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.
MTG Fast Finance is a weekly podcast that tries to break down the flurry of financial activity in the world of Magic: The Gathering into a fast, fun and useful thirty minute format. Follow along with our seasoned hosts as they walk you through this week’s big price movements, their picks of the week, metagame analysis and a rotating weekly topic.
Reveillark Foil Modern Masters, Confidence Level 8: $17 to $30 (+75%, 6-12+ months)
Disclosure: Travis and James may own speculative copies of the above cards.
Segment 3: Grand Prix Toronto and Grand Prix Tokyo
Between last weekend’s Standard GP in Toronto and the Standard GP running in Tokyo while this episode is recorded, there’s plenty of decks and cards to discuss.
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
Today we are going to talk about Standard. Not entirely focusing on this particular format (as in, the current Standard environment), but rather the structural mechanics that keep the system moving. Standard is worth discussing, even if you don’t play it, for these reasons, because they are the essential underpinning of the majority of Magic Finance’s activity.
Standard, unlike all other formats (currently), has a bottom in rotation. Once cards rotate out, the majority of them become devalued due to lack of demand and larger application. This is even often the case with format-defining cards like Thragtusk and Boros Reckoner. The trade-off, however, is that Standard is the de facto constructed format, and the overwhelming majority of constructed events are Standard. Subsequently, there is always a high amount of content generated on Standard (even during times when the format itself is less than healthy), which both helps feed and generate demand. From a tournament organizer perspective, I can tell you that it is infinitely safer to guarantee attendance to a Standard event than any other format.
Of course, you probably knew all of this already.
Let’s start by defining and identifying some key markers in Standard, and then evaluate what they mean for the format as a whole.
Critical Mass: A concept that gets mentioned primarily during deck-building process is critical mass. This is the idea of having a threshold quantity of cards that do either the same or very similar things. In current Standard, I would say that we have a critical mass of white 2/1s, a laDragon Hunter, Kytheon, Hero of Akros, and Expedition Envoy. Now, while these cards themselves do not comprise the entirety of an archetype, they do strongly enable the White Weenie strategy by ensuring one or more copies in a statistically significant percentage of opening hands. The magic number for “must have” effects in deck construction is 8.51, and having 12 allows you to play the full set of the two best, and then enough of the rest to suit your needs. Knowing what your critical mass effects are give you an early indicator of what archetypes are likely to be viable in the low-information period that is a new format. The interesting part is that the critical mass pieces are not always the gainer in that situation- rather, cards like Always Watching and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar are the financial winners because they push the strategy over the top (while conveniently representing a critical mass of playable “Anthem” effects).
I’ll make this same joke again later.
Bottlenecks: This is not really the opposite of a critical mass, but it’s kind of similar? Bottlenecks represent obstacles that define the format. I mentioned these briefly a couple weeks back, but I think it bears repeating here. Bottlenecks, both literally and metaphorically, represent elements that restrict the flow and development of the game. The most important of these is the de factoWrath of God effect of the format, which helps regulate the tempo of an environment and dictates the pace with which aggressive strategies must operate. The current best Wrath variant is Languish, which, while conditional, lands fast enough and kills such a significant percentage of the playable creatures in the format, that it gets the nod. It’s worth mentioning that Black is also currently the best removal color (in having access to things like Ultimate Price, Ruinous Path, etc).
Knowing where your bottlenecks are, specifically the bar for Wrath effects, has a lot of secondary effects. Valuing effects like Haste (which, to be fair, is always really good) and Indestructible is colored by the point at which all of your other stuff goes bye-bye, as well as things like toughness relative to things like Languish.
Many of the control strategies from PT:SOI leaned heavily on Languish, meaning that it is overperforming relative to its cousins. Planar Outburst, which was the second-most played such effect, was considered by many to be too difficult to cast reliably, both because it was WW and because it was at five and not four. Given that we have a year with Planar Outburst and only six months with Languish, it’s worth wondering if Planar Outburst will fill a sufficient amount of Languish’s market share come rotation- the need for that effect will always be there, and Planar Outburst is our current second best option. With Languish currently around $9 and Planar Outburst below $1, there is a demonstrable gap in price that is only explained by current viability. If Planar Outburst steps into the role of “best Wrath effect” as Languish rotates (and BFZ stops getting printed!), then it’s not crazy to think that the card could climb to $4-$5 range (conservatively half of Languish’s price since it’s coming from a much larger and more popular set, but still an impressive gain). This is all assuming, of course, that the next Fall set does not have a wrath effect that is strictly better than Planar Outburst.
