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Magic Online and You: An Intro

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By: Camden Clark

Many people have little understanding of how important Magic Online is to MTG finance.

They are really missing out. If you fail to take full advantage of Magic Online, you too are missing on some valuable opportunities.

Think about it: Magic Online is where all the pros play. Moreover, it is the de facto deck testing platform for anyone heading into a competitive event. These are people who will pay any sum to have an opportunity to test a deck or just play high-level Magic. This means that there are huge speculation opportunities on Magic Online, as well as having one of the best platforms to determine the progression of cards in paper.

Let’s go over some basics of how the Magic Online economy works.

Event Tickets are the currency of Magic Online. They are used to purchase cards from bots and enter into events. Each one is worth a little less than a dollar, but you can buy them for a dollar from the Wizards store on Magic Online. However, almost everything can and should be purchased outside of the Wizards store by trading with bots or other players.

Bots are what drive Magic Online’s economy. They provide the liquidity for players who want to buy cards. They make their money through occasionally absurd buy/sell margins (especially on eternal cards). They automatically perform buy and sell orders and are basically an automatic cash cow for whoever is running the bot. More on this later.

Most things are cheaper to buy from a bot than buy from Wizard’s store. The most notable example of this is booster packs. Boosters get into the system as rewards from constructed events and draft events, and are used to enter into drafts. Rarely does a current draft set booster pack cost the official four tickets from a bot. Usually, they are at least twenty cents to a dollar cheaper.

Typically, Magic Online card prices are significantly cheaper than their paper counterparts, with a few exceptions (most notably Force of Will).

So how do you get started with utilizing Magic Online?

Magic Online is unforgiving to mistakes. It is quite easy to buy a seemingly perfect speculation opportunity but make some serious mistakes and lose money. That being said, let’s go over some pitfalls first:

Investing in cards with high buy/sell margins

This is a major pitfall of online investment.

Many eternal stapes have extreme margins between the buy and sell prices on the bots. This is because of their low volume. Bots trade standard staples at an exponentially higher rate, thus holding eternal staples is a liability.

Let’s say you purchase a Legacy staple at fifty tickets (essentially dollars). However, the buyback price on the bots is currently thirty-five tickets. That means the sell price would have to go up at least fifteen tickets to be profitable. Those are huge margins that could leave you with significant deficits. Moreover, these cards don’t move in price very quickly. Your money could be tied in a fifty dollar spec for months. That’s not good value.

This is why, in general, I don’t recommend investing in Legacy yet online, especially with the looming Vintage Masters set.

Buying event tickets from the store

This is a small issue, but can be important if you are moving a large volume of event tickets. If you are inside the United States, last time I checked, you pay a dollar per event ticket with no tax at the Wizards store inside Magic Online. This is subject to being changed, of course. For many who aren’t in the US, there can be insane upcharges with tax. Thus, it’s almost a necessity to purchase event tickets outside of the Wizards store.

There are many places to buy event tickets. A quick google search will give you the best ones (I don’t want to endorse one over another-you be the judge). You can often get event tickets for $.97-$.99 per ticket. That’s not too good to be true, that’s just the going rate.

Under this section, I might as well put some general tips when starting out on Magic Online. Don’t open any product you get when starting. Sell your booster pack; you can typically get about two to three event tickets for it.

Don’t play cube unless you want to throw money away.

Getting screwed by the bots

It is very easy to let yourself lose a ton of value by dealing with bots. You will always round up the amount you are paying for cards up to the next event ticket (you cannot have a decimal of event tickets on Magic Online). However, the bot will save your credit. Obviously, this requires trust on your part that the bot will correctly log the amount of credit you have and stay online. I would recommend keeping a word document of the bots you have credit with and searching those for your cards first. That’s a mistake I made.

Make sure to shop around for the best prices of cards. It is certainly possible to pay a dollar or more than you would at a different bot. I have also paid up to five dollars less than the going rate because of an error in bot maintenance. Be mindful of the going rate (MTGOTraders is a ceiling, look for prices above this).

