Category Archives: Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED: The ABCs of MTG Finance

A is for Arbitrage

Arbitrage is a favorite topic of ours around here, and it’s especially favored by Sigmund Ausfresser and Jason Alt. It’s a simple concept wherein one buys an item from one party and sells it to another party for a higher price. Essentially, it’s a matter of identifying market inefficiencies and capitalizing on them. Here’s an example from a recent Jason Alt article:

mindsdesirearbitrageopportunity

You see where the buylist price (the blue line) is above the retail price (the green line)? That’s an arbitrage opportunity. Taking these opportunities is as close to “free money” as you can get, though obviously there are risks if you’re waiting for mail.

B is for Buylists

Buylists are beyond important to the MTG community. For store owners and independent operators, they’re the prices one is willing to pay for cards. For hobbyists and players, they’re the prices one can get for one’s cards at a moment’s notice. For financiers, they’re the indicators that might help one decide whether or not to buy in on a speculation target or avoid it. The existence of buylists is what makes Magic cards one of the most liquid non-currency assets you own.

forceofwillbuylists

When you search for a card here on MTGPrice, you’ll see a list of retail prices from a bunch of different vendors on the right side of the screen. Click the “Sell To” button, though, and it will switch to the buylist prices for those vendors. This will show you who is paying the most, and will also give you a good indication of the current demand for the card in question. (The card above is Force of Will, in case you’re wondering. Demand is pretty tepid for this $115 card.)

C is for Canceled Orders

If you’re watching a tournament and see a card performing well, you may want to place an order for that card. However, in the climate of today’s Magic marketplace, prices swing quickly, and there’s a good chance your order will get cancelled by overambitious vendors who would rather make $3 extra than retain a loyal customer. It’s just a fact of the world, and you should be aware of it.

How can you combat this? A few tips:

  1. If you know you want a card, order it before the big tournaments are underway.
  2. If you’re ordering a large quantity, either order from many different vendors or order from a big-name player (Star City Games, Channel Fireball) who will honor your order.
  3. Run a Google search and check the MTGPrice forums to see if a store you’re considering buying from has a reputation for cancelling orders.
  4. If you do run into issues, report them in the various places Magic players gather online to warn other players who may be considering a purchase.

D is for Dragons

Not just dragons, though. As an MTG financier, you should know that dragons, angels, elves, goblins, and a few other tribal creature types get a premium from a certain subgroup of players. If a sweet new card comes out with one of these creature types and seems underpriced, this is another factor that may convince you to buy in. This chart will probably convince you not to sell your mythic dragons at bulk prices:

BalefireDragon

E is for EV

You’ve probably heard people talking about “EV,” but it may have taken you a while to figure out that it stands for “expected value.” This is a term that you’ll hear quite often, and not just in Magic circles, either. It refers to the average gain or loss one can expect after performing an action many times, while taking known variables into account.

For example, the EV of opening a booster pack of Battle for Zendikar would be the average value of ten commons, three uncommons, one rare or mythic, one basic land, and the possibility of a foil, maybe even of the Expeditions variety, replacing a common. Most often, you’ll hear people discuss the EV of playing in particular events, weighing the cost of entry versus the value of the prizes, tournament materials, and added perks. The better your EV, the more you should want to do something.

F is for Formats

Knowing which format(s) a card on which you are speculating is played in is absolutely key to being successful in Magic finance. Cards that are played in Standard perform differently than those that are played in Vintage, and the same is true of Legacy, Modern, Commander, Cube, and basically any other format you can think of.

If you’re buying a card for speculative purposes, you need to know in which formats the card sees play, how in demand it is in those formats, and how those formats generally impact prices (e.g., Standard moves prices more quickly than Vintage, but Vintage-playable foils could end up worth more than your car if you acquire a few of them).

G is for Grading

You should know the difference between near mint (NM), slightly played (SP), moderately played (MP), heavily played (HP), and damaged. You should know how these different grades impact card prices. You should be able to grade your cards accurately. You should know who grades harshly when buylisting (Strike Zone Online, Card Kingdom) and whose SP cards are often NM (Star City Games). DJ Johnson wrote a great piece on getting value from less-than-NM cards. You should read it.