Can a worse card benefit from a better situation?
Identifying System Players: Remember earlier when I mentioned Thragtusk and Boros Reckoner? Those are cards that I have long referred to as Broodstars, but will now term “system players”. These are cards that only end up excelling in Standard (or even just a particular point in their total Standard lifetime), and don’t end up making the leap to Modern, Legacy, Cube, or Commander. One of the most easily quantifiable indicators of a system player is their mana cost- larger formats exert a higher degree of pressure on converted mana cost because the critical turn decreases as size increases. Standard is more forgiving than Modern, just as Modern is to Legacy, and Legacy to Vintage. While Vintage is not a “Turn 1 Kill” format as people often demonize it to be, you definitely have to have your crap together more quickly than in Standard.
The next characteristic is to pinpoint if a card is the “best available”- which works both positively and negatively. Reaver Drone is currently the best black turn one 2/1 in Standard, by virtue of being the ONLY black turn one 2/1. Once you look to Modern, however, Reaver Drone immediately becomes outclassed by cards like Gravecrawler, which is in (almost) all scenarios the better card. Conversely, if you NEED a B 2/1 for Standard, then Reaver Drone is your guy. This is how Heir of the Wilds ended up getting so much play, for what it’s worth.
Finally, is a card reacting to pressures or synergies unique to the current Standard environment? Thragtusk was very famously concepted as an “answer” to Vapor Snag, which in retrospect seems like bringing a Terminator T-800 to a knife fight.
Always carry two spears.
Broodstar was best in the Affinity decks that existed prior to the printing of Arcbound Ravager, and almost immediately invalidated after the release of Darksteel. Great Sable Stag, probably the best of the misfit toys that we’ve mentioned so far, is in many environments (especially ones with Lightning Bolt) just a Gnarled Mass (which some people will tell you is still a great card).
I mean, he’s not wrong.
These cards are different, however, from narrow role-players. Things like Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and Nissa, Voice of Zendikar are not likely to have wide playability in formats like Modern (meaning that they see some amount in a large amount of decks), but they have a relatively unique ability that make a very specific deck better. An example here is something like Death Cloud or Smallpox– they don’t fit into a very wide spectrum of decks, but there are no other comparable effects (at a viable rate, at least- sorry, Undercity Plague!), so they have a baseline value buoyed by being the best at that very narrow role they serve. It’s the difference, for those who can grok it, between a guy who only excelled in college Spread offenses (TEBOWTEBOWTEBOW) versus a guy who only comes in on third downs to just try and rush the QB. One serves a valuable, but very small and clearly defined, role, the other is on the SEC Network now.
So who are our current Standard system players?
Chandra, Flamecaller: I think this card has some life left in Standard, and I could see her price increasing over the summer, but rotation is going to crater the price. You know how sometimes when you are buying a card that you really need for a deck, but aren’t sure if that twenty bucks or whatever is going to really be worth it in the long run? Yeah, you better win the tournament.
Archangel Avacyn: This card is probably overrated in Standard right now, to say nothing of older formats where 3WW is a VERY big ask. She also benefits from Standard being the format where you can play a bunch of creatures that don’t also backdoor into a combo kill.
Tireless Tracker: This is both a better and more fair Knight of the Reliquary, except that Knight is big on the spot in late games AND can be gotten back by Reveillark (this matters to nobody except a small contingent of crazy people).
Dromoka’s Command: I will never give up on this card, but the rest of you will. For shame.
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet: Another card that feels built to handle specifically this Standard format, and not the larger and more diverse threats of a wide environment like Modern. Again, that doesn’t mean that this card won’t help define Standard for a while, but be aware that the carriage WILL turn into a pumpkin again. Also, this:
Et tu, FN-2187?
That’s all for this week- Nahiri, the Harbinger is starting to spike as we speak, so hopefully you got into yours already. It’s a card that we’ve been discussing a lot here and on the forums, so make sure that you keep your ears to the ground on what’s coming next. Also, the hype behind Nahiri isn’t JUST coming from Standard- there is word that she may (in concert with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn) be the best thing to be doing in Modern. What cards and colors fit around that combination? Tell me your thoughts, and lets try and piece this beast together. Thanks as always for reading!