To be honest, the best way to make money directly from Magic Online is to maintain your own bot. That is a topic that goes far beyond the scope of this article. Stay tuned for that.

Those were some pitfalls. It will be confusing at first, and you may make some mistakes.

The key question is: how does this translate into paper investment?

All of the best players play on Magic Online. They test their decks here. They play with other high level grinders here. Where else can you face this kind of competition virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?

An invaluable gauge for where prices will be is the Magic Online tournaments called Daily Events. Although the name implies they are “daily”, there are Standard tournaments that fire several times a day, with Modern having about half as many of these tournaments.

You can pick up on the latest technology by looking at the tournaments results that are posted every week on dailymtg. Being cognizant of this will vastly improve your ability to make good decisions.

Another useful feature of Magic Online is being able to see good inventory data.

One of the greatest features of Pro Trader here on MTGPrice is the inventory data from retailers. It allows you to see when certain cards are experiencing a buyout and to move in on those cards.

However, Magic Online is a good supplement to this data.

Once you get a “feel” for how much stock major bots have in cards, it is quite easy to see when that stock is being depleted or is simply too low.

This provides you with a barometer of which cards are going to see price swings in paper too.

It’s difficult to quantify, unfortunately. There is nothing like MTGPrice for MTGO, so it’s mostly up to you to gain the understanding and utilize it.

This is constantly what I’m talking about in my articles. There aren’t any silver bullets for MTG finance, you have to use your intuition as a player to make money.

That is the essence of why you should be on Magic Online. You need to be a part of the culture of Magic in order to be effective in investing in it. Would you invest in a company where you knew nothing about the product it sold?

No.

The same goes for Magic. If you are playing in the same events that the pros are, you will develop your sense as a player and investor. The difference is that the people you are playing with aren’t looking to make money, they want to get better at the game. If you are looking for opportunity while playing Magic Online, it will begin to present itself.

I can go over hundreds of cards that might see drastic increases in price. Is that the most helpful thing to you? Does that help you become a better investor?

Not for the long term.

If I spent this article telling you my picks for the next months, it may help you for the next few months.

How about five years?

You can only become a better investor by investing a bit of yourself, especially when your money is going into a game. In our hearts, we are all still players.

So load up Magic Online. Take it for a spin. It’s mediocre (read: shitty) technology, but it’s the platform that Wizards has made for competitive players to test decks. If you’re not on there, you are missing out.

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The Japanese Market

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By: JT Neal

First things first, let me introduce myself. I’ve played Magic on and off since Ice Age, albeit only very seriously since Innistrad. I’m an American (Atlantan, to be specific) and I’ve lived in western Japan for the last six years of my life. The first five of those years were mostly spent in rural Shiga, a lovely prefecture with historical castles, Japan’s largest lake… and dismayingly few shops that run Magic events*.

Then, in 2012, I moved to Osaka. Japan’s second-largest city, Osaka is the seat of western Japanese cuisine, comedy and commerce. It also boasts the Nipponbashi district, second only to Tokyo’s Akihabara as a geek mecca. With one move roughly two hours west, I’d gone from Magical famine to feast. Of course, this bounty presented a new threat to my wallet; enter my budding interest in Magic finance.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a new hand at this, and I’m very grateful to be able to share my discoveries in an unfamiliar market with you all here on MTG Price. The Japanese Magic scene is vibrant and worthy of attention, and I think we can all stand to gain by learning a little more about foreign markets. I’d like to start off by going over a few things that might surprise a visitor or new expatriate stepping in to the Japanese scene for the first time. (As a note, all US dollar figures I’ve given are based on the current exchange rate as I write this, of 101.72 yen to the dollar.)

– There’s a surprising amount of English product available. Stores stock English booster packs, and many carry English versions of products such as Commander decks as well. As far as single cards are concerned, most shops that specialize in Magic will have any given card (with the exception of very new or very old sets) available in both English and Japanese.

Between high availability and a relatively older player base, card language is rarely an issue among Japanese players. I know Japanese players who strongly prefer to use English cards, fellow expats who strongly prefer Japanese cards and everyone in between. It’s easy to forget all about the language barrier once you start playing.

