PROTRADER: Shadows over Innistrad Rotation Review

March 16, 2016 Corbin Hosler 9 Comments

I talked a lot last week about Rotation for Standard and how it is going to affect player interest in our most short-lived format. I also covered the cards from Dragons of Tarkir and Magic Origins that I thought fit well in this new world and evaluated their financial upside.

This week I’m going to complete that analysis — this time with Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch — to take us live into the new (and mad) world of Standard!

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Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Bulk is Like Play-Doh

March 16, 2016 Douglas Johnson 13 Comments

Does anyone else remember playing with Play-Doh when they were younger? That stuff was a child’s best friend. You could live out your wildest six-year old imaginations from the highest chair in the house, while Mom watched out for the four-year old brother crawling around beneath ready to eat up any of the delicious clay that fell to the floor.

Of course, it was never actually anything like the picture above. That was a cold, hard, sweet-smelling lie; similar to Play-Doh after it hardened because you didn’t touch it for like five minutes. The real stuff wouldn’t mix without turning into grotesque colors, ruining your idea of a rainbow or multicolored house. Other than that though, it was a wonderful blob of molding clay that you could turn into anything your heart desired.

I find bulk to be a lot like unused Play-Doh. I mean, it’s a lot harder to make rainbows and ice cream out of Magic cards, but the core concept is still there. You can mold it into any number of different shapes and sizes to fit the needs of your customer base. While the majority of competitive players don’t really care about the Suture Priests or Jace’s Erasures of the world, we can be thankful that the invisible and silent majority of players really could care less about bulk. In fact, they’re one of the main sources where we’ll be acquiring the recent bulk. I’ve mentioned this in previous articles so I won’t go too into depth on bulk acquisition this week, but phase one is just putting your name out there in the local scene and being “that one person” who wants to fill their house/apartment with Magic cards.

My Preference

If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you know what I’ve been molding my bulk into. I pick through it for the Rancors and the Blood Artists, even snatching out the Ajani’s Pridemates. Those were alphabetized, while the remains were randomized and packed into 1,000 count BCW boxes (Disclaimer: These actually hold approximately 1,200 cards, so don’t pack them to capacity if you’re trying to sell 1ks). I sell those out of my small display case in town for $7 per thousand, and continue to be surprised at their enduring popularity.

This method certainly doesn’t take a whole lot of effort, but you can scale the amount of money you squeeze from a thousand cards up with the amount of effort and time you want to put in. For those of you who are true ~~masochists~~ grinders and actually enjoy sorting cards by set/alphabet, there are a few select buylists out there that will pay you handsomely for your Netflix+sorting multitask skills.

If you’d rather not turn down the dark road of becoming a real “Magic Financier”, then don’t worry. We have some other options available that involve a significantly lower time investment. If you can set up a consistent stream of “old” bulk from NPH or later, certain stores like Coolstuff are willing to pay a solid amount of coin.

Sorting of old/new

It’s a lot easier to sort rarity colors and set symbols than letters in the alphabet, so this might be up your ally if you get all of that NM Revised bulk that has been stripped of all its’ dual lands. I’ve also found CSI helpful when I bought bulk that was already sorted by common/uncommon, and I didn’t feel like randomizing it or increasing my volume of 1K boxes at the shop. Once you pick out all the Mindcranks and Vapor Snags, Coolstuff will take the scraps without you needing to put in a whole ton of brain power or effort.

My Future

While I pick relatively thoroughly, I don’t pick down to the nickel. At least, I didn’t before visiting Card Advantage in Athens, GA. After having a few conversations with the owner, I am now (well, I will be over the summer when I actually have time) a certified Blueprinter. What the hell is a Blueprint? Just one of the most extensive buylists for common/uncommon picks that you’ve ever seen, created by some of the most amazing people in the industry. (Disclaimer 2: Thomas Dodd did not pay me or MTGprice for this advertising space; my high recommendation of them comes only from my own personal experience). While this style of buylisting is certainly not for the faint of heart, you can pick your bulk absolutely bone dry with methods like these, then ship the rest off to CSI.

Oh, you didn’t know that you can get almost a dime a piece for common Sludge Crawlers? That’s twice as much as an uncommon Retreat that actually sees play in the Modern deck. If you thought Sylvan Scrying was dead after the reprint, you’re dead wrong. Card Advantage will pay you a dollar for five of these things, which later equals ten more bulk rares in your pocket when you buy someone’s collection. See where I’m going with this? Once you get used to the extensiveness of the buylist and the types of cards that people on Amazon buy, it will only get easier and faster.

