What’s in a Deck?

May 11, 2016 Jason Alt 6 Comments

Time is a luxury we can rarely afford. When we do have such a luxury, doesn’t it make sense to make the most of it? The current undertaking for this column is to go through the five projected Commander 2016 decks and predict exactly what we expect to be printed in them so we can be ahead of those reprintings and also maybe pick out some cards we don’t expect to be printed that pair well with those cards that could have some upside. If we expect a lot of tokens in a deck, for example, we can reasonably expect Parallel Lives to be in the deck and maybe that will affect our buying behavior and depending on the degree of confidence in that reprinting we’ll think about selling. But in the same breath, we look at a card like Eldrazi Monument which was just reprinted and is very unlikely to be reprinted again but which will have some upside with tokens. We might want to sell Awakening Zone and buy From Beyond.

However, while it’s easy to guess the big rares that could get reprinted, it might be healthy to look at everything that goes into a deck to see what all we have to be ready for. Being able to predict a staple uncommon reprint or new art on a common may be just as instructive. For example, do you know how many rares and uncommons are in a Commander 2016 deck? Because I don’t! I’m serious – I am 250 words into the article where I’m going to discuss it and my plan is to look it up as I’m writing about it. You’re going to read the article once it’s finished and edited so you won’t know how foolhardily it was written and I’ll probably look by the end but I had a plan, but I want to let you all peek under the curtain and tell you, NOPE, I have no idea what’s actually in these decks. You probably don’t know, either, do you? Who cares? Value is in them. Staples. New goodies. You tear the deck open, you take out the chase rares and stuff you want to play with and put all the other chaff in a pile. The worse the deck is, the bigger the chaff pile is. I have busted open the Prossh deck a bunch and I have a pile of Hua Tuo, Honored Physician big enough to choke a baby to death. I mean, three copies could probably do that, though, so that’s pretty lame hyperbole. And my baby is at the stage where she tries to put everything in her mouth so if she comes across my stack of them, she’s probably going to do her level best to choke on them. Do you understand how dangerous precon deck chaff is? It’s a baby choking hazard and that’s about it. In order to properly guage how dangerous one of these decks is to a new father like me, I’m going to have to actually look at what goes into one of these decks.

Wade Into Battle (The Boros One)

Creature (30)
1 Stinkdrinker Daredevil
1 Taurean Mauler
1 Dawnglare Invoker
1 Magus of the Wheel
1 Desolation Giant
1 Fumiko the Lowblood
1 Hunted Dragon
1 Stoneshock Giant
1 Thundercloud Shaman
1 Warchief Giant
1 Oreskos Explorer
1 Herald of the Host
1 Kalemne’s Captain
1 Anya, Merciless Angel
1 Sunrise Sovereign
1 Hammerfist Giant
1 Inferno Titan
1 Dawnbreak Reclaimer
1 Sun Titan
1 Hostility
1 Jareth, Leonine Titan
1 Victory’s Herald
1 Sandstone Oracle
1 Hamletback Goliath
1 Arbiter of Knollridge
1 Borderland Behemoth
1 Dream Pillager
1 Magma Giant
1 Angel of Serenity
1 Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
Sorcery (5)
1 Breath of Darigaaz
1 Fiery Confluence
1 Disaster Radius
1 Earthquake
1 Meteor Blast
Instant (2)
1 Fall of the Hammer
1 Orim’s Thunder
Artifact (17)
1 Sol Ring
1 Blade of Selves
1 Boros Signet
1 Coldsteel Heart
1 Fellwar Stone
1 Lightning Greaves
1 Mind Stone
1 Thought Vessel
1 Basalt Monolith
1 Boros Cluestone
1 Darksteel Ingot
1 Loxodon Warhammer
1 Urza’s Incubator
1 Worn Powerstone
1 Seer’s Sundial
1 Dreamstone Hedron
1 Staff of Nin
Enchantment (5)
1 Curse of the Nightly Hunt
1 Banishing Light
1 Faith’s Fetters
1 Rite of the Raging Storm
1 Warstorm Surge
Land (39)
1 Ancient Amphitheater
1 Blasted Landscape
1 Boros Garrison
1 Boros Guildgate
1 Command Tower
1 Drifting Meadow
1 Evolving Wilds
1 Forgotten Cave
1 Secluded Steppe
1 Smoldering Crater
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Vivid Crag
1 Vivid Meadow
1 Wind-Scarred Crag
14 Mountain
11 Plains
Tribal instant (1)
1 Crib Swap

That looks pretty intimidating, so let’s look at just the rares first.

