks? For the first time in years, I’m going to take a real deck to Magic Game Day. Here’s some MTG finance advice for you:

1. Learn to play Magic.
2. Top eight Magic Game Day.
3. Profit!

Notice how step two is filled in here?
If you take a look at how Thunderbreak fared at the Pro Tour, you’re going to see some significantly different results. A total of forty copies showed up in the top-performing Standard lists across ten decks, a little over 17 percent of the field.
While Thunderbreak didn’t show up as much as Siege Rhino (14 decks), it’s probably a safe bet that there are significantly fewer Thunderbreak Regents in the world than there are Rhinos… and it also turns out that dragons have waaaaaaay more casual appeal than rhinos, unless you happen to be  in the ivory trade (or whatever rhino horns are actually made out of).
So what does this mean? Thunderbreak is going to continue to be popular, thanks largely in part to its amazing little sidekick Draconic Roar. I still think this card has a little more room to go, probably another couple dollars after we see it tearing up an SCG open or two over the next couple of weeks, and there’s a pretty good lifespan in front of it if either Magic Origins or Battle for Zendikar feature a five-drop playable dragon to replace Stormbreath.

Analog Lag

One of the biggest pitfalls of Magic speculating is the idea that everything is a quick flip and a quick double up.  This is the finance equivalent of playing roulette and putting a stack of chips on black, repeatedly. Sure, the first time you hit, you’ve doubled your money (never mind that this poorly thought out metaphor doesn’t take into account the physical shipping of cardboard thousands of miles ).

Nobody can deny the appeal of buying  in a ton of copies of cheap rares at $2 a piece and “selling” them for $4, because maybe making $2 on a $2 card feels cooler than making $3 on a $7 card, (shout-out to Dragonlord Silumgar). But high liquidity is hard to achieve in paper cards and one of the biggest risks to these types of spec targets is the “analog lag” we see in the time it takes orders to be picked, packed, and shipped. The lucky ones had their orders shipped out on Friday, but I’m sure that some sellers didn’t get them into the delivery pipeline until Monday.

The Good News

There is good news, I promise. And by “good news” I mean “there’s still hope” that Den Protectors see an uptick in play over the coming months as more cards round out the archetypes

When I tuned into coverage on Friday, I saw a ton of sick plays with Protector on camera, so I added a couple copies to my PucaTrade wants list to fill out a playset. After waiting ten minutes and seeing no trades confirmed, I added two foil copies and two prerelease copies as well, figuring that I would take whatever editions sent first and remove the rest… then I fell asleep on the couch and woke up to find that I was to be the proud owner of too many copies of this card.

So now I can speak from experience that going too deep on DPs is not where you want to be.

I still have hope that all is not lost: I threw my Den Protectors and Deathmist Raptors into a Sultai Reanimator shell and had an absolute blast taking the deck out on its maiden voyage. Protector is a really sweet creature that allows for so much value to be ground out in the long games … I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of this card.

Completely Unrelated

This weekend, I also had the opportunity to work as a buyer for Nerd Rage Gaming at the SCG States in Indianapolis. Some of the things you notice when looking at binders all weekend for hours at a time are the cards that everyone wants to get rid of, the cards that nobody wants to get rid of, and the cards that nobody even had in their binders to make offers on.

I bought a ton of Monastery Mentors this weekend, even after lowering the buy price. This signals that players just aren’t as excited about this card going forward and there is a good chance it’s going to keep creeping downward over the next couple months.

Another card I bought way too many of was Tasigur, the Golden Fang—I couldn’t offer a number low enough to make people say “no” when it came to selling these guys. There’s a good chance that the supply of this card has reached critical mass and the people that went deep on these have lost confidence in further (short-term) gains.

I saw virtually no Silumgars, Atarkas, or Ojutais over the weekend, which signals that all of these cards are going to remain strong going forward. We sold every copy of Atarka or Ojutai within a few minutes of buying them—both of these were wildly popular all weekend long.

The cards that most surprised me this weekend were Dragon Whisperer and Ojutai Exemplars. I only saw one copy of each of these cards in anyone’s binders over the weekend, which is somewhat puzzling to me. I know Dragon Whisperer definitely has a fan base out there in both the mono-red and the dragon lovers communities, so I could understand that this card was being held onto by someone. But where were the Exemplars? I don’t even have an operating theory on this one outside of coincidence plus variance.

Fetch lands were very liquid all weekend long: we brought them in easily and sold them just as fast. Fetch lands are a good holder of value and people’s willingness to sell them shows that they’re still readily available in trade binders. Multiple people selling me fetches over the weekend commented in one form or another that they’d be easy to replace, so that signals that it might be a while before these see any significant upward pressure.