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For the most part, stores charge more or less the same amount for non-foils in either language, though very new English cards and older Japanese cards may cost a touch more due to supply issues. For foils, though, all bets are off – if you visit, you’ll probably find that last Japanese foil Stoneforge Mystic you’ve been hunting for, but don’t expect to get a deal on it.

– Many shops explicitly prohibit trading on the premeses. The store where I usually play doesn’t, but trade binders are still a relatively uncommon sight there. There’s plenty of trading going on at Grands Prix and the like, but at least in Osaka, few cards change hands under store roofs. There’s cold comfort in the fact that buylist prices are often pretty competitive. They have to be, because…

– In urban Japan, game stores are typically found close together. If you don’t like the prices or selection at one store, the next may be as far as one city block or as close as another floor in the same building. Some stores handle this competition well, by aiming to have the lowest prices, or stock the fullest discount case, or host the most events. Unfortunately, some deal with it rather poorly; one Osaka branch of a major store has banned all cell phone use, and I’ve seen the staff harass customers for carrying shopping lists.

– And then there’s the elephant in the room: Singles in Japan tend to cost a good bit more than you’re probably used to. Individual packs for in-print sets cost around 300 yen, which is on par with retail price in the United States. Single rares and mythics, however, generally retail for about 120 to 150% more on this side of the Pacific.

This is a fairly consistent rule of thumb, but of course there are outliers. If you’re in Osaka and you need a True-Name Nemesis in your hands today, you’ll spend anywhere from 7000 to a whopping 10000 yen ($69-$99) for the privilege, depending on the store. Tokyo-based tokyomtg.com can hook you up for 5,500($53).

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On the other hand, while card price fluctuations in Japan tend to match worldwide patterns, they often take some time to catch up to spikes in the United States. For whatever reason (and I’m open to theories), I have noticed this tendency is particularly strong with eternal-playable lands. Zendikar fetchlands, Wasteland, Rishadan Port, even Serra’s Sanctum; all of these afforded at least a week’s time to act after spiking Stateside.

Single prices do look a little more familiar if you browse Yahoo Auctions ((http://auctions.yahoo.co.jp/)), though there you run the same risks you’d run with eBay. Yahoo Auctions can be particularly intimidating to international shoppers, or those without much Japanese ability; if there’s interest I would be happy to provide a quick-and-dirty guide in a future column.

– Legacy is alive and well in Japan. My usual shop in Osaka runs at least two Legacy tournaments every week (it was four until recently, when they replaced two of them with Modern); another nearby spot runs Legacy events alongside their Standard FNM. There are several non-sanctioned Legacy events organized by members of the local community, too, like the popular Known Magician’s Clan ((http://mtgkmc.wix.com/kmc-invitational)). There’s growing interest in Modern among players, but for the most part the events aren’t there yet. I expect that to change as we draw closer to the Modern Grand Prix in nearby Kobe this coming August, though. Standard is, unsurprisingly, very popular as well, and Vintage events pop up from time to time.

I hope this has been at least a little informative or interesting. What would you like to know about the Japanese Magic scene? Please don’t hesitate to contact me here, or on Twitter @JohnnyToNowhere, with any questions/comments/complaints/foreign Gifts Ungiven foils you may have. Thank you for reading!

* Respect due to Dragon Tale ((http://www.dragontale.jp)) in Kusatsu, Shiga

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Help us turn MTGPrice.com into the ultimate MTGFinance tool!

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A note from the team at MTGPrice.com:

The last six months have been quite a ride for MTGPrice.com. We’ve gone from roughly 300,000 pageviews a month to over 1.5 million in a slow month. Our “unique users” rates have similarly increased – last month we had almost 125,000 individual magic players use the site. Our growth rates are high and we’re continuing to grow at almost 40% month over month.

analytics_screenshot

With the increase in users, we are starting to slip when it comes to fixing bugs and delivering new features. Just keeping the site running takes quite a bit of effort and we’d very much like to add some new tools. To help with this, we have made an agreement with out current part-time developer to vastly increase his hours in order to get caught up with bug fixes and building new features.