Taurean Mauler
Magus of the Wheel
Desolation Giant
Fumiko the Lowblood
Hunted Dragon
Kalemne’s Captain
Anya, Merciless Angel (Mythic)
Sunrise Sovereign
Hammerfist Giant
Inferno Titan (Mythic)
Dawnbreak Reclaimer
Sun Titan (Mythic)
Hostility
Jareth, Leonin Titan
Victory’s Herald
Hamletback Goliath
Arbiter of Knollridge
Borderland Behemoth
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
Dream Pillager
Magma Giant
Angel of Serenity (Mythic)
Fiery Confluence
Disaster Radius
Earthquake
Blade of Selves
Loxodon Warhammer
Urza’s Incubator
Seer’s Sundial
Staff of Nin
Warstorm Surge
Ancient Amphitheater

The whole deck is $60 if you add up the values of the cards, and it’s largely carried by the $9 Blade of Selves which basically wasn’t a consideration when they built the decklist to be around $40 in cards adjusted for how they expected the reprintings to shrink values. They were guessing, but they didn’t do too badly. Incubator shrunk to $5, Gisela to $4.50 and Inferno Titan and Sun Titan were crushed, hitting $1 and $2 respectively. Here’s another surprise –

This card is poised for a price jump and I think we have Nekusar to blame. See that buylist price? That’s about to mess stuff up in a big way. Looking forward to it.

OK, so we have 100 cards and of those 100, 28 are rare and 5 are mythic. That’s a lot of rares to try and get to add up to a reasonable number. Even though they expect prices to fall, they don’t want the cards in the deck to be like $100 or there will be a run on that particular deck. They have to try and balance things so they get a price aroundish MSRP for the deck, although Commander 2015 decks are all between $50 and $60 total, owing to some solid $10ish new cards like Command Beacon and Blade of Selves. I’d say Commander 2015 did exactly what they wanted, and since they did it 5/5 times, I’d predict they can expect the same level of success for Commander 2016.

That means if we look at a hypothetical UW fliers deck and assume they print a $10ish new card like Blade of Selves and a $5ish one like Magus of the Wheel (And not Fiery Confluence like a lot of people expected) we’re looking at about $30ish +/- $5ish (I feel like I’m one ish away from looking like I have no idea what I’m talking about) in value, predicated on cards losing some value from the reprinting. While we’re looking at prices, what did the reprintings do to the values of some key cards in this deck?

a $14 card became a $6 card

Twice.

Other interesting things happened

Cards whose prices were stable after multiple reprintings mostly shrugged off the effect of the Commander 2015 printing. Sun Titan only fell off about $1 and some places haven’t even bothered to update their inventory to reflect the lower price on older versions because they’ll eventually sell. We saw this with multiple cards with multiple printings.

Cards that have been printed a lot, and not always in Commander sealed product, shrug off reprints a little better and their prices are a little easier to predict.

However, the reprintings may have been too much for cards under $2 that may have seen this mass printing as the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Relative adoption is obviously a factor – way more people play Lightning Greaves in EDH than play Seer’s Sundial, but that discrepency contributes as much to the higher place in the first place as it does the increased supply being too much for the demand to soak up. I think figuring out “tiers” of cards is fine since these factors seem to account for each other.

There aren’t too many EDH cards with multiple reprintings that are over $10, so we can expect a few things provided they don’t decide to print one of those cards. If they do, we should be able to predict that based on seeing a few cards from the decks or even doing our “What does the wiki say these colors do?” analysis like we did with Azorius last week. For now, I’m going to talk about a few general things to expect.