H is for Homo Magiconimus

In this article, Ross Lennon took the economics term homo economicus and applied it to Magic, creating a new, fancier term for “magical human.” The concept of homo economicus/magiconimus is basically that economists/MTG finance writers predict things as if everyone will act rationally at all times—despite all evidence to the contrary.

We want to be the magical human of legend, but alas, humans are not rational creatures, but emotional ones. Knowing that you will be misled by your emotions, however, can help you plan for just such a contingency. We can all aspire to be magical humans, and being self-aware of our biggest weakness in this respect is a huge step toward this goal.

I is for Interests

MTG Stocks has a section called “Interests” that shows the daily and weekly movement of the cards with the largest changes in that time period. MTGPrice has similar pages called “Today’s Gainers and Losers” and “Week’s Gainers and Losers.” Both sites seem to have slightly different algorithms, so you’ll see a few different cards on each list, but the information is great on both. MTGPrice offers a format sorting ability, too, which you know is extremely helpful if you’ve been reading along.

Checking the finance interests every day is a highly efficient way of getting a handle on the market. DJ Johnson paid proper homage to this aspect of MTG finance in this article.

J is for Judge Foils

Judge foils are important because they are one of very few ways to inject truly high-end cards to the Magic market without just crashing those cards’ values in the process. Two recent examples:

eleshnornphyrexianjudgechart

forceofwilljudgechart

You’re not going to find prices like that on cards from recent booster packs (even Expeditions are dwarfed by these), yet these ridiculously expensive cards were just printed in the last couple years. The point is: if you care about high-end cards, you should probably get friendly with a judge—or become one yourself.

K is for Knowledge Capital

From Investopedia:

An intangible asset that comprises the information and skills of a company’s employees, their experience with business processes, group work and on-the-job learning. Knowledge capital is not like the physical factors of production – land, labor and capital – in that it is based on skills that employees share with each other in order to improve efficiencies, rather than on physical items. Having employees with skills and access to knowledge capital puts a company at a comparative advantage to its competitors.

Hey, this is what we offer at MTGPrice! With a team of some of the best finance minds in the business as well as a bevy of tools at your disposal, we are offering our knowledge capital to you at the price of less than $5 per month. Could you do it without us? Sure. Will we make it easier? Count on it.

L is for LGS

You’ve definitely run into this term, and if you were too embarrassed to ask after all these years, let me finally enlighten you: it stands for “local game store.”

Your LGS is not essential to your success in Magic finance, but it can certainly be helpful. Here, you will have access to a local buylist (hopefully), meet people to play and trade with, get to test out formats and decks, be able to purchase Magic products without waiting for shipping, and more. Your LGS is a resource to you, so don’t let it go to waste.

Wastes

M is for Mill

I could have put this under the dragon umbrella, but mill cards are unique enough that they deserve their own letter on this list. Mill cards are, inexplicably, hugely popular among the casual crowd. Take a peek at Glimpse the Unthinkable‘s unfathomable price for the prime example. That’s not the only one, though, as we see abnormally high prices on cards like Mind FuneralArchive TrapConsuming AberrationTraumatizeHedron Crab… you get the idea.

If it’s blue, black, or both, and it puts cards from your opponent’s library into his or her graveyard, there’s a reasonable chance that card will be worth money someday. This is a fact you should we aware of.

N is for Negotiation

Considering the fixed-price nature of most retail establishments, it’s rare to get to negotiate for items these days. That said, you get to negotiate all the time in Magic finance.

Making a trade? Every step of the process is negotiation. Buying a pile of cards from a vendor at a Grand Prix? If you’re not offering a lower price than what’s listed, you’re doing it wrong. Looking to sell some cards? Negotiation skills will help you get the most possible for them.

This is a skill you should be developing, period.

O is for Out of Stock

Star City Games is well known for having too-high prices on its cards (but compensating with stellar customer service and Magic‘s best tournament series), and as such, I have never actually bought cards from the company. That said, SCG is huge and can thus swing the marketplace single-handedly. When SCG is out of stock of a card, that probably means the card is in high demand, as SCG’s coffers are deep. Often, the card is not sold out at all, but SCG is merely taking some time to determine what the new market price should be. Currently, most of the Expeditions lands are out of stock. A sign of high demand and/or a pending price increase? It’s hard to say for sure, but keep an eye on it.

