By Guo Heng Chin

There are a few topics I would like to write about, but neither had sufficient fodder to be expanded into a full-fledged article. So I combined them together into one article, a sort of holiday hodgepodge of an article. The first part deals with the shifting paradigm in Modern speculation. The second discusses the first trickle of spoilers in the Fate Reforged spoiler season.

Modern Paradigm

Modern used to be a veritable speculator’s heaven. It was a relatively new format with plenty of unexplored deckbuilding space. Breakout cards spiked overnight by order of magnitudes when they received coverage during a major event. Bulk and near-bulk rares shot up to insane heights when a home was found for those once unloved pieces of cardboard wasting away in bulk bins. Modern staples resembled blue chip shares. However, that era is coming to an end.

Wizards stated over and over again that they are serious about supporting Modern as a Pro Tour format. Modern was a non-rotating format unshackled by the reserve list. We passed the era when the power level of the format was being tuned by frequent bannings, and the format has since evolved a distinctively unique flavor – midrange value grinds with a splash of combo – and a plethora of viable tier one decks in the format at any one time. Wizards is currently in the stage of keeping Modern’s entry barrier sufficiently affordable to be inclusive of the majority of the playerbase, while at the same time remain a premier non-rotating format.

From the reprint of in-demand, expensive staples like Remand and Wurmcoil Engine in supplementary products like Duel Decks and Commander decks to reprinting Thoughtseize and fetchlands in normal sets, Wizards made it abundantly clear that they are taking their promise to ensure that Modern staples remain affordable seriously. While Wizards’ dedication is great for the game and playerbase overall, it increased the risk for Magic financiers invested or planning to invest in Modern staples.

I would not have it any other way: I am a player first, a financier second. I got into Magic finance because Magic is an expensive habit. A little speculation here and there helped eased the financial pressure of grinding competitive Magic.  If Wizards goes gung-ho in reprinting Modern staples, that negates some of the cost associated with staying at the forefront of competitive Magic. Every wave of reprints help me get one step closer to completing my gauntlet of tier one Modern decks.

That does not mean I am jumping overboard from the invest-in-Modern ship. I still have a decent amount of vested interest in terms of Modern investment. That just means I have to change my outlook towards investing in Modern cards to fit the new paradigm. Adapt or die.

I. Shorter Hold Time

Thee Modern staples I bought at the inception of the format in 2011 just kept on going up and up. Those $8 Vendilion Cliques I bought on eBay doubled to $20, $40 and then $80. I bought my fourth non-foil Cryptic Command at $35 in January 2014 because I needed it for the Modern side event at Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur. $35 must be the ceiling for a Modern staple reprinted in Modern Masters as a rare, I consoled myself as I mentally punched myself for not completing my non-foil playset back when it was a $15 card. Cryptic Command is now at $60. Don’t even get me talking about the Liliana of the Veils and Scalding Tarns.

Most of my Modern investments remained with me today as I kept on convincing myself that they have more room to grow. The fact that my holdings got more expensive after Modern Masters emboldened the greedy me. My Modern stakes were invincible.

My approach to Modern speculation was untethered from the realities of Magic finance and investment in general. Even the mighty crude oil eventually fell in price. Earlier this year my Remands took a hit when it was reprinted in Jace vs. Vraska. Fine, Remand was still a double-digit uncommon and I dug them out from my bulk box anyway. But I still held on to them, hoping that they will return to their near-$20 price.

Late last year Birthing Pod was hovering around $6 – $8. I bought my second playset of Birthing Pods. And traded for a few more. In the post-Bloodbraid Elf era of Modern, Pod decks took down more Grand Prix than every other archetype in Modern. Surely $6 – $8 was way too low for the namesake piece of Pod decks. I was right. Birthing Pod spiked to $18 – $19 spring this year. Yet I was reluctant to liquidate my Birthing Pod holdings. Phyrexian mana cards must surely be hard to reprint. I am sure Birthing Pod has more room to grow as the centerpiece of one of the most important archetype in Modern! I told myself that even though I knew they were printed in the New Phyrexia event deck. The spike did not last long; Birthing Pod dropped to $10 over the summer and with Modern Masters 2015 coming up, I doubt Birthing Pod will be able to break $15 again. Let alone the lofty heights I had hoped for previously.