Let me repeat this for those who are going to scroll to the bottom and write an angry message about how I’m wasting my time sorting cards for pennies on the hour. This industry pays off depending on how much time you put into it. People like Ryan Bushard built a full-time job out of bulk, and there are some people out there who actually enjoy sorting cards. If you want to go out and find the next underpriced Shadows Over Innistrad Standard staple, I think you clicked on the wrong article.

Am I going to be spending the next week working on my Blueprint with the 150k cards in my dorm room? No, I don’t have time for that. I will, however, use my last summer break before starting graduate school to grind value out of this, learn the .03 cards to pick, and practice speeding up the process of set sorting/alphabetizing while watching Netflix or professional League of Legends streams. While the remains that didn’t get Blueprinted won’t be up to par to be sold as 1k boxes in my display case (I don’t think my non-competitive customers would appreciate if half the cards in the set were missing), those leftover Play-doh droppings can be molded into cash dollars from another vendor like Coolstuff, and be sold as true bulk.

bulk — No, those are not World of Warcraft cards.

End Step:

Can someone explain to me why the pre-release foil of Lotus Bloom is the same price as either non-foil? I feel like there are only a couple dozen people in the country who went to a Time Spiral prerelease, and Lotus Bloom certainly isn’t getting another printing anytime soon considering they pumped out Suspend a few years ago and it’s extremely high on the Storm reprint scale. Do people not like the Christopher Rush artwork on the promo? Someone help me understand.

Uncategorized

Flavor Town

March 16, 2016 Jason Alt 4 Comments

Let me start out by saying that I’m very uncomfortable with how much Guy Fieri with a normal haircut looks like me. 10 years ago, looking anything like him was not a crime, but he’s so legitimately awful that he’s basically ruined even looking like him a little bit. He’s also made it so I say things like “Flavor Town” whenever I think of the word “flavor” because he ruins basically everything he touches. Seriously this guy is the worst.

You know what isn’t the worst? Casual Magic players. When I say “casual” I’m not talking about EDH – not really. EDH can be casual but a lot of EDH players would take exception to being lumped into that group and rightfully so. There are EDH players that are just as competitive as the spikes in any other format. In the Competitive EDH subreddit just today I saw a guy unironically offer a primer on his “budget” Boros deck. What’s “budget” to them? $200 or less. “I want to play this fun format and do it on a budget but I’ll switch over to Yu Gi Oh before I play a budget deck that doesn’t get a Turn 1 Mana Crypt at least 14% of the time! I’m on a budget, not a savage.”

It gets so much more casual than EDH players. Some finance advice I used to give back when trading wasn’t entirely killed by every jackass installing a cellphone app that makes every trade take an extra 10 minute while they type every card in then try to get an internet signal in a gigantic convention center thinking they can’t be sharked when they can totally still be sharked, was to find casual players where they live. Smaller LGS locations in your area. Community Colleges. Their home kitchen tables. Actually, that last one is a little tough. You can just knock on every door in town hoping to find a game in progress but your odds off success are going to be really low. I used to have a Craigslist ad looking for casual Magic players but after one too many unsolicited dicktures, I took the ad down. The point is, once you find casual players, you should trade with them because it’s literally the best.

I Feel Like This Will Get You On a Tangent, but Why Trade With Casuals?

Because the stuff they value is unlike anything other groups value, the way they value it is unlike any way other groups value it and they’re always happy with every trade. You could pull a casual player’s pants down for $50 on a trade and they will do a cartwheel for joy and you will feel bad for ripping them off and you’ll feel even worse for not being as happy as they are. Don’t rip people off. It’s not worth it and you don’t even need to do it. If a casual player is happy to trade you a Verdant Catacombs for a Ludevic’s Test Subject, why not give him a Verdant Catacombs worth of weird octopus crap? It’s clogging up your binder and you’ll make his entire day.

Now this is not to say all casual players are durdles or don’t trade cards by monetary value or that they’re easy marks or anything derogatory. The simple truth is that people who play Magic casually have more fun that you ever will because the things you have been conditioned to think are important don’t matter to them for the most part. Their octopus and sea monster deck only has to be good enough to beat their friend’s Thallid deck roughly 50% of the time.

There are people out there who don’t quite understand why everyone acts like Tarmogoyf is such a good card. Find that guy. Spend time with that guy. He will teach you how to enjoy building decks and playing for no prizes. He’ll teach you to enjoy this children’s card game that you have ruined for yourself by treating it like a commodities market, you cynical, money-hungry fun-hater.