P is for PucaTrade

I love PucaTrade, as I’ve expressed on this very site. In fact, PucaTrade has been a recurring topic for more than a year now here at MTGPrice. While there has been some recent controversy after Cliff Daigle’s last couple articles, the site is growing by leaps and bounds and has proven itself to be a fantastic place to exchange Magic cards for other Magic cards. My cube would be an untuned mess without the service, I can promise that.

PucaTrade is another of those tools available to you that is not essential for your success, but is helpful to it. There’s a high time cost associated with getting started (PucaTrade is at its best when you list your entire collection), but once you’ve begun on the path of Puca, it’s hard to look back.

Crag Puca

Q is for Quarterly Reports for Hasbro Shareholders

The Magic community doesn’t get a lot of hard numbers regarding number of players, the growth of the game, or how sales are doing. We get broad platitudes like “the best-selling set ever,” but rarely do we get a glimpse at hard numbers.

The one exception to this is the information provided to Hasbro shareholders, which is available (at least in part) to the public. Realistically, the annual reports are more important than the quarterly ones, but come on, I needed a word that starts with “Q”. (Just wait until we get to “X”.)

Incidentally, Anthony Capece drew heavily on Hasbro shareholders reports for his research in two of my all-time favorite MTG finance articles: “Rare is the New Uncommon” and “Size Matters.”

R is for Reserved List

Back in the ’90s, Wizards made a stupid promise in order to appease collectors: it will never reprint cards that are contained on this list, colloquially known as “the Reserved List.”  The Reserved List includes the power nine, the ten original dual lands, and tons of great cards from the first five or so years of Magic‘s existence (and also Wood Elemental).

Wood Elemental

In 2011, after some controversy, Wizards removed a loophole that allowed the company to print premium versions of these cards. The company has maintained that it will never violate the letter or the spirit of the Reserved List again.

This has a two-pronged effect: cards on the Reserved List are some of the safest investments in Magic, since we have a guarantee they will never be reprinted. On the other hand, formats that need cards like the power nine and dual lands are dying because of the ever-decreasing numbers of these cards in existence, which we might expect to lead to card devaluation over time. Not too long ago, Travis Allen wrote a great piece about the effect this is having on Legacy.

S is for Spread

The difference between the retail price and the highest buylist price is what we refer to as spread. For example, if a card is selling for $10 and you can sell it for $5, the spread is 50 percent.

In MTG finance, we use spread to determine dealer demand for a card, which in turn gives us some insight into the larger demand for a card. If a dealer is paying $9 on a $10 card, that’s a 10-percent spread, and indicates that the dealer is having no trouble at all moving copies of the card and just wants to move through as many of them as possible.

In general, the lower the spread, the more we’re interested in buying in. A very low spread often acts as an indicator that a retail price is about to go up.

T is for Twitter

There’s a whole bunch of MTG financiers on Twitter, some with podcasts, article series, blogs, or other platforms, and some that post only to Twitter. The #mtgfinance hashtag is one you should be well familiar with. If you’re not on Twitter, you’re giving up a whole bunch of free information (and sometimes entertainment).

Jason Alt once wrote an article series at Gathering Magic focusing on the best people to follow on Twitter. That seems like a fine place to start if you’re just now registering for an account.

U is for Unrealized Gain

This is perhaps my biggest weakness in MTG finance. An unrealized gain is one where you have successfully made an investment, but haven’t actually secured the capital that equals profit. The eight copies of Wingmate Roc that I bought for $2 each and never got around to outing? Those are great (and shameful) examples of unrealized gains.

Don’t get caught by this trap—be a homo magiconimus and sell your cards at the right time. In this case, laziness was my downfall, but it’s been greed in the past. Lock in those profits and don’t let greed or laziness lose you money.

V is for Value

If you don’t know why V is for value, then I don’t know why you’re reading this website.