$15ish cards with a single printing that aren’t mythic are getting cut in half. This didn’t happen with Wurmcoil in Commander 2014 but we saw it across the board in Commander 2015. There are a ton of examples – Black Market, Gisela, Eldrazi Monument – the only deck without a good example is the Izzet one and that has practically only one valuable card anyway and it’s new.
$5ish – $10ish cards with multiple printings are that price for a reason. The new supply didn’t pants the price completely because people just used the copies in decks right away rather than flooding the market. There are a lot of examples of this, as well. Lightning Graves, Phyrexian Arena, Solemn Simulacrum, Eternal Witness. If an uncommon is worth more than most of the rares in the deck, don’t expect the reprinting to pull the price down much.
Anything that starts under $3 or so is most likely going to end up around $1. A few exceptions to this were the Titans but those, despite their many printings, were printed at mythic and are very popular cards. Most cards in the lower tier, even at the top end, took hits, even really solid cards like Prime Speaker Zegana. Expect most of the rares and even mythics to end up here even if they don’t start out there.
New printings of popular commanders can hold a lot more value than people thought. $4.50 for Karlov and $7.50 for Meren probably surprises a lot of people. Maybe it shouldn’t. While a good commander printed in a set like Shadows over Innistrad isn’t expected to do much in non-foil, the only way to get Meren is to buy the precon for $40 or deal with someone who did. Also, not being available in foil at all means the precon version is the “best” version unless a judge foil comes later.

Wizards seems to have dialed in how to make cards for these decks that end up between $7.50 and $10. They don’t make a ton of bulk rares out of the brand new cards they print and every deck seems to have at least one new card that is in this range. There are 2 in the Golgari deck, but that is not that big a deal. They aren’t making True-Name Nemesis anymore and that’s a very good thing for players. The decks are very balanced price-wise this time around and that’s going to be good for players because they can buy the deck that fits their play style without worrying about speculators buying every copy of the deck like we did with Mind Seize. Everyone is a speculator when the value is that obvious. Barring that this next time around, if we do get some sort of fliers deck, can we try and guess specific cards based on three tiers of prices rather than just the one tier like we tried to do a year ago (trying to find that set’s “Wurmcoil Engine”)?

The amount of times they’ve reprinted cards like Solemn Simulacrum makes me think that cards we considered unreprintable before may not be the sacred cows we once thought. If we do get a fliers theme and a flicker subtheme like I’m not even super convinced we will (although birds sounds a bit boring) I think we can take a whack at some of the cards.

Mythics

New $10 mythic commander
New $1 mythic commander
Reprint $1 mythic commander (Brago? Lavinia? Some bird guy?)
Frost Titan ($1 -> bulk)
Sphinx’s Revelation at mythic? ($7 -> $4ish)

Rares or Expensive Uncommons

Aven Mimeomancer (bulk)
Emeria Angel ($2 ->$1)
Aven Mindcenser ($12-> $8ish, hopefully)
OR, probably not AND
Restoration Angel ($15 ->$8-$10ish, hopefully)
Duplicant ($9 -> $6ish)
Knight-Captain of Eos (bulk)
Gravitational Shift (bulk)
Glarecaster (bulk)
Windreader Sphinx (at rare, not mythic)
Adaptive Automaton ($5 -> $2)
Cyclonic Rift ($7 -> $4)
Stormtide Leviathan (bulk)
Archon of the Triumvirate (bulk)
Reveillark ($7 ->$4ish)
Azor’s Elocutors (bulk)
Peregrine Drake ($4 -> $2, up to $3.50 in a year)

You get the idea. Most of those cards mesh well with whatever strategy ends up being employed and they won’t upset too many things in terms of prices. It’s interesting to try and pick out how you would construct an entire deck worth of rares and saucy uncommons (I gave up and didn’t do all 28 rares, but I put the important ones) rather than just try and guess one big mythic or rare. This way we can look at cards less likely to get reprinted and evaluate their upside. Eldrazi Displacer is pretty new to be in a flicker deck and Great Whale is on the Reserved List but those could both have some upside, for example. Predicting they might put Deadeye Navigator (I don’t think they would because people complain about it too much) is cool, but predicting Eldrazi Displacer has upside if they do is cooler. Next week I’ll take everything we came up with today into account when I look at the next color combination on the wiki. Until then!