Modern is no longer a hold and wait game. If you are interested to invest in Modern staples, you must be willing to liquidate them rather than holding onto them like blue chip stocks. Some time ago, Corbin Hosler wrote about liquidating his fetchlands when the blue ones hit $35. When Scalding Tarns broke $100 during spring this year, I thought to myself Corbin could’ve made so much more had he held them just for another year. Every time I considered liquidating my Modern holdings that are already in the profit, I hark back to Corbin’s article and told myself to wait just a little bit more.

Gone are those days when we laughed at the idea of predicting a ceiling for Modern staples. Today, as I write this, I looked back at Corbin’s article as a good paradigm to follow for investing in Modern staples: liquidate once you have made your profit.

Be willing to liquidate your holdings that have grown into profit instead of waiting and hoping for another spike. It took a while for Wizards to go full steam ahead with their promise on reprinting Modern staples due to their multi-year-long development cycle and a conservative approach to prevent Chronicles 2.0, but Wizards seem to have grasped the pace for Modern reprints now. This year alone saw Modern staples like Wurmcoil Engine, Remand, Chord of Calling, Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and fetchlands fall in price.

In Bayesian terms,  it is better to liquidate at 130% profit rather than stake out for a 200% profit and risk making a loss instead in the current climate of Modern reprints. As Corbin said, leave the last 10% to others. Expanding on that for contemporary Modern speculation, I would say you have to be willing to even leave the next 20% – 30%.

Set a reasonable exit price for your Modern speculations and adjust existing exit targets. I am no longer holding onto my Snapcaster Mages until they hit Dark Confidant price; I am happy to liquidate them once they hit $50 and take home the $30 in profit rather than risk a reprint while I am gunning for a $60 paycheck.

II. Every Product Spoiler is Relevant.

I used to ignore supplementary product spoilers as they were not relevant to the competitive metagame. I prefer to discover those items at my own pace like shuffling up freshly-unboxed Commander decks with no knowledge of the decklist and finding out myself the surprises R & D had in store for me as I play that deck. It was a pleasant surprise to discover the dragons subtheme in the Daretti Commander deck as I drew dragon after dragon.

Wizards is now willing to reprint expensive Modern mythics in supplementary products like Wurmcoil Engine in the red Commander 2014 deck, Built from Scratch. Keep a close finger on the pulse for Modern reprints.

III. Hit it Low

Look for obviously underpriced Modern staples rather than buying already expensive Modern staples and hope for the next bump. It is harder to predict if another bump would happen with Wizards churning out so many reprints. The increased risk is not worth it.

Hunt for Modern cards no one is looking at because it is not seeing much playing  at the moment or a recent reprint crashed its price. $3.58 Chord of Calling is a good example. You are unlikely to regret buying a Modern staple at this price.

That Time of the Year

One nice thing about being in charge of the column that goes up slightly after midnight on Tuesday is getting to write about the spoilers right away.

The first spoiler that manifested itself was:

Whisperwood Elemental was Mark Rosewater’s preview card on the first day of spoiler season. When I first read through the essay of a card, I was underwhelmed. Mark Rosewater’s spoilers were usually the cream of the crop for the set, the marquee cards of the block designed to whet our appetites and rev up the engines of the hype train. A five mana for 4/4 with no enter the battlefield ability felt a little disappointing.

While Whisperwood Elemental’s triggered-at-your-end-step ability may not always net you the extra value with Hero’s Downfall, Murderous Cut, and Stoke the Flames being popular removals in the format, Whisperwood Elemental rewards you with a snowballing board state if it is left unanswered. Sticking a Whisperwood Elemental on board for a few turns might just put you too far ahead for your opponent to catch up, especially with its second clause that acts as an insurance against board wipes. Financially, I am not (yet) sold on Whisperwood Elemental as it feels fragile in the current state of Standard. It has the making of an expensive rare, but I think Whisperwood Elemental might be more Duskmantle Seer than Wingmate Roc. Okay, maybe better than Duskmantle Seer, but definitely not as good as Wingmate Roc.

Ah dragons. I missed them. Competitively costed? Check. Solid stats? Check. @rezaaba reminded me during our usual flurry of spoiler season discussion that Kolaghan is actually a 5/5 when attacking. I am not sure how relevant Kolaghan’s anthem trigger would be at five mana: Kolaghan could see play as a top-of-the-curve alpha striker in aggressive RB shells. Or perhaps a midrangey Mardu deck that relies on token-makers to create an overwhelming number of creatures to make Kolaghan’s anthem worth the five mana you tap for it. Note that Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker, another key-piece of Mardu midrange tokens,  triggers Kolaghan’s anthem too.