Casual players by different cards and they buy the same cards differently when compared with an EDH player. I’m not saying that they buy differently because they bust hella packs at Walmart trying to get a card instead of paying a quarter as much money and just buying the card on TCG Player although that does happen. I’m not saying they say “I went to BOTH card stores in town and neither one had it. Now what am I supposed to do?” although that does happen. I just mean they tend to buy playsets of cards and that means cards with casual appeal can spike four times quicker than a card with equivalent EDH appeal only. That’s fairly obvious, but it’s worth reminding ourselves of every once in a while because while it seems trivial that people buying cards four at a time can spike a card four times faster, we don’t always stop to consider which cards can shoot up in price on this principle. We should. When you consider how easy these things are to see coming sometimes, we really, really should.

What do Casual Players Like?

First of all, casual players like slow cards. Until EDH became a thing and insane mana ramping plus people leaving each other alone for 5+ turns became a thing, casual players were the only ones playing slow enough game for big, huge durdly creatures to hit the battlefield. You’re going to die to 4 tokens and a Hellrider on turn 5 with that Palladia Mors still in hand at FNM but at home on the kitchen table, he’ll live long enough to get suited up with all 4 of your Armadillo Cloaks before you decide to attack someone with him.

Again, casual players aren’t all durdles but that isn’t to say they don’t like durdle cards. I mean, we as EDH players like durdle cards, too so let’s not pretend we can pass value judgments. If it weren’t for EDH and casual, only like 100 Magic cards would be worth money and the rest would be junk. It’s not Modern players making Glimpse the Unthinkable do this.

Which brings me to the next thing casual players love – Mill.

Mill’s not great in EDH. Liiiiiiike at all. I have seen some pretty funny Phenax mill decks with cards like Eater of the Dead but for the most part, you don’t want your opponent starting out at 92 life, I don’t care if your damage spells do 10. Mill cards are expensive, though. Really expensive. Before Modern Masters, Mind Funeral was actual dollars. Why is that? Well, it’s not EDH players doing it and it’s not competitive players doing it. Who does that leave? Lots of unsleeved copies of Glimpse the Unthinkable are getting pulled off of a topdeck and getting pointed at 73 card decks. Milling is fun but it’s not very often all that competitive. Playing Magic for fun like we should all be doing but refuse to means you get to play fun cards like Glimpse the Unthinkable and even if you’re a casual player that doesn’t mean you’re a poor. They get a few bucks together and they buy Glimps the Unthinkable and it does the Unthinkable. It ends up worth more money than Glare of Subdual and Concerted Effort and Doubling Season and all of the cards that EDH players think are so much better. EDH can do a lot of things, but it can’t make this card nuts. But casual can.

Finally, casual players love tribal stuff. EDH players do, too, but a casual player won’t let a little thing like “There’s no Legendary creature that buffs these guys” stop them from building the deck. Casual players didn’t wait for General Tazri to come out to build an ally deck. Oh you best believe they had an ally deck.

How does knowing this help us get ahead of spikes? Well sometimes playability is only half the battle. Sometimes cards go up strictly based on their flavor. Yes, I waited 1300 words to get to my thesis. Chill, you had an enjoyable journey so far.

I Has a Flavor

Two players see the same card. We’ll call the first player “player C” because he’s a competitive player. Player C looks at this card and he’s blown away by its playability.

“Holy zombie balls,” says player C, “this card is busted. You can recur him for as cheap as Gravecrawler without the requirement to have other zombies in play. And you can bring back other zombies, too? This is amazing. I want this in a dredge shell, or maybe paired with Goblin Bombardment in something. This is going to be $20+ easy.” Player C is understandably very excited by this card and he saw everything he wanted to see.

Another player is casual so let’s call him “player C” because he’s a casual player. Player C says “Do you see the background of this card? It’s clearly a few minutes after the art from Endless Ranks of the Dead! The zombies are all climbing into the church and this one is leading the way! How cool is that, closing the loop on this years later? Did they plan it, or did they revisit the old art when they got the new assignment?” Player C is very excited because the art from another card is represented on this one. Something curious happens.

The price of a card that isn’t Standard legal starts to climb and it’s in no small part due to people being reminded that it’s a card because a new card has its art on it. It may be a bit of an oversimplification to say the art connection is the sole impetus for the increase but it’s a factor. EDH zombie decks aren’t getting much so far from the spoilers we’ve seen so there’s no real reason EDH players are going to run out and buy a ton of copies of this. Yet the price jumped and it hit a historical high and this card isn’t done growing yet. I think Army of the Damned showed how devastating a reprint can be for a card like this, but I think the reprint risk is lower here and even though EDH players aren’t going to make Endless Ranks climb, casual players are not done spiking this.