W is for Watching and Waiting

MTG finance is all about watching and waiting. If speculation is your style, you need to watch for targets and wait for them to hit. If you’re the type to buy collections and piece them out, it’s all about waiting for that perfect customer or Craigslist post. If you’re a player looking to get cards for their best prices, you’re waiting for December or the summer, when prices are traditionally at their lowest.

Waiting in the Weeds

You need to watch what’s going on in the marketplace and wait for predictions you’re counting on to come true. It’s just part of the hobby.

X is for Xenaphobia

As opposed to xenophobia, xenaphobia is the fear of strong, powerful women, such as a certain warrior princess. The Magic community has a strong case of this affliction, as we see in the responses every time an article about women in Magic gets published (examples here, here, and here).

I don’t know that the Magic finance community is particularly unwelcome to women, but we also lack (m)any prominent female voices, so maybe there’s something we could do better. On a purely selfish level, more women in the game simply means more customers and trading partners, but there’s plenty of arguments for why diversity in games (in both content and audience) will make the hobby more fun for everybody.

Y is for You

Everything in Magic finance comes down to you. Your preferences, your beliefs, your ideas, your actions, and your money.

MTG finance writers are here to point out trends, strategies, theories, and suggestions, but we never tell you that you have to go buy this or that you have to go sell that. We give advice—usually good, but occasionally bad—but you’re the one who ultimately vets what we have to say and takes action based on your opinion of it.

Mark Rosewater often says that the best way to get better at Magic is to own your losses and always be asking yourself what you could have done better. This exact same practice can—and should—be applied to Magic finance, too.

Z is for Zero Balance

Zero balance means exactly what it says: the balance of your debts is zero.

Of course, I hope you’re not going into debt to buy Magic cards (unless you’re opening a business, I suppose). However, we all know Magic cards can make us money. Can you pay off your home, car, student loan, and other outstanding balances with our proceeds? Sure, if that’s your goal.

Maybe your ambitions aren’t to pay off your real-life debts with your Magic hobby, which is fine! In that case, the dream can be a zero balance on your MTG wants list. That’s something we can all agree would be awesome, right?


I’ll update this list periodically, and if you have any links to content that is especially relevant to any of the above, please leave them in the comments and I will add them to the post.

So Much Unlocked ProTrader

Every so often, we here at MTGPrice unlock some older ProTrader articles for everyone to read. Well, lucky reader, have I got good news for you: today is one of those days! Here’s a plethora of content, now available to everyone:

DEATH OF A BINDER GRINDER

By Travis “Firsty Firsty” Allen

TRIBAL GAINS

By Jason Alt”ernative Humorist”

THE FALLOUT FROM VEGAS

By Corbin “Big Hoss” Hosler

BITS ‘N PIECES

By Ross “Not John” Lennon

LESSONS LEARNED FROM GP VEGAS

By Sigmund “Freud” Ausfresser

IS MODERN MASTERS 2015 BOTTOMING OUT?

By Travis All”i”en “Encounter”

GODS AND GENERALS, PART 1

By Jason Alt “Key”

ONE LAST LOOK AT MODERN MASTERS 2015

By “Shut Up” Corbin Hosler

MY BETS FOR GP CHARLOTTE

By Guo “I’ve Heard of a Hang Nail but Never a” Heng Chin

HOMO MAGICONIMUS AND DARKSTEEL

By Ross “The Boss” Lennon

TWO MORE MODERN CARDS

By Guo Heng Chin “Up”

THE CHICKEN LITTLE OF MTG FINANCE

By Sigmund “Yeah, We’re Going Back There” Aus”Freud”er

DREGS OF TARKIR

By Danny “Not Dan” Brown

GODS AND GENERALS, PART 2

By Jason “E. (Thanks, Marcel) S”Alt

RETROSPECTIVE: GP RICHMO…ER, CHARLOTTE. WHATEVER.