City of Traders

PROTRADER: Big Dumb Spells, Big Dumb Profit

May 11, 2016 Travis Allen 11 Comments

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, I can’t recommend highly enough that you sign up. This weekend, while answering Tumblr questions, this beauty popped up:

Within minutes the Magic twitterverse was falling over itself trying to figure out what to make of this. Were they repealing the Reserve List? Leaving it standing, but removing specific cards? Could this have to do with the new CEO? I’m sure I’m not the only one who almost immediately began thinking about the 40 Revised duals in my binder. Then, not long after, this popped up:

Whether it was Tumblr’s mistake (possible) or user error (likely), the whole tempest in a teapot was over not long after it began. It was a fun two hours though!

Aaaaanyways, over at Grand Prix Secaucus this weekend, we were treated to Sam Black making everyone get real excited because he was resolving The Great Aurora late in day two while making a run at (and missing) the top eight. What more could fans of Magic possibly want to see on one of the game’s largest stages? Competitive decks casting Seasons Past and The Great Aurora is basically all of our hopes and dreams realized; it’s the Magic we all loved as beginners and were then told isn’t good enough for constructed. Nine mana may as well be single payer healthcare, sorry buddy. Stick to one drops, incremental gains, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Really, The Great Aurora is Bernie Sanders’s campaign as a Magic Card.

While the price hasn’t moved (much) on TGA yet, it may by the time this goes live. And even if it doesn’t, that’s mostly because Black was only running one copy. Yet Seasons Past was in the $6 to $10 range shortly after Pro Tour Shadows Over Innistrad, and Finkel was running just one additional copy, for a total of two. I’m sure that the fact that it was the Pro Tour and it was Jon Finkel helped there quite a bit.

Several weeks ago, when Shadows Over Innistrad was still being cracked at release events, a UR control list showed up at the first SCG Open of the year that ran Pyromancer’s Goggles to great effect. The price exploded, and after a strong follow-up performance a week later, the price was surprisingly resilient. Pyromancer’s Goggles, a five mana artifact that taps for a single red mana the turn it comes into play. That’s a far cry from the safe choice of Town Gossipmonger.

That’s three (I guess maybe two and a half) large, splashy, “that’s an EDH card” cards that have made big waves in Standard all of the sudden, with price tags to match. Seeing cards like this become relevant in Standard is uncommon, and it feels like we’ve seen more of it in the last six months than average. Still, it seems as if there’s a strong incentive to look towards these huge, EDH-caliber cards. What if we look backwards?

I flipped through all the cards that were at least six mana and jumped out at me as specifically EDH cards over the last few years. I also included artifacts down to four mana, since there were specifically a few cheap ones I wanted to think about: Alhammatret’s Archive and The Chain Veil, for instance.

I also only included cards that had price points I considered relevant. Resolute Archangel is an awfully EDH card, but with a current price of $.25 and no upward movement, it’s not really worth considering right now. Same with Hedonist’s Trove. Hornet Queen, on the other hand, while having 0% gains, is already at least $1, saw a lot of movement at one point in time, and is subjectively a more relevant card.

This list is entirely subjective of course; Worldfire screams EDH to me even though it’s banned, and I probably skipped over something you would have listed. I’m also not sure how popular a card like Elderscale Wurm is, though it seems quite reasonable in the format. In any case, let’s call it a non-comprehensive and imperfect list.

This is all the cards, sorted by the percent gain they’ve seen since they were released. Right at the top is Pyromancer’s Goggles, one of the many gifts Magic Origins has given us. At the bottom is Ugin’s Nexus, a card whose price has basically not changed. Some of the prices here have more going on than is obvious at first glance. For instance, Primeval Bounty was played in Standard, and had some price movement back then. Similarly, Hornet Queen was more expensive than it is today thanks to Standard.

I’m going to cut out all the cards whose prices are currently predicated on competitive demand. This is cards like Pyromancer’s Goggles and Seasons Past. Those are very compelling reasons to consider picking up cheap EDH cards, but that’s a bonus, not a reliable feature, and I want to think about these cards mostly as long-term casual staples instead. I’m leaving a card like Hornet Queen though, because even though it was popular in Standard at one time, the price today is entirely due to EDH. You’ll also see The Great Aurora on here, because its price isn’t based on competitive play — yet.