So how do we get ahead of what’s going to go up? It’s fairly simple. You already know what casual players like because there is a casual player in the heart of us all. Vampires are in this set, so any older relevant vampires are worth a look. Do we have a vampire lord? We do?

And it’s at a historic low? Will the non-foil versions be held down by the price of the foil media inserts? Maybe. But casual cards tend to not follow traditional rules and usually whichever copy is chepest sells best. Am I investing a ton of money into Nocturnus? No, I tend to speculate on EDH cards. But this isn’t exactly a tough spike to predict, is it? New Vampires means old ones get a look. Old ones like this other one, also.

Casual players like good cards, guys. That’s what we need to remember. Captivating Vampire is a good card. Vampire Nocturnus is a good card. No one is really playing those cards because they don’t have much of a home in EDH, Standard, Modern, Legacy or Vintage. Even though I listed basically all of the formats, casual isn’t a format, it’s a lifestyle. This lifestyle is all about spiking Captivating Vampire up to $10 while everyone was distracted debating what a second Modern Masters printing was going to do to the price of Tarmogoyf.

Look at spirits. Vampires. Werewolves. Zombies. Chances are there are a few cards with upside. While I don’t think EDH is a primary driver here and I cautioned against throwing too much money at Mayor of Avabruck last week because we can’t really quantify how popular werewolves are going to be using tools like EDHREC, there are cards that historically go into casual decks and it would be silly if we ignored casual as a format just because it isn’t one.

Keep your eyes peeled for cards like Immerwolf and Drogskol Captain moving forward. If you made money on Drogskol Captain in 2011, thank Jon Finkel. If you make money on it in 2016, thank a casual player. They’re the only ones who even get on the bus to Flavortown anymore.

City of Traders

PROTRADER: Before You Leave

March 16, 2016 Travis Allen 8 Comments

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Shadows Over Innistrad spoilers started in earnest this week, and they sure are exciting, aren’t they! Archangel Avacyn will shape the combat step for the next 18 months, Relentless Dead may give rise to a new tier one Zombie deck in Standard, and Anguished Unmaking is the closest thing to Vindicate Modern has seen yet. We even got a DFC sorcery, which I’m sure Matt Tabak was thrilled with. Pair all of this with out-of-the-park flavor and atmosphere, and this set is rapidly becoming as popular as our first foray into the horror-trope landscape.

So far the interaction that tickles me the most is between Neglected Heirloom and Heir to Falkenrath.

T1: Neglected Heirloom

T2: Heir to Falkenrath

T3: Equip Heirloom to Heir. Transform Heir by pitching Fiery Temper, which you madness for 1. You’ve now bolted something, are swinging with a 6/5 flying first strike, and still have one mana to spare. On turn three!

Over the next several weeks, we’ll all be wading waist-deep through bloodstained waters. Before we get ahead of ourselves though, I want to check in on what we’re leaving behind: Khans of Tarkir. Last week I looked at how rotation would impact Standard by examining where the holes would be. This week I’ll talk about some specific cards that are quietly slipping into bulk boxes that you should be keeping an eye out for. Make no mistake, these are all long-term plays that aren’t going to pay you off in two months. They will, however, almost definitely pay you off eventually. These are great cards to buy 30 to 200 copies of, shove in a box somewhere, and find again two to five years later and turn them into much more value.

Jeskai Ascendancy

When this was first spoiled, I sort of glazed over the ‘untap’ function of this card. The looting and pumps looked solid, but uninspiring. I mostly ignored it. Then I saw the decklists emerging that utilized the untap with Birds of Paradise, which were four color Glittering Wish builds that could kill on turn two, and I was hooked. It was a unique deck, used a bunch of unique cards that made me some dough (thanks Wish!), and nobody knew what the hell was going on. I loved it. A few weeks later the Fatestitcher build showed up at the Pro Tour, which was considerably better than the garbage fire that was the original iteration’s manabase.

Not long after the deck ate it hard when Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time were banned. It still pops up occasionally, with some various four-color builds popping up in MTGO leagues since the first of the year, and a Jeskai Ascendancy/Pyromancer’s Ascension hybrid managed to ascend to 15th at GP Bologna two weeks ago. These results are promising, but so far, we aren’t at critical mass. It’s too early to profit on this anyways, as Ascendancies are haven’t undergone the necessary aging yet.

Of all the cards on this list, this may be the one I’m most excited for. Jeskai Ascendancy is out there on the fringes, waiting for the right card to be printed. It’s already established – it was the breakout deck of a Pro Tour – so we know it’s a strong engine. There are still viable builds that occasionally show up at FNM, MTGO, and GP top 64s. The seeds of a new build are there with cards like Visions of Beyond, Glittering Wish, and the relatively new (and Lightning Bolt-proof) Wandering Fumarole. All it really needs is one reasonable-looking card to become completely viable again.