Until next time, you can find me on Twitter at @GoingMadlem, and I encourage you to check out my article on MythicMTG.com later this week, too. I’ll be going over the most fun Standard brew I’ve played in quite a while.

Putting the “U” Back in “Obvious”

No.

I know what some of you are thinking. “This title is some clever pun about how there is a ‘u’ in ‘obvious’ and it’s a play on the word ‘you.'”

You’re so vain.

No, this article isn’t about you, it’s about EDH cards that make a nice, predictable shape on their price graphs—and how we can use that information to our advantage. If you want, we can talk about the factors that contribute to that shape. Just kidding, we’ll do it if I want, and I want. Sorry if you were looking forward to not learning anything today. Yes, I realize I promised this would be a series about EDH finance, but we still have to talk a little finance.

I feel like the EDH case is easier to make to the finance community than the finance case is to make to the EDH community. If you’re someone who just wants to slang some cards, why would you care about graph shapes?

Basically, my hope for this series is that I may be able to make some of this material accessible enough that someone who is interested in saving money but not interested in speculation or really even paying a ton of attention to the finance market can save some money on EDH staples they will buy at some point regardless. I also think people who are interested in finance but not terribly interested in learning all the idiosyncrasies of EDH can avoid making some mistakes with card buying. This is a concept that both groups can apply without having to learn a ton about what the other group is up to.  Would I hate it if this piece got passed around /r/EDH? Nope, not even a little.

Predictability

We could have made a  prediction about the price of a card like foil Chromatic Lantern and it may or may not have been true. The problem with making a prediction about the value of a card is that sometimes we put our blinders on and look at the price as something we view through a keyhole. We get one glimpse of the value as a fixed point in time and sometimes it jives with our prediction and sometimes it doesn’t. Most people don’t view finance this way anymore, preferring to see a graphical representation of price as being less static, which is preferable. Otherwise, trying to get a sense of a card and how it fits into the overall tableau of prices is akin to the proverb about the three blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and all having very different ideas about what the elephant looks like.

elephant-with-blind-men
Thought of the Week UK

How do we avoid their ridiculous fate and get a sense of what the next elephant will look like before we wait two years for enough data to see if our predictions panned out? Well, we could palpate said elephant for two years, or we could just look at a picture of an elephant and extrapolate. You’ve seen one elephant, you’ve seen them all: that’s how predictability works. So what does an elephant look like?

The Elephant in the Room

Untitled

The “elephant” metaphor is a goofy one, but I think it illustrates how sometimes we put our blinders on. We all do it. I bought foil Lanterns and it was for too much money. I sold foil Lanterns and it was for too little money.  How badly did I punt? Well, not terribly and in fact, I did really well by most MTG finance standards. However, I was groping around in the dark and making guesses based on my experience, which means I was in okay shape since I spend a lot of time doing this. However, when the blindfold came off and I saw the real picture, I felt a little foolish, like a guy who described an elephant as having two tails and no trunk because he spent too much time around the ass end. What did my elephant drawing look like?

Untitled

The black arrow represents where I bought my foil Lanterns and the red arrow represents where I sold. In for $10 (cash on site, no fees or shipping) and out for $17. A 70 percent gain is pretty good in this game, but not great. Now, am I kicking myself for not selling at $25? Nah, the window was too small. Still, now that I have the whole “hindsight is 20/20” picture, we could have easily doubled up and done a lot better. The thing is, I had ample opportunity to buy in at $7.50 (cheaper from players, although anyone who has a foil Lantern isn’t usually coming off of it for $7.50!)—longer than I had to buy in at $10. I was following the price so intently, waiting for it to come down from its initial price of $15, that I didn’t stop to consider that there is a right time to buy and I might not have been buying at the right time. Let’s look at the three parts of a clumsy elephant metaphor an elephant and see where we buy and where we either sell or dive into a theoretical swimming pool full of our theoretical “winnings” like Scrooge McDuck.

Tail

This is a politer way to say “ass end.” It’s possible to buy too early, and when we’re dealing with EDH foils, impatience is a real thing. People are impatient about the cards they want to use to play Standard events, and EDH players have read the spoiler and identified the cards they want for their decks, and the foil people have already decided they want foils. Sometimes buying before the card really establishes itself means you can save money, especially since people tend to assume a two-times multiplier for foils even though the EDH foil multiplier is usually higher. Cards with no 60-card applicability are usually identified as EDH cards very early, and for this reason, it’s almost never a good idea to buy in early if you want a foil copy. For the purposes of simplicity, I’m lumping Cube in with EDH to an extent, which is convenient and not ridiculously intellectually lazy. Cube has nuances, but for the moment, we’ll assume Lantern is a 100 percent EDH card because I don’t feel like picking another example that has no cube applicability now that I’m this deep into the article.