Would Kolaghan be the Thundermaw Hellkite to the contemporary Thragtusk, Siege Rhino? I highly doubt so. The prevalence of reanimator strategies in the current Standard metagame is a twofold obstacle for Kolaghan. The amount of life gained by reanimator decks over the course of a game is too much for aggressive decks to handle, even if they have access to top of the curve beaters like Kolaghan. Second, the number of 1/1 deathtouch bees in the meta is too damn high. Slamming hasty five mana fliers is not something you want to be doing unless its called Thundermaw Hellkite.

I am happy to see a new, potentially competitive dragon being printed, but I doubt its financial potential. Even if Kolaghan sees play, small set rares have a low ceiling unless it is a ubiquitous linchpin of the format. Kolaghan is not a card I am inclined to preorder.

Manifest Destiny

I stole that pun off Twitter.

I guess it’s too much to ask for a card to be called “Manifest Destiny”, so maybe a deck can be called that. #MTGFRF

— MTG Color Pie (@mtgcolorpie) December 29, 2014

At first glance, manifest seemed like an underwhelming mechanic designed with limited in mind. For once I was actually excited for limited. Morph is already pretty fun by itself and manifest is going to push limited dynamics to a whole new level. Playing around face-down cards just got a whole lot more complicated (and fun)!

Upon closer inspection, manifest is a form of card advantage. It takes a card from the top of your library and turns it into a 2/2 creature, regardless of the card type. That extra land on top of your library could be conscripted to bolster your board presence, saving you one dead draw phase. Manifesting a creature from the top of your library is sort of like drawing it, except you do not use up your draw phase.

But enough about strategy, I am writing about Magic finance and there would be plenty of discussion regarding the pros and cons of manifest by other more esteemed Magic strategy writers. What I am concerned about is the financial impact of the mechanic on existing cards, and a card that stands to abuse the manifest mechanic in Standard is no other than:

Manifesting a Hooded Hydra allows you to turn it face up for just GG to become a 5/5 creature that leaves behind five snake tokens. That is a trip to valueland.

Of course that scenario assumes that Hooded Hydra is on the top of your library when the manifest trigger resolves. Working with the manifest cards spoiled so far, we can assume that manifest will draw from the top card of your library. Barring convoluted ways to get Hooded Hydra onto the top of your library (thereby negating the advantage from manifesting it) your best shot at manifesting a Hooded Hydra would be to run four copies of it and/or manipulate the top of your library with Courser of Kruphix and scry.

I am not saying that Hooded Hydra will shine with the new manifest mechanic. It just has a better chance of finding a home. Hooded Hydra is a card to keep an eye on as the spoilers are rolled out within the next few weeks. If Fate Reforged grants enough tools to build  decks revolving around the manifest mechanic, getting in on Hooded Hydra at under $2 would have a nice payoff as it is one of the prime candidates to be a four-of in manifest decks.

Another card that works well with manifest is Ashcloud Phoenix, which @rezaaba pointed out during our discussion. You get to unmorph the Phoenix at two mana less than its morph cost and still reap the benefits of turning it face up. Ashcloud Phoenix already proved to be a solid, difficult-to-remove card even at a morph cost of six; manifest decks would be inclined to run multiple copies of Ashcloud Phoenix shall those decks exist. Do not buy Ashcloud Phoenix right now, its current price of $4.33 is not a great buy-in. Keep an eye on upcoming spoilers for manifest enablers and just trade for your Phoenices at the moment.

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By Guo Heng Chin

As I mentioned in last week’s article, I was in Tokyo for a week. Seeing that the holiday season is just around the corner, let me regale you with some holiday tales of my little pilgrimage to the Magic stores in Tokyo and the wonders I saw and experienced throughout my journey. Readers interested in actionable finance-related stuff can skip straight to the Trends segment at the bottom of this article for the card I am examining this week with my financial monocles.

While my trip was not Magic-related (that one comes next May for Grand Prix Chiba featuring Modern Masters Two, I mean 2015), I tried to squeeze in as much time as my girlfriend would allow to drop by Tokyo’s Magic stores. In a way, Japan is the hallowed land of Magic: the Gathering in Asia. It is the Asian country with the largest number of Grand Prix allocation each year. For comparison, there will be five Grand Prix in Japan in 2015 while China and Southeast Asia only got three each. Japanese players are among some of the most accomplished Asian players in the pro circuit, a testament to the thriving Magic scene in Japan. However the part about Japanese Magic stores that excited me the most was the fact that they are home to Japanese foils and various other peculiarities unique to Japan.