Jeskai Ascendancy is not necessarily the card with the largest potential absolute value today. It is, however, the card with the absolute cheapest buy-in. Right now you can pick up copies for around $.50 to $.60. Hopefully we’ll see this drop off 10 cents or more through rotation. It’s at that time that scooping up a healthy volume will be a strong play. We never know when the right card will come along, or when someone will figure out that the missing piece has been there all along ala Nourishing Shoal, but when it does Ascendancy will see a healthy bump. We saw prices in the $3 to $6 range when it was all the rage, and with two years worth of attrition, it could easily surpass that with a new enabler.

Hardened Scales

Boy, this card has just been a roller coaster. It was $1. Then it was $.50. Then it was $1.50. Then it was $3, then $8, then $2. The buylist has tracked similarly.

On release, every finance writer worth his salt did a double take. Doubling Season is the banner card for casuals loving counters. Hardened Scales evokes the same mental imagery, and with a teeny tiny converted mana cost, there’s even a glimmer of constructed legitimacy. What a financial windfall that could be!

Late last year this card saw a stupendous rise in price, jumping from about $1.50 to nearly $8. It took almost four months to find it’s way back to a $2 price tag, so there had to be at least a few people buying in between. It was in part predicated on tournament success, whether real or imagined, but that price spike was given backbone by the idea that there’s a casual market for the card as well. Cards with a similar effect that have greater mana costs and were utter garbage in Standard have done well (Parallel Lives) so why can’t Scales? Recently the ChannelFireball team showed up to an event with Scales in their sleeves. They didn’t take the event down, but it did remind everyone that the effect is potentially explosive in real formats.

Over the coming years, many, many casual decks will be built with this card at the core. Do you know what the first deck I bought cards for online was? It was a Simic counter-based Doubling Season deck with stuff like Cytoshape and Cytoplast Root-Kin. Month by month, supply on Scales is going to drain to attrition, and with no new copies entering the market, prices will quietly begin to rise. In fact, did you catch the uptick at the end of the graph there? The retail price has only barely started to budge since early December of last year, with the MTGPrice having climbed from $2 to today’s $2.32. The buylist though? $.25 on December 9th, and $1.06 today. That’s a 15% gain in the retail price, and a 400% gain in buylist. That is very real organic demand, and in three years, you’re going to wish you had bought more of these.

Clever Impersonator

Clone effects are popular, especially so in EDH. Do you know what’s almost always a great card to cast in a multiplayer game? A four mana copy of the best thing on the battlefield. It’s even sillier when you can bounce that four mana creature to your hand and do it again. Beads? BEES.

Of course, Clever Impersonator doesn’t bounce itself, but whatever. What makes it special is that not only can it come down as the best creature on the board, it can also come down as the best artifact, or the best enchantment, or Planeswalker, or equipment. Whatever. Falling behind in life and need a Batterskull? Yep, it does that. Would the tutor on that Ob Nixilis Reignited be especially useful in your mono-blue deck? Go for it. How about a Nevinyrral’s Disk? Done. And. Done.

We’ve see clone effects gain over time more than once. Phantasmal Image is the best known of the bunch, though admittedly that’s partly because of the raw value in a two mana clone. Then there’s Sculpting Steel. Copy Enchantment. Phyrexian Metamorph. Progenitor Mimic. Sakashima the Impostor. The list goes on. As long as the copy effect is useful, reasonably costed, and/or versatile, there’s demand for it. Clever Impersonator checks off every one of those boxes.

Clever Impersonator started life with a retail price of $10 (and a buylist of $9!), so clearly there was an expectation and belief that it’s a powerful card. The foil is also about four times higher than the non-foil, which means the EDH crowd is into this card. Today the price tag is around $2, which is about $1 more than I’d really like it to be, but there’s still fertile ground here. I’m not as excited to rush out and spend cash on these – I’d rather do that on Jesaki Ascendancy or Hardened Scales – but I’d be trading for every copy I could find.

These are cards that stand out to me as exceptional pickups for the future. Whether it’s based on casual appeal, a powerful and consistent upward force on card prices, or as a potential constructed combo breakout, which can stick a rocket right into a card’s butt and blast it to the money moon, I expect these to pay off a few years down the road. I’m sure there are other cards in Khans of Tarkir and Fate Reforged that I didn’t pick that you guys think stand to gain handsomely. Share them with us in the comments!

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