By Travis “Name Not Well Suited to Puns or Nicnames” Allen

MODERN WATCH I

By Guo Heng Chin, “The Notorious GHC”

PLAYER FINANCE – TOURNAMENT FINANCE 101

By Ross “Dress for Less” Lennon

A NEW WORLD OF ARBITRAGE

By Sigmund “Never Met Him in Person and Always Wonder If He Has an Accent” Ausfresser

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT DEMAND SOURCES

By Danny “Whitest Guy in the Room but Still Named” Brown

GODS AND GENERALS, PART 3

By Jason “Mr. So-Prolific-That-I’m-Running-Out-of-Puns” Alt

TRANSACTION ETIQUETTE

By Travis Allen “Ant Farm?”

COMMONS AND PLANESWALKERS

By Ross “Not Lenin” Lennon

ELVES, MERFOLK, AND GOBLINS (OH MY!)

By Sigmund “Mr. Wall Street” Ausfresser

BUYLISTING EFFICIENTLY

By Danny “Still Not Dan” Brown

That’s, count ’em, twenty-four articles that you previously couldn’t access that you now can. You can thank us later. You’ve got some reading to do.

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Modern Flaws

Sometimes things just line up perfectly. If you read my article last week (of course you did, you never skip an installment!), then you may have picked up on some anti-Modern sentiment (or, at least, pro-Extended). We are going to get into some of the nuts and bolts stuff further along, but the gist of the argument is this: Modern is not necessarily the miraculous catch-all that Wizards imagined when the format was created.

Even from a purely financial perspective, there are a lot of things to not like about it. We got a great example of why last weekend when Collected Slivers made a surprise top eight appearance in SCG’s Modern Open. You know what? Let’s just get started, and you’ll figure it out as we go (or just smile and nod every now and then, and maybe say something like, “Hmm, interesting,” or, “That’s one interpretation.” This approach will also get you through any art gallery showing or non-French wine tasting1).

 

Wizards and Fan Engagement

One of the reasons why Magic is such an enjoyable hobby is because the producers of the game are so actively involved with the consumers. While social media has now made direct fan engagement easier for any companies to do (even though so many of them are bad at it), Wizards has consistently valued fan reactions, responses, and requests.

Heck, the fact that we are getting foil full-art(ish) fetch lands and shock lands in Standard-legal boosters seems to suggest that Wizards has gotten pretty good at parsing through our feedback, even though I would have never in a million years expected the company to do something like this. Yet another way that Wizards engages the community has been by hiring professional Magic players (and some contest winners) into its ranks.

I say all of this to make the point that when Modern was announced as a format, it was to strong fan applause—the demand for it had begun months earlier, and all players were waiting for was WOTC’s blessing. Wizards knew what the fans wanted and gave it to them, but that doesn’t mean what the fans wanted was what was best for them.

Destructive Urge

Modern Background

Modern came largely out of the smoldering ashes of Extended, a format that had neither stability nor a large fan base. Extended was, for most of its life, “the last seven years,” meaning that it was much deeper than Standard, but still rotated annually. The last year or so of Extended events reduced the format to the last four years’ worth of sets, which gave the format notably less depth, and at a time when depth was needed the most.

Extended was also considered a “PTQ format” in the sense that people would only play it when they were “required to,” which was only during Extended PTQ season (January to April). In fact, the appeal of Extended was so low that most players would sell off their decks when the PTQ season ended, just because they knew the cards would be worthless for the next eight months. I personally liked seven-year Extended, and I even tried out (the current) four-year Extended back in January. I really liked it!

If Modern was just a response to the complaints about Extended, things would probably be a little better—but there is more. Modern was created in 2011, which coincided with the surge in popularity of Legacy. Legacy, prior to the Zendikar Boom2, wasn’t even a PTQ format like Extended. It was closer to how Vintage is regarded today, in that it got a few weekends a year where people outside of the format’s hotspots watched and said, “That’s kind of neat!” and then forgot about it a week later.

The crucial reason why Modern doesn’t rotate is because it took the role of spiritual successor to Legacy, removing the prohibitive barrier of card scarcity (hahahahahahahahaha) but keeping cards in the format indefinitely (besides stuff like banning, which is fair). Unlike Extended in any of its forms, if you love Affinity or Tron, you can play it in Modern ostensibly forever, even though Urza’s Tower hasn’t been reprinted in (just) over a decade, and Magic‘s development team was literally too scared to bring Affinity back in Scars.