The Rarest of Them All

The first place I went to search for magic stores was Akihabara, the epicenter of geekery in Tokyo. Akihabara is home to not just one, nor two, but a cluster of Magic stores, with at least four of them being major purveyor of singles. The first store I dropped by was Big Magic located on the top floor of Radio Kaikan, a shopping mall dedicated to anime and manga, figurines, collectibles and TCGs . As Big Magic’s name implied, the store showcased a big inventory of big money singles.

It felt surreal to be in the vicinity of so many singles worth more than my monthly salary just sitting behind the glass display, like museum exhibits. I have played in a plethora of Magic stores in Malaysia and England, but I have never encountered such brazen display of Powers and high end cards within a two meter radius. I grind competitive Magic and write about Magic finance, but I am also a collector at heart. I have a fascination with the rare and unique, a trait I imagine I share with most collectors, be they collectors of cardboards, stamps, or bottle caps. And nothing excites a collector like witnessing with his or her own eyes an object so rare it possessed a near-mythical status:

The Adarkar Wastes above was one of the test print cards done in a different frame. Though the card has an Unglued symbol, it was part of the test print for 8th Edition that leaked out. There is only one copy of the card above as only four of each card were printed, with two of them featuring different styles of foiling.  The copy above should be the dark hue-with-foiling-all-over-the-card version.

Wow. Just wow. I recall reading an old piece about high end foils by no other than the godfather of Magic finance, Jonathan Medina. The article concluded with a segment aptly titled ‘Foils You’ll Never See’  where Medina wrote about certain foils where ” chances are that you won’t run into these, but you should be aware that cards like this exist”. They are so rare that most of the time you can only see them at Magic Librarities, a website dedicated to archiving all the rarities that exist throughout the two decades of Magic’s existence, and one of my favorite procrastination site (I have some boring task at hand, oh wait lets have a look at all these rarities). There was a sense of awe in seeing those cards in real life, akin to witnessing in person an old painting in which you have only saw low resolution pictures of in a textbook or Wikipedia.

I also had the chance to see one of these beauties physically. I have always wondered how would a shiny bronze symbol would look like on a card:

Cream of high-end rarities aside, the other cool thing about Big Magic in Akihabara is their order-taking system where you can browse and select the singles you want on a tablet and pick them up on their counter. I read that Hareruya, Tomoharu Saito’s megastore also employs a similar system using desktops.

Speaking of machines, I stumbled upon one of these in front of another Magic store a few floors below Big Magic:

The Taste of Brainstorm

I visited nearly all the stores in the two clusters of Magic stores in Tokyo, Akihabara and Ikebukuro. There are plenty of articles and forum posts written about how the stores are like, so rather than repeat what others wrote (go read them, they deserve the hits), I am going to share the things that fascinated me during my visit to those stores. Witnessing rarities in person was one of them, and the other was finding out how Brainstorm tastes.

I made the trip to Shibuya, partially to accompany my girlfriend for her shopping, and partially to check out Mint, the magic store sponsoring Yuuya Watanabe (I am sure most of you who watched the World Championship semifinals caught a glimpse of Mint’s logo on Yuuya’s sweater). Opened in February 2012, Mint is a relatively new store compared with the incumbents in Akihabara and Ikebukoro but it boasts a unique edge: it is both a bar and a card store.

Mint Shibuya definitely leveraged the fact that they are a both a bar and a Magic store by concocting their own cocktails inspired by and named after iconic Magic cards with like Brainstorm and Voice of Resurgence. I relished the opportunity to finally experience a Brainstorm with my taste buds. I am no expert on cocktails, but the Brainstorm cocktail was sweet and zesty, just like casting the spell itself (or maybe I am just biased, being a lifelong blue mage).

Wait a minute. Aren’t you asking for trouble putting a drink right beside your deck?

Mint Shibuya came up with a great answer: two-tiered tables with a transparent glass upper tier to put your drink and a spacious bottom tier for you to sling cards.

There were no one playing in the shop as I visited it on an weekday afternoon, but I could not resist the urge to test out such an ingenious solution. I can now claim from experience that it was pretty comfortable to use!