Would you have guessed Boundless Realms is the most profitable EDH card printed in the last 4 years or so? I wouldn’t have! At least, the most profitable high-cmc card. 550% growth is no joke, and had you bought a few hundred of these at their low point, you’d be a richer man for it.

In order to unpack this list, we’ll look at it through a few filters. First, I want to look at card types. How do artifacts fare?

Wow, artifacts look excellent. 7 of the top 11 slots are artifacts. Is part of that perhaps that I included artifacts with a lower CMC than the other spells? I don’t think so. Only one artifact with strong gains fell below my six mana cutoff; Gilded Lotus. The other three that fall below that threshold are also the three with the smallest gains in the top half.

You’ll also notice that the older they are, the better they look. All the best performing artifacts are oldest, with the four smallest gains coming on on the four youngest copies.

Clearly there’s a strong correlation here. Artifacts as a card type do great. Is this because they can be cast in any deck? Possibly. Probably. Aside from The Chain Veil and maybe Darksteel Forge, those are all cards I would consider fairly universal, as in most EDH decks would be happy to play any or all of them.

How about Sorceries?

These are much more distributed than artifacts, but given how dense artifacts are at the top, they couldn’t not be. We see that the best performing card in our list is in fact a sorcery, but also so is one of the cards with 0% gain. Overall, they’re evenly spread through the list.

There’s no noticeable correlation with converted mana costs amongst sorceries as far as I can tell, though I do see that age is fairly important. There’s a clear trend towards towards younger cards as you move from top to bottom, especially if you ignore Worldfire, which again, is currently banned in EDH. That’s certainly worth noting — age seems to play a big part in the value of sorceries, and probably most cards. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody of course. The older a card is, the fewer copies there are, and the higher prices are pushed.

Speaking of age, let’s look at that metric.

With age in months color coded, there’s a distinct trend. Older cards take up a lot more real estate at the top of the chart than the bottom. If you kick out Woldfire and Elderscale Wurm, a creature whose prevalence in EDH I’m beginning to question, it becomes even more pronounced. Now notice that Primeval Bounty, one of the oldest, least-impressive cards started at $3.50, making large gains tougher than if it had started at $1. Were it ever that cheap, it would be the second largest gain on our chart!

We saw trends in both artifacts and sorceries that age is an indicator of gains, and this graph serves to lend strength to that notion.

Huh, creatures have not done too well. Even Diluvian Primoridal, a creature of unquestionable utility in EDH and over three years old, still hasn’t broken a $1. This isn’t a foil/nonfoil thing either; foils are like $2. I guess Colossus of Akros did fairly well, though that is an awfully splashy creature in a way that few others are. (Cool tidbit: @deejfordicus is the model for Colossus.) Hornet Queen, another extremely powerful creature in the format, is also quite low. It’s also not been too long since a reprint either. Will Hornet Queen end up on the top end of this chart in a year or two? It doesn’t seem unreasonable, though the sub par performance of creatures in general isn’t inspiring. Endbringer is also a creature I could see show up in nearly every EDH deck down the road, but will it be enough to buoy it above $2?

Finally, does converted mana cost matter?

Nope.

One thing I’d really like to look at, but don’t know how, is some sort of power level metric. I think about a card like Rise of the Dark Realms, which almost always wins its caster the game, compared to a spell like Ghastly Conscription, which seems like a much worse version of the same effect. I have no way to measure this though. At first I thought I could use EDHREC’s prevalence feature, which tells me how many decks out of their entire database a card shows up in, but it’s not accurate at all because it doesn’t account for cost. Woodland Cemetery shows up in three times more decks than Bayou, and the latter is unquestionably better than the former. Similarly, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale only shows up in a little over 100 decks — do you think that’s because it’s not a strong card, or because people can’t afford the $1,000 for an EN copy? It’s really unfortunate we don’t have a reliable way to rate cards like this, because I think it would be quite telling. This is where the MTG in “mtg finance” comes in I guess. You need to use your knowledge as a player to differentiate which are truly powerful spells.