To date, we have personally spent over seven thousand dollars building MTGPrice.com. Our monthly bills for hosting, writers and development costs are many thousands of dollars. While the site mostly covers these costs, we don’t have much room for growth at the speed we’d like to see. A few users have asked for the ability to help support the site. Because of this, we have the following proposal:

ProTrader LIFETIME

– $100 single-time payment.
– Have ProTrader forever. No monthly fees!
– Limited to exactly 100 users.
– Goal is to get $10,000 together to pay for development of the features below.

Sound good? Sign up HERE or read on for details. (NOTE: you MUST have at least a free MTGPrice.com account in order to sign up for lifetime. If you don’t, you will be asked to create one. Once you do, please just re-visit the above link to sign up.)

EDIT: If you see “your 14 day trial begins” in the confirmation screen, please ignore it – you are fully signed up, this is just due to the one-off nature of the signup form.

We plan on using the money in the following ways:

Expanded ProTrader Tools That We Plan On Building

  • ProTrader bug fixes: we have a number of outstanding issues with the ProTrader tools. Fixing these is priority #1.
  • **Hourly updates** instead of daily (“large” email once per day, occasional hourly alerts if “most interesting cards” changes or arbs change)
  • “Best Deals per Vendor” tool: shows the best possible deals from a given vendor. Especially useful if you have some store credit you want to use up.
  • Advanced arbitrage tool: includes store credit calculations and ebay/amazon as a source plus hourly updates.
  • Weekly/Monthly trends emails: Sent every Friday, these emails will cover longer-running trends.
  • Community Tools: share specs, store reviews and card discussions with other ProTraders. A premium community with premium users.
  • Custom daily report based on a ProTrader’s unique collection and wishlist.
  • Advanced Trade Tracker: Track store credit at each store, cash spent, transaction costs (fees to ebay, postage etc.) to ensure you are making money with your MTGFinance activities.

Things for Everyone

  • Bug fixes! We have 116 bugs listed against the main site, from minor (wrong alternate art image) to major (autocomplete sucks). We want them all fixed, yesterday.
  • Free MTG Finance blog content with high-quality, paid writers every day, not just four days a week.
  • Sealed product prices.
  • MTGO prices: MTGO can impact paper prices. We will show both.
  • More US vendors: there are 4-5 other large vendors we would like to cover.
  • International vendors: We plan to add the EU, UK, Japan and then others, in that order.
  • Foreign cards
  • Card condition tracking and pricing.
  • Trade Tracker: Track the cards you traded away and what you got in return. Review past trades to see how they worked out in the end.
  • Fair Trade Wizard: Simple trading tool for in-person trading.
  • Trade Matcher: Enter a username and see the best trades you can make with that user using both of your wishlists and trade lists!
  • Social Tools: A personal collection page that can be shared and viewed by others.

Once the above is complete, we MAY offer a final 100 ProTrader LIFETIME subscriptions to help fund the development of an official MTGPrice.com app for Android and iOS. This is our #1 most requested feature but in order to build it, we need the above work to be completed first. This is the only other time that we plan to (possibly) offer a lifetime subscription.

Important Notes:

  • ProTrader LIFETIME lasts for as long as MTGPrice.com exists. Once you buy it, it’s yours forever without any further direct payment.
  • Limited to 100 users total (with an option for 100 more users if needed to fund a mobile app).
  • The lifetime subscription is not transferrable to anyone else.
  • Since this money is being used to fund new development, unfortunately we cannot offer refunds. Please use our 14 day free trial if you are interested in testing out ProTrader before purchase.
  • New development takes time. Every penny you spend will be spent on development but it will be several months before the above tasks are completed. While we plan on working on tasks in the above order, the order may change over time.
  • The ProTrader offering WILL change over time. We cannot guarantee that any specific vendor will always be included in the offering. Features will change over time as well as new development work is undertaken.
  • We love you.

