You may or may not know this about me, but I have one foiled-out Commander deck. It’s tribal Vampires, Grixis colors (Garza Zol, Plague Queen), and I didn’t intend for it to be the all-shiny deck, but it is and it’s the only deck I aggressively chase foils for.
As you can imagine, the foil manabase has been an expensive proposition, to the point that I only have a foil Bloodstained Mire that I opened early on in Khans drafts. The deck really wants a foil Scalding Tarn and a foil Polluted Delta, and until recently I’d resigned myself to spending a little of my Christmas bonus, likely about $100, to get a foil Khans Delta.
Then Battle for Zendikar, and the Expeditions, landed. Now I had a new decision about which version I wanted and as I kept an eye on eBay, a strange thing happened:
The price on eBay has gone down by $20-$30 since Battle for Zendikar came out.
Now I’ll be the first to admit, I was telling you to get foil fetches when Khans block ended. That’s traditionally when the prices are lowest on things and that was certainly the case for the nonfoil fetches. Those have gone up significantly since, while the foil trends downwards.
If I was a fan of foil fetches before, am I a bigger fan now? Mostly, yes. Personally, I feel that the Onslaught versions are more aesthetically pleasing, but more on that in a moment.
Other writers, on this site and on other sites, have pointed out that we are reaching the floor on the Expedition lands, and that if you want them, you should get them relatively soon. I agree with this viewpoint, and if I wanted Expeditions, I’d buy them now. We will have a small amount added during Oath of the Gatewatch, but the draft format is going to be Oath/Oath/Battle so it’s not a large addition, especially at Sealed events.
Also worth noting is that the rush of players who HAVE TO HAVE THE NEW SHINY has passed, for the most part. You can see the effect of these types of acquisitions on Blade of Selves, a card I mentioned last week, as it started low, spiked massively as players flocked to get the new toy, and has come back down to earth.
This is what happened with Expeditions, as players out of the gate wanted these and wanted them badly. Prices were insane, the frenzy was real, and thankfully the hype has died down.
As part of that hype, though, a secondary effect took hold: players spent less on the other versions, especially the Khans fetches. The foil versions of shocklands are due to go up too, but the Expeditions have sucked up a lot of the money that would have gone into Return to Ravnica or Gatecrash foil shocks.
With the extra supply of Expeditions, there’s simply more to choose from. A lot is going to depend on a player’s personal taste. Are you into old-frame foil fetches? Maybe judge foils catch your fancy? Perhaps the three-quarter-art or the kooky border on the Expeditions make it worth your dollars.
It’s interesting to watch how Expeditions have helped keep the prices lower on the included cards while adding a new version of those cards.
One other factor to note: It appears vendors are cutting their buylists on the Khans foil fetches across the board. All five fetch lands have a decrease in their buylist price recently, indicating that they have a full stock and don’t feel they need to pay more.
The buylist dip is also an indicator of retail demand. People aren’t buying as much of this version anymore, and that’s a chance for us to move in.
If you want to have foil fetch lands, do it relatively soon. I’m placing strategic eBay bids and being patient, because I’m sure I can land a foil Delta at $60 on eBay, unless one you of you sniples it from me.
I also want to give you a caveat: the presence of Expeditions is probably going to keep the prices of the regular foils down. Expeditions are something different and unique, qualities that Magic players love to have in their Cubes and Commander decks. The more foil versions there are, the less chance that all the money will be concentrated. Players have a variety of ways to invest their foil dollars, and that will keep all of them pretty stable in the long run.
So if you pick up some foil fetches or shocks or battle lands, don’t expect a huge return anytime soon. I do think they will slowly go up in value, but this injection of supply will keep prices low.
One more thing about Expeditions: There are more yet to come. Speculation remains rampant, but most agree that the 20 Expeditions of Oath will be the new five battle lands, the ten filter lands, and then five more. Those other five might well be the Scars of Mirrodin ‘fast lands’ like Seachrome Coast, since it needs to be a cycle of five. Regardless, I’d expect the pre-existing foils to take a hit on their prices, so if you’re sitting on a playset of foil Twilight Mire, you might want to think about selling high.
“Wow, Jason, that’s profound. Way to identify the only two types of people on the planet with respect to EDH” –You
Look, I made a Venn diagram
Look, I was making a point before I was so rudely interrupted. Yes, I realize most of the people on the planet don’t play EDH and some of you do. But I meant that with respect to just my readers. Some of you play EDH, some of you don’t.
For those of you who don’t but are still interested in the financial opportunities, thanks for reading. I realize it’s literally torture to read a finance article that concerns cards from a format you don’t play, and you’re sticking with it because of my animal magnetism (and because I occasionally make jokes at Corbin Hosler’s and Douglas Johnson’s expense. Trust me, Doug deserves it).
Whether or not you actually play EDH, you can get a sense of which cards are poised to do something and which cards are in higher demand than others. High demand cards can be moved for closer to retail and fringier cards are better to buylist, so sorting your cards on this basis can help you figure out which cards to ship on PucaTrade or TCGplayer and which to just ship to buylists. And although trading tends to suck, I still make a ton of money trading for Standard cards that EDH players don’t care about and for EDH cards that Standard players don’t care about.
You know how we keep saying “value is subjective?” That’s not just a way we rationalize ripping someone off in a trade (not something I advocate, and karma has a way of catching up with people who do this)—it is also a reminder that when you are trading a pile of cards someone considers very useful for a pile they consider useless, they are more likely to be generous and skew the trade in your favor a bit yet end up way happier with the trade than you are. Trading straight across isn’t a losing proposition when your $3 Standard rare will be a dime in a year and the $3 EDH staple will be $5 in a year. Hell, even if the $3 EDH card is $3 in a year, you made $2.90 on the trade.
Have you ever built an EDH deck? Some of you have, some of you haven’t. I don’t mean just physically sleeving up a deck, but making a decklist that ends up as a working 100-card pile? I want to advocate going through some of the motions of building a deck as a mental exercise to familiarize yourself with some EDH staples and EDH deckbuilding resources. It forces you to stay on top of prices, see cards you may have “glossed over” in a new light and make you remember to watch their price changes, and in general, interface more with EDH people who give you all the information you need to make good finance calls without even knowing it. You don’t need to be EDH Jesus to make good financial calls. I’m going to go through my deckbuilding process and tell you every step I take and every discovery I make. Let’s build a deck and see what we figure out.
Make Like Bob Vila and Build a Deck
I have talked about some of these cards and resources in the past, but I don’t care because I’m actually going to build the list we come up with at the end of this process, because I bought the Daxos the Returned precon and found a Serra’s Sanctum in a collection I bought.
(There was also a Tolarian Academy in that collection. Guess which card is worth more money. Surprised? This is what EDH does to card prices sometimes. If Tolarian Academy were legal in EDH, you’d really see the effect. In fact, that would be a great lesson: Sanctum, Academy, Cradle. You could see how EDH relevance stacks up against EDH-plus