Our rough-hewn analysis has revealed a few trends. Artifacts definitely seem to perform best, with sorceries taking a distant second. Creatures historically haven’t stacked up well — at least, not the high mana cost ones. (Solemn Simulacrum would have been at the top of the list had I included him, but he’s a touch too old. Lower CMC cards would be a different list though.) Age is certainly a factor in price, though being old doesn’t mean a card has to be expensive.

All of those charts cut the competitive cards too, remember. Pyromancer’s Goggles and Seasons Past were near the top of the chart, and Omniscience would have been first had I used it’s historical lows and highs; $4 and $40 respectively. Had you bought in right away at their lows you would have made bank, yet that begs the question, had they not broken out in constructed, would they still have been windfalls? That’s a future we’ll never know, though I’m willing to bet at least Omniscience and perhaps Goggles would have done well.

There’s another thing I want to show you too. Here’s the price graph for Rise of the Dark Realms:

That’s a slow, steady growth over time. No cliffs and walls here. Just consistent demand coupled with attrition. Most of the cards on the list look something like that. If it isn’t quite that smooth, it’s a series of steppes instead, which is basically the same thing. Given what we’ve seen about how age works — older cards are more likely to be valuable — and the price graph above, there’s a reasonably obvious answer about when to buy. We’re definitely incentivized to pick up our copies nearly as soon as the card is printed, or at least during the card’s lull a few weeks after release. Grabbing a card that’s already two to three years old may be too late, or at least, will be less profitable. Either it’s a card that’s rising, in which case after two years you’ve already waited too long, or the price is still flat after two years, in which case it may be a dud. In other words, buying any of the cards on the list above that aren’t at least as new as Battle for Zendikar may be a bad idea. I could see Clone Legion; in fact, I kind of like that one, but it’s still fairly fresh all things considered. Ugin’s Nexus though? Ghastly Conscription? No thanks.

Overall, it looks like anything we pick up we’ll most likely be in for the long haul, unless we get stupidly lucky such as with Pyromancer’s Goggles. We should definitely look at huge, powerful artifacts, or ones that do great things for your mana, such as Gilded Lotus or Chromatic Lantern. (Latern didn’t show up on our list because it was too cheap, but have you seen the price of that card lately?) Sorceries are good too, but you want ones that really do something. Boundless Realms ramps you for like six or seven. Rise of the Dark Realms often kills your opponents on resolution. Don’t worry too much about mana cost in either direction; so long as it has a profound effect, it’s good. And creatures in general are unexciting, though I admit to being drawn to Endbringer and Hornet Queen.

As for me? I’ll probably stash some of The Great Aurora, some Clone Legion, Endbringer (because I’m dumb), and possibly Alhammarret’s Archive if I can find them for a good price, because that card is stupid. I’ll also begin watching each new set closely for the gigantic EDH staples and begin buying in much sooner than I have in the past.

Sigmund Ausfresser

PROTRADER: My Concessions to Hype

May 10, 2016 Sigmund Ausfresser 13 Comments

By: Sigmund Ausfresser
@sigfig8

Did anybody catch the most recent banned and restricted changes? I’m not talking about the latest Modern banning of Eye of Ugin and unbanning of Ancestral Vision and Thopter Foundry. I’m talking about the change that caused this:

Bet no one saw this coming – Fork was unrestricted in Old School MTG. While I’m fairly confident that one copy for over thirty grand won’t sell, the price chart is entirely accurate. Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited copies of this format staple are significantly more in-demand now than they were a couple weeks ago.

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Jim Casale

Grinder Finance – The Grand Prix Ecosystem

May 9, 2016 Jim Casale 5 Comments

By: Jim Casale
@phrost_

I was battling it out with approximately another 2,000ish people for a shot at winning GP NYC last weekend. After the unfortunate trip to Secaucus, New Jersey for this terribly named Grand Prix, I was able to browse the vendor booths and meet up with fellow writer Doug Johnson. I want to bring you some of the more interesting things I noticed this weekend.