Help us build the best MTG pricing tool on the planet! Click HERE to sign up for ProTrader LIFETIME. (NOTE: you MUST have at least a free MTGPrice.com account in order to sign up for lifetime. If you don’t, you will be asked to create one. Once you do, please just re-visit the above link to sign up.)

Need to pay via PayPal? Send an email to webmaster@mtgprice.com and we can process the payment manually.

Thanks for helping make MTGPrice.com great!

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Know What You’re Talking About

I was on Facebook earlier this week.

Yes, I know; Facebook is terrible. Everyone’s parents are on Facebook and they’re reported to potentially lose 80% of their users and Zuckerberg just sold 3.2 Billion in Facebook stock; it’s a cesspool. I get it. It’s useful to join Facebook groups to engage with brands you like and find sales and trades and it’s fun to see who from High School got fat and went to jail. It’s also (sometimes) instructive to see what people are saying about cards. Some people think that they have to set the record straight when people are wrong about cards, but it’s really more useful just to sit back and see what different groups are saying.

This set is bad. I don’t think I’m shocking anyone with that proclamation. Not every set can be good, that’s an impossible standard. But no set should be this bad. There are literally 3 cards I care about and one of them I only want to get copies of because I can virtually guarantee it’s overpriced by 300% and I want to trade it out for cards that will retain value. I’ll give you a hint- it’s blue and black and it rhymes with “Den Hacks”.

Given that the set is bad, people are doing something very curious, which is to try and find nice things to say about bad cards they would normally skip. I actually think that’s a great practice, because people who play mostly standard tend to ignore about 90% of every set and focus on the 10 cards that are going to get played in Standard and they tend to miss the stuff with the most financial potential. I happened upon a conversation one day in a Facebook group that was discussing a new card that was just spoiled.

One succinct, one-word review proclaimed “EDH” as if to say “Boom. Nailed it. Moving on.” That would be a pretty good way to handle not spending too much time on a card that was clearly not going to see play in Standard. There was just one problem.

This isn’t really that great in EDH.

Card Analysis is Hard

Even pros get it wrong sometimes, but Standard players are generally about 95% accurate with their gut reactions to cards. Bad stuff is usually very obviously bad, limited-only stuff is generally pretty obvious as well. Good stuff can be even more obvious, and though some cards are initially under or over-rated, Standard players are usually pretty close. They know what they want to play in those formats and it’s easy to identify.

With more people getting involved in MTGFinance, it seems like every set there are fewer and fewer opportunities to make money pre-ordering cards from Standard. Sphinx’s Revalation was embarrassingly-low as was Angel of Serenity. I ordered Thragtusks for $5 apiece from eBay. Five. Actual. Dollars. Price corrections happen much faster because people are on top of it more and more each set. 50 copies of Pain Seer at $2 sold in minutes and the price was corrected very quickly. I am not convinced Pain Seer should be more than $2, but the people buying it at $10 a copy disagree.

With it getting tougher to make money by analyzing the cards from competitive formats it is even more important to learn how to analyze the cards from other formats. The person who gave Astral Cornucopia a dismissive “EDH” as if the card were a waiter who reached for his salad plate before he’d finished picking at it probably won’t lose any actual money by not correctly evaluating the card (and I likely won’t lose any if I’m super wrong and Cornucopia is just what people need to go from 9 mana on turn 6 to 13 mana on turn 7, thus winning all of the EDHs forever) he’s probably going to lose out on a lot of money eventually by failing to correctly evaluate EDH cards. If you see a card that is worse than Darksteel Ingot at 3 mana and worse than Gilded Lotus at 6 mana and say “EDH players will want this”, you should probably play a game of EDH, ever.

You Should All Play a Game of EDH, Ever

I’m serious. I was a very late adopter of EDH but I’ve seen the value in how playing it has allowed me to access an entirely new customer base. EDH players are way better to trade with than people who only play competitive formats. After weekends at SCG Opens where some competitive player would look through three of my binders and say “I’m pretty much only looking for Snapcaster and Boros Reckoner” I thought I would quit trading altogether. What I found when I traded with EDH players was that the amount of stuff they were looking for was way higher and they had no reservations about coming off of competitive cards. Having an EDH deck to play a few games will not only introduce you to those players, it may demonstrate the power level of certain cards you may be able to hook them up with to improve their decks.