Best,
Ross
1In high school, I did a huge math project on Magic, including teaching myself Hypergeometric Distribution in order to evaluate win percentages and keepable opening hand math. Given that I was neither a good student nor a very good Magic player at the time, some of the results may skewed (one of the decks I submitted for testing included the awesome-in-my-mind combo of Natural Affinity + Eradicate, which was a seven mana mostly one-sided Armageddon). I do not have the project saved anywhere to my knowledge, although I do remember that having 8 of a significant effect (Birds of Paradise + Llanowar Elves) equated to a statistically safe amount of opening hands (over 80%).
This article was originally posted 5/3/16 as ProTrader only. Due to the feedback received, I’ve chosen to make the part of this article relating to reprints public. Enjoy!
Not as Easy as it Looks
This all blends into a much larger discussion of reprints as a whole. It’s been a hot topic again recently, with the removal of Modern from the Pro Tour circuit. Without a Modern PT, there’s concern that WotCaHS (Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro Subsidiary) won’t reprint nearly as many staples, and it will lead to players being priced out of the format. I understand the concern here, and it comes from a well-intentioned placed. However, reprints are not nearly as simple as “shove card X into set Y.” Check out this recent Rosewater Tumblr post on the topic:
He states it blatantly. Yes, we’d like to do something about making Modern more accessible, but no, jamming everything into Standard isn’t the right path.
Corbin Hosler had an excellent string of tweets not too long ago documenting one piece of this rather challenging puzzle. He probably should have made it an article, but he didn’t, so instead I’m stealing his content and using it for mine.
(1)Magic was built on a platform of desirable cards – some will be “chased” after, leading players to open more packs.
Chronicles was a disaster for Wizards back in the day, and it was cited by Aaron Forsythe as exactly what they wanted to avoid when discussing how to manage Modern Masters. It’s far safer to underprint a product like that than overprint, because overprinting can ruin future profits, and thus the health of the game as a whole. If it’s $400 for a tier one Standard deck and $450 for a tier one Modern deck, how many people would play Standard instead of Modern? Many fewer packs of the new set would be opened, and Wizards would end up cannibalizing their own product’s long term health for some short term profits. They’re already bad about that as it is with regards to MTGO. Do we really want paper Magic to begin experiencing the same failures as MODO?
Right Bullet, Wrong Target
One of the more common proclamations is that WotCaHS should give absolutely zero consideration to maintaining collection values of the enfranchised, so that new players can get into the format. Slash and burn card prices, screw the privileged elite, and let everyone into the party. It sounds great, right?
As someone who owns a set of Tarmogoyfs, let me say this: I don’t care if they reprint him as a rare in Standard. I don’t care if Goyf’s price drops. I’ve had them for years, will continue to have them, and wouldn’t sell them unless I was selling the entire damn collection, which is a long ways away. They represent only a small portion of my collection’s value.
However, I’m not the average player. Most people don’t own nearly as many cards as I do, and a $600 set of Tarmogoyfs is a much larger percentage of their total collection’s value than mine. If you reduce that number by $500, you’ve just taken a humongous chunk out of the average player’s Magic gross worth. Why punish those that don’t have a house’s value tied up in cardboard?
Going beyond that, assuming you don’t care about the 1% of Magic players that wouldn’t be bothered by a drop in Goyf’s price, what about all those players out there that are actively working towards sets? Nearly 4,000 non-foil Tarmogoyfs show up on Want lists right now on PucaTrade. Imagine spending however many months it may take to earn enough points for a Tarmogoyf, receiving it, and then finding out it’s showing up at rare in Eldritch Moon. Poof, there goes $100 worth of card value that you just spent six weeks grinding out. Is it fair to those players? Forget about guys like me, I’m not the one that a Standard reprint would hose. It’s all the mid-level players that those reprints really screw. Reprinting Tarmogoyf in Standard at rare is a dramatic example, of course, but you get the idea. Crashing card values doesn’t harm the hoarders like myself nearly as badly as it harms the thousands of people trying to scrape together a reasonable Modern collection.