Tokyo Hauls

Being the guy who writes about undervalued cards, I can not help but search for undervalued Magic in Tokyo. The first haul from my trip was Japanese Khans of Tarkir booster boxes.

It comes without saying that Japanese booster boxes are going to be cheaper in Japan. I bought my three Khans of Tarkir boxes from different shops, and they all averaged out at ¥10, 500, about $87 each. Throughout December 2014, Japanese Khans of Tarkir booster boxes sold on eBay for $130 – $160, with a single outlier of $119 and some fetching up to $175. Japanese Conspiracy boxes sold for around $140 each during the same time frame.

The Japanese stores are well aware that their eternal staple foils command an insane multiplier compared to English foils and price them accordingly. The foil Japanese Khans of Tarkir fetchlands were on par with eBay completed sales prices. But nowhere else could you find Japanese booster boxes for the price it was sold at inside Japan. I opted to buy booster boxes rather than Japanese foils as I figured that would give me the best value with my limited funds.

Intriguingly, shops in Tokyo sell English Khans of Tarkir booster boxes at a higher price than Japanese boosters. English Khans of Tarkir were going for ¥13, 000, around $1, 500 more expensive than the Japanese ones. The shopkeepers I spoke to, with the assistance of Google’s Translate app, cited the fact that in Japan, English boxes come in a significantly lower supply than Japanese boxes. No surprise there. While they agree that Japanese cards reins in a higher price due to the cards’ cool typeface, their opinions differ on how much Japanese players value English cards. One claimed that Japanese players generally prefer Japanese cards, a statement I can agree with. The other mentioned how some Japanese players seek out English cards to play in tournaments abroad, something I find peculiar as it is technically legal to play Japanese cards anywhere English cards could be played.

Nevertheless, it remains the fact that English booster boxes were sold at a higher price than Japanese booster boxes in the stores I visited. It makes little sense economically to sell a product at a higher price when it has low demand, even though the product’s supply is lower. I guess I will find out more about  the value Japanese players place on English cards when I have the chance to do some trading at Grand Prix Chiba come May next year.

Unfortunately, player-to-player trading is not allowed in most Tokyo stores. While I sympathise with their reason for implementing the rule,  it nevertheless disappointed me  as I lugged along my trade binder for the trip with high hopes of trading for Japanese foils. I guess I should have dug deeper while researching my trip.

The other Japanese MTG object you could get much cheaper in Japan than anywhere else are these:

APAC (Asia-Pacific) lands is a series of fifteen basic lands given out to Asia-Pacific players as promotional cards back in 1998. The APAC lands are unique in a sense that their art each refer to a specific real world setting in Asia-Pacific. They came in three sets distinguished by their color-coded packaging – clear, red and blue and each pack contained different arts for each basic land type. APAC lands are highly sought after for their gorgeous and unconventional art (land art do not usually refer to real world locations) and their rarity.

The cheapest APAC lands go for $6 – $7 apiece while the most expensive ones go up to $25. Unopened packs go for anywhere between $25 – $60 on eBay and online retailers sell them for least $45 for the clear pack and up to $70 for the red pack, and that is if they stock them. My only regret was not getting more unopened APAC lands during my trip.

I hope my tale amused you a little, and if you ever go to Japan, you know what to spend your money on. APAC lands and lots of ramen.

Trends

A good indicator of an undervalued card about to spike is a spike on Magic Online. As of writing, Pharika, God of Affliction is demanding 12 tix online, while paper copies are only $4.32. Pharika has been seeing play as a two-of in the mainboard of Sultai Reanimator, Abzan Reanimator, GB Constellation and the occasional Abzan Midrange. Pharika is the ultimate value engine, churning out a stream of deathtouch blockers from your fallen or milled creatures, with the potential to become a 5/5 body. As her snakes are enchantment creatures, Pharika combos with Doomwake Giant to give you an asymmetrical Drown in Sorrow each turn.

Pharika was one of the cards I thought would be one of the breakout card in Journey into Nyx but it has never even went as high as $10. Pharika is a mythic rare from a little-opened spring set, is competitively costed in a popular competitive color combination and is a card that generates value turn-by-turn and is hard to get rid of. I would consider her on par with Keranos, God of Storms who was nearly $20 at his height and is now $13. I do not expect Pharika to emulate Keranos pricewise as Keranos sees play as a one-of in Modern and Legacy decks as a way to grind out long games, but Pharika at under $5 seemed to be way undervalued.

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