EDH isn’t a joke. It’s not a fad. It’s not something to deride or dismiss. It’s a completely new card game that uses the same cards you already have and if you don’t know anything about it as a financier, you’re doing it WRONG.

Build an EDH deck. You probably have a dozen of each Commander 2013 deck, right? Bust one open. Jam some better cards in there. Evasive Maneuvers seems fun given you can generate infinite mana with the general Derevi, a Deadeye Navigator and a Gilded Lotus (or an Astral Cornucopia at X=3…maybe I was wrong about that card. No I wasn’t). Power Hungry is begging for you to jam a Parallel Lives and a Doubling Season in there and go to token town. It would take you 20 minutes and $20 to make a serviceable EDH deck with stuff you have in binders and boxes and you can trade for the rest. Once you play a few games, you’ll know right away what is good in EDH. You may have been playing since 1996, but you’re about to get humbled when you have to ask someone to hand you a Black Market or a Mana Equilibrium so you can read it.

Then, One Day, You’ll Get it

You’ll learn that you can never buy too many copies of Sol Ring at $2 or Gilded Lotus at $3. You’ll learn that Japanese foil EDH generals aren’t quite as liquid as you thought, but your group can’t get enough copies of Food Chain and Pattern of Rebirth. You’ll learn why it was a good idea to snap foil Sylvan Primordial for $1 the first week the set was out but not buy foil Chromatic Lantern yet. No article can teach you how to truly evaluate cards in EDH as well as playing a few games, building a few decks, meeting a few people who come to your shop every week but whom you’ve never met because they don’t play FNM.

You’ll also learn that there are different kinds of EDH groups, and while competitive players will not play a card like Astral Cornucopia, casual EDH players might. When games go a million turns, playing this for 15 to tap it for 5 may be what they want to do. That won’t drive the price up that high and won’t make this card suddenly a good investment, but it will let you know which kinds of EDH players might want this off of you. But how will you ever meet them if you don’t play with them?

Just like someone who plays Standard will recognize the immediate impact of cards like Brimaz, someone with a few EDH  decks and some experience is going to correctly identify the sheer, awesome power of a card like Prophet of Kruphix or Progenitor Mimic and they are going to recognize that although a card like Astral Cornucopia looks durdly and mana-intensive, that isn’t a bad thing to every group . They’ll know that by having an understanding of the format, some experience playing and some decks built so they will know what their own specific needs are.

Also, once you’re building EDH decks and picking up cards to build with in the future or trade to your group, you’ll pay more attention to prices. I’ve made way more money picking up underpriced Vigors from competitive players who only cared about the ten cards that get played in Standard from each set than I have trafficking in Huntmasters and other cards with thin margins due to a low spread. I’ve had 10 copies of Thespian’s Stage disappear out of my EDH deck stock box in one night and had 10 sit unsold for weeks on TCG Player despite being the cheapest listing. You won’t have to ask twitter why Kami of the Crescent Moon and Wheel and Deal and Forced Fruition are quintupling in price because you will have seen the power of those cards in a Nekusar deck demonstrated and you will have stocked up before the big spikes.

Rather than handing out a few fish, this week I wanted to teach you to fish and in this case, learning to fish involves playing Magic. It’s not even going to feel like work.

Finance Quick Hits

  • Nekusar isn’t done making stuff spike. Any card that makes people draw extra cards and hasn’t been reprinted is a good target.
  • For the love of Heliod, didn’t anyone read Pain Seer?
  • Bitterblossom getting bought weeks in advance of the B&R announcement is a new trend. Don’t expect to be able to have a full shopping cart at 11:59 like you used to. I really don’t expect this (or anything) to be unbanned next week and I expect the price to tank back to where it was.