It’s First Order or Something
Corbin spoke about how it’s important for WotCaHS to manage the cost of entry of Modern and Legacy relative to Standard, so as to avoid cannibalizing their own product. We talked about how crashing card values harms players, but not necessarily the players you’d expect it to. Now, let’s look at another facet: reprinting Modern cards tends to ruin Standard.
Here’s my for-fun theorem:
Modern has many more sets legal than Standard
As a card pool grows, it is tougher and tougher for individual cards to rise to the top
Those that do stand out in a card pool are exceptionally powerful
A format is defined by its most powerful cards
Format defining cards are more desirable
Controlling for rarity, the more desirable a card, the more expensive it is
The most expensive cards are the ones most in need of a reprint
Cards that would be identified as ideal reprints are exceptionally powerful
The smaller a format, the more influence a powerful card exerts
Therefore: Modern’s best cards will have a dramatic impact on any Standard format in which they appear
(Yeah yeah I know it’s not a valid or sound proof.)
Because of how good the cards in Modern need to be to see considerable play, they will by their nature impact Standard heavily. We don’t need to look far to see evidence of this. When Thoughtseize was reprinted, it had a tremendous impact on Standard as a whole. Remember Mono-Black and Pack Rat and Desecration Demon? Standard was 50% MBC mirrors for six months. Even without those support cards, Thoughtseize would have been a key player in that format. In fact, that Temur was basically non-existent in constructed Magic during that time can certainly be at least partially attributed to the presence of Thoughtseize.
Similarly, the fetches in Khans of Tarkir did a lot to Standard. Do you remember what the decks looked like before Shadows over Innistrad? They were all four color messes. Fetches, in combination with the battle lands, were responsible for that. You could make the argument that fetches wouldn’t have had such an impact on Standard had the battle lands not been printed, but that’s sort of the point — WotCaHS needs to bend over backwards to make sure these higher power cards don’t screw everything up.
Heck, look at two newer cards, Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy and Siege Rhino. Neither one is a reprint, but they’re both seeing play in older formats. And while doing so, also made Standard all about them the entire time. Standard only has a handful of exceptionally powerful cards in it at a time, and all the meaningful cards in Modern are exceptionally powerful.
This isn’t to say that Standard can’t accommodate for these cards whatsoever. After all, each of these reprints had to exist the first time, right? Sure, but don’t forget what these looked like the first time around. Tarmogoyf, in conjunction with Garruk Wildspeaker, was a pillar of Standard when it was legal. Cryptic Command was key in 5c Control, another top Standard deck. Snapcaster Mage was all over Standard for two entire years. Did they “ruin” Standard? Probably not. They definitely warped it though.
I fully admit that any card could be reprinted in Standard and the format could be shaped to accommodate it. A great example of this was Mirrodin, where they brought back Atog and Terror. Terror had been an amazingly powerful piece of removal prior to Mirrodin block, but with artifact creatures everywhere, it seemed much less impressive. At the same time Atog, which had been garbage in the past, was now impressively useful on a plane with so many artifacts.
Yeah, we could have Snapcaster Mage in Standard and not have him be the most important card in the format. But it would mean almost no playable one mana instants and sorceries, and the two mana ones would need to be powered down too. Not just in the set he’s legal either. You’d need these restrictions in place in the block preceding him, the block including him, and the block following him. That’s a year and a half of Magic sets that would need to be designed within strict guidelines, just to allow for a single card to be reprinted. And what about the other reprints going on at the same time? And what about the blocks even further out that are impacted by the presence or absence of those one mana instants or sorceries in adjacent blocks? You can see how making room for a single powerful card can impact years worth of Magic design. When Rosewater talks about how difficult it is to balance reprints, he’s not kidding.
QED or Something
I’m not saying reprints aren’t helpful or necessary, because they absolutely are. Without them, formats tend towards stagnation, and if reprints are simply not an option whatsoever, as in Legacy, there is only one conclusion. However, shoving multiple highly-desired cards into Standard sets comes with a host of problems that go far beyond simply costing a handful of enfranchised players some value. WotCaHS runs the risk of alienating burgeoning players, crashing markets, cannibalizing future Standard sets, and driving players out of the game altogether. When you consider how bad the consequences can be, and how many ways there are for things to go poorly, it should come as no surprise that they’re (rightfully) erring on the side of caution.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