It’s possible to buy too early and this is what happens in 99 percent of cases. If you think a card’s value can go up in the short term (like two to three weeks), preorder, I guess, but this very nearly never happens. If you’re impatient, understand you’re going to overpay and you deserve it. However, I almost bought in at the ass-end by buying in at $10. Buying in even earlier at $15 would have been the mistake I mostly managed to avoid.

Untitled

All you see is a foil non-mythic in the post-mythic era screaming out of the gates at $15. That’s pricey for a card in Return to Ravnica, a set that everyone knew would break sales records. If all you can see is the tail, you might think an elephant looks pretty ridiculous, but figure that’s how things are. You can buy in here if you want, but that’s almost never a good idea.

Trunk

Party! This is the upside area. We saw a decline and then the price started ticking up. If this happens after the card rotates out of Standard and it has no use in Modern or Legacy, it is EDH playability, Cube desirability, and casual appeal that will buoy the price. And buoy the price these things did, sending Lantern to $25 for a brief, shining moment. It will see $25 again, and relatively soon. They aren’t printing more unless they do another Commander’s Arsenal, and even then, the set foil will maintain most if not all of its value.

Untitled

If you’re inclined to sell, this might be a time to do it. You can buy here if you want the card, just like you could have if you were impatient. But the relationship between the trunk and tail is a special one because sometimes people don’t check out the midsection and end up losing out. How? It’s probably pretty easy for you to figure that out—incomplete information leads to incorrect conclusions.

Untitled

If you imagine someone who checked the price of foil Lantern when preorders went out and decided it was too expensive and decided to wait a while for the price to go down and checked after rotation, you can imagine them seeing the price be roughly the same and assuming the price didn’t go anywhere. Finance people check prices a lot more often, and people trying to find a deal may check more often than that, but we’re illustrating a point here.

Cards that are EDH staples have a nice, predictable U shape to their price graphs, and we can use that to our advantage. If you ignore the $15 at both points of the U because you know what the shape is going to look like, you’re in good shape.

“Got it. Don’t pay too much for cards. Great article, moron.”

The point here isn’t that you should pay attention to prices, although you should, The point isn’t that you should avoid paying too much by buying too early or too late, although you should.  Did you already know that a card like Lantern would start high, get lower, and go back up? Great, so did I. And yet, I was a blind man fumbling around to an extent. I knew that prices would go down because supply would go up as more packs were opened and the set was drafted, but my buying activity was still suboptimal. I bought below $15 thinking I was being smart and I still ended up overpaying. I paid too much attention to the numbers on the graph when the letters were just as important.

“Letters?”

Untitled

Peak supply happens when the set is just about to stop being drafted. People redeemed foil sets of RTR for the shocks and gave zero craps about EDH cards. People busted a foil Lantern in a draft somewhere in the world probably once a day.  Why buy in for $10 in March 2013 just because $10 is less than $15 when the price was $2 cheaper a month later? Did I know that would happen? Well, no, but it was pretty predictable, wasn’t it? In hindsight, of course it was. And that is what we want to do in the future.

The Next Elephant

The next card that will follow this pattern will be an EDH staple, likely one printed in Battle for Zendikar. It will preorder at a very high price initially based on Cube and EDH hype. At peak supply, the price will fall. It will likely flag until rotation or after rotation and then it will begin to tick back up as copies dry up and people build more decks.  A lot of the cards in Battle for Zendikar will do this because of how supply and demand works, but EDH cards don’t have other factors obscuring their fates. EDH staples also have the distinction of being identified as desirable foils irrespective of how they fit into Standard.  We can predict an early over-evaluation, a decline, and upside. Does this work for non-staples? Not usually.

Untitled

What’s going on here?

I think I may start ending every article with a “Why isn’t this card worth more?” discussion question. So why aren’t we seeing our sexy U shape here? Is Progenitor Mimic not ubiquitous enough? Does it not get played as much as we thought it would? It has no Cube applicability like we see with Lantern, so does that mean EDH needs to take the hit for all of its price? Was it speculated on early driving the price up artificially? Are we done seeing a decline and seeing the best time to buy in? Does it have room to fall?

Understanding what is going on with Progenitor Mimic is going to help us figure out what to do the next time we see a card that looks insane in EDH, so let’s revisit Mimic next week There’s a lot going on here, and if we decide this is a good time to buy, $12 into a probable $20 feels pretty good if we can avoid getting eaten alive by fees at both ends.

Let’s start talking about Mimic in the comments and the forums and we’ll have our heads right when we revisit next week. Until then!