Bring a list

The first thing I always suggest to people is to write down a list of cards you’re looking for. It’s way too easy to get caught up in the huge number of cards at each booth and lose track of what you’re really trying to pick up. I always recommend you also include a price range for the cards you’re interested in. I went into the weekend with a short list but was quickly able to pin point the prices I wanted to pay.

Don’t buy on Saturday

Prices for cards are always the best on Friday morning (or Thursday if the GP is four days, like Vegas last year) or Sunday night. Dealers would rather carry cash than cards and frequently have the inventory they’d most like to move early in the GP. As the weekend progresses, the natural economy of the event will come to light. Selling popular cards for the weekend is the best on Saturday. This weekend many vendors were sold out of Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet on Friday. Going into Saturday dealers were paying $25 and selling him for $45 as people scrambled to finish decks before the Grand Prix.

Don’t sell on Sunday

Much like the reason you don’t buy on Saturday, dealers are less likely to spend more money (or might not even have anymore cash to spend) on cards. There are some exceptions (vendors that don’t resell as they buy like Coolstuff will keep purchasing on Sunday) but many of the smaller vendors don’t want to leave with product if they don’t have to. They also don’t want to leave with product they overpaid on.

Don’t come to the event needing cards to play

This might sound like common sense but as I stood near some of the vendors I heard people vastly over paying for many cards. I even saw Luis Scott-Vargas looking during round two for Eldrazi Skyspawners that he most likely paid far more than the $0.25 you can pay to get them from your LGS. Some more popular commons and uncommons I heard people paying far too much for were Clip Wings, Lambholt Pacifist, Duskwatch Recruiter, Zulaport Cutthroat, and Brood Monitor. The most common problem children are sideboard cards (Clip Wings) and newly popular commons and uncommons for new decks. Bringing a box of extra sideboard cards can save you a bunch of money.

Side Event Value

While the number of byes you can get from a “grinder” decreased from three to two, the other benefits you can get vary a lot by tournament organizer. I was lucky and/or good enough to win a grinder last Friday to not only get an extra bye but also a lot of other great perks. Channel Fireball offered a free upgrade to their best Grand Prix package and a ton of prize wall tickets. I’d have to say it’s probably the most cost effective event you can win with the lowest level of competition. I wouldn’t have paid the extra $125 for the VIP bonus but the $20 I spent to play in the grinder more than paid for itself. If you’re going to play side events on Friday I suggest looking into the EV of each event.

Tickets please!

Prize wall tickets are another commodity that tends to vary from event to event. 99% of the time, the best value you can get from prize wall tickets is in the form of Standard legal booster packs. Sometimes tournaments will pay out in ten ticket increments while others will pay in one, but they’re basically the same. The cheapest prize you can get is likely a booster pack. As such I would recommend converting the tickets in your mind to dollars. If a booster pack is worth 10 tickets then in my mind I would make the cash value be $2.50-$3 for those 10 tickets. It helps to shape how much you really want to spend on some of the more eclectic purchases you can make on a prize wall. This past weekend you were able to purchase a themed GP shirt for 50 prize wall tickets (or about $12.50 – $15) which seems like a great prize! I actually ended up buying myself one as well as two more for friends. Some of the worst things I saw on the prize wall was singles. Explosive Vegetation was on the prize wall for 20 tickets or $5-6 per copy! That’s obviously an extreme but it’s insanely expensive.

Week in Review

Nahiri, the Harbinger has seen a nice bump in price from playability in Modern and Legacy. Vendors had adjusted their buy prices according this weekend and I saw some even paying $16 for her.
Kalitas continues to impress and although he will probably not reach the $45 he was on Saturday at the event, he is probably due for some play based price corrections.
Gideon, Ally of Zendikar yet again found himself everywhere in the Top 8 of Grand Prixs. Only three of the top eight decks managed to not play any copies. Most of the decks playing Gideon also play Nissa, Voice of Zendikar. I’m going to continue to harp on this, it’s only a matter of time.
Cryptolith Rite continues to be a conduit for some decks that feel like mediocre Modern decks in Standard. I’m cautiously optimistic we will eventually find the right shell to make it the corner stone of the best deck in Standard. When that happens it will be expensive.

MTGPrice Blog