Terror

Modern Supply Issues

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following point will be illustrated using MS Paint. I am not an artist. Okay, now pretend I’m saying the next part in a cool Neil DeGrasse-Tyson voice. *clears throat*.

Modern Graph

If we look at the first highly scientific graph that I have provided, you will see the growth of Magic represented as a cone. As it moves forward in time (up), the supply expands to meet growing demand (width). Although in actuality Magic‘s past growth would not be a perfect cone (growth expanded more rapidly in some years than others), the nature of the game’s expansion can still be represented this way.

In Legacy, the floor of the format is the game’s literal starting point in 1993; in Modern, it’s the purple line representing 2003. The reason why many Legacy staples are so expensive is that as you get closer to the bottom of the cone, the supply is constricting, which forces the price to rise as compensation.

Modern, in attempting to be the “new Legacy,” is raising that bottom to a wider point in the cone, but it is still significantly narrower than the top (which is going to happen at any point, unless the player population takes a significant and sustained downturn to the point of throttling print-runs).

Rotating formats like Standard and Extended have a floor, but it moves as the graph grows. Something more like this:

extended graph

One of the important factors that gets overlooked for Modern is that it doesn’t filter out outdated design philosophies. Part of the reason why I mentioned Affinity and Urzatron lands earlier are because neither currently fit development’s standards for Magic design. In any iteration of Extended, Urza’s Tower would be nothing more than an antiquity. In Modern, the cycle is a pillar of the environment. This is great if you are a dedicated Tron player, but boxes out room for other archetypes featuring newer cards because they can’t compete. This is a form of stagnation that prevents other decks from competing because they are primarily “worse” versions of cards deemed too good for current design philosophies3.

Burnout

Modern Fears

The fear with Modern, unlike Legacy, is that any card can be reprinted at any time (assuming the reprint fits the development philosophy of the product its going in). This means that as cards drift closer to the floor of the format, and their price begins to rise, they can immediately get wiped out.

For example, the price on Smash to Smithereens got smashed (to smithereens!) when it was reprinted twice this calendar year, and it will take years for it to recover, if it ever does. More frequently, you will see cards that exist solely near the floor of the format that don’t fit current development standards spike because of their use in one narrow archetype. The most recent example is Sedge Sliver, a card that only exists because Magic was so briefly unpopular that design wanted to make a card that riffed on a rare from Alpha that most people don’t even remember4. It is highly unlikely that we see a Sedge Sliver reprint any time soon, which means that the new price ($10!) is likely going to take a while to go down, but how much actual demand now exists for the card?

While a static floor allows these “opportunities” to occur, they highlight a larger flaw with the format: in order for players to be competitive, they have to have access to cards at various points in the cone. As the cone continues to ascend and widen, that narrower bottom becomes more inaccessible, and can actively hurt demand for newer cards. If you tell newer players that they can play in a deeper, more enriched format with their existing cards, that is exciting—and probably helps drive interest in selling/trading older cards. But if their current cards can’t compete in the larger format, what then?

Let’s look at it this way: I would feel comfortable playing my current Abzan Aggro list in a field that includes some Standard lists from the past couple of years. At the very least, my losses would probably feel close enough that I would want to buy some new cards and try again. If I played Abzan Aggro in a format that includes things like Tron and Affinity, I’d be more likely to just ignore that format and keep playing Standard. This is the reason why it is so difficult to cultivate a Modern community if you don’t live in one already, and especially if you don’t have a majority of players with collections going back several years.

Reki, the History of Kamigawa

The Modern Point

The point of the article is this: I don’t feel comfortable being a “Modern” guy anymore, at least in terms of keeping staples in stock. The format is continuing to grow in the sense that it is popular online amongst the very vocal, very visible minority of Magic players, but it is an unstable place to park Magic capital long-term.

It’s also not very fun to play, largely for the reasons I spelled out above. I think a lot of players love the idea of the Modern format more than they love it in practice, and I think that there are some serious developmental issues that need to be addressed. The problem there is that because cards in the format don’t naturally expire, the only solution here is banning (which has an associated public relations cost that WOTC does not like).

It isn’t impossible to imagine a future format that serves as bridge between Standard and Modern (there is, after all, more time between now and Mirrodin than between Mirrodin and Alpha). While that format would be more prone to becoming “just” a PTQ Format the way old Extended did, it would also provide a real opportunity for cards with larger print runs to service the growing Magic population better than Modern does. If the format was successful as a year-long player, it would mean less of a hit in prices at rotation, and longer sustained prices. It would also be easier to bridge Standard players into the new format, since the older cards in the format would be more liquid and available.

Liquify

I am not holding out hope for a radical format change, or trying to advocate that people should stop playing Modern if it is something they enjoy. I just want to articulate some of the very real issues with the format, and caution people who think that it is a safe place to “invest.” And again, it’s not fun.

That’s all for this week, although I really want to encourage you to leave your feedback this week. I think this is another one of those articles where a discussion is going to lead to more analysis than I could provide on my own, and it helps prevent me from being the only voice on this topic. I hope that you feel interested enough to leave your thoughts below, and I will check in over the course of the week.

…Except when the Jags are on. BECAUSE FOOTBALL IS BACK!!!!

Best,

Ross

1 See, only my premium readers get this quality life advice!

2 You’ve heard my spiel on this already, but thanks for clicking on the footnote! If you aren’t familiar with the Zendikar Boom, read my first article here on MTGPrice (linked above in the article).

3 It’s important to remember that this is why they originally banned Wild Nacatl.

4 I’ve always loved Sedge Troll. And the crazy thing is, Sedge Sliver wasn’t the only tribute to it in this block!

A Whole Lot of ProTrader, Unlocked

Greetings, MTGPrice readers!

If you’re not a ProTrader yet, you’ve been missing out on some great content. Luckily for you, we’ve unlocked a whole bunch of previously ProTrader-only articles for you to enjoy! If you want to read these in a more timely fashion, keep in mind that ProTrader access is less than $5 a month. Remember: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Anyway, enjoy the unlocked content!

MM2015 — THE UNOFFICIAL MTG STIMULUS

By Sigmund Ausfresser, May 11, 2015

THE META REPORT, 2 MAY – 10 MAY

By Gue Heng Chin, May 12, 2015

LEGEN—WAIT FOR IT…

By Jason Alt, May 13, 2015

MODERN MASTERS 2015REVIEW PART DEUX

By Travis Allen, May 15, 2015

THE NEXT LEVEL OF MODERN

By Corbin Hosler, May 14, 2015

FOIL REDEMPTION FINANCE: THE NUMBERS FOR KTK, FRF & DTK

By Gue Heng Chin, May 15, 2015

DECISION-MAKING STRATEGIES FOR WHEN YOU KNOW REPRINTS ARE COMING

By Danny Brown, May 16, 2015

THE META REPORT 9 – 14 MAY

By Gue Heng Chin, May 17, 2015

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MODERN MASTERS 2015 EMOTIONS

By Sigmund Ausfresser, May 17, 2015

PUCAPRO

By Danny Brown, May 19, 2015

I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLES

By Jason Alt, May 20, 2015

LEFT BEHIND

By Travis Allen, May 20, 2015

MODERN MASTERS 2015 EARLY MOVEMENTS

By Corbin Hosler, May 21, 2015

PICKS FOR THE MODERN SEASON

By Guo Heng Chin, May 21, 2015

MODERN HISTORY 101 –EIGHTH EDITION ANDMIRRODIN

By Ross Lennon, May 22, 2015

MAKE MONEY BY GOING NOSTALGIC

By Sigmund Ausfresser, May 25, 2015

GOING HUNTING ON THE BANNED AND RESTRICTED LIST

By Travis Allen, May 27, 2015

DIGGING FOR GOLD

By Jason Alt, May 28, 2015

MODERN MASTERS (THE OTHER ONE)

By Corbin Hosler, May 28, 2015

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

By Ross Lennon, May 29, 2015

TRADE MODERN, DON’T OWN IT!

By Sigmund Ausfresser, June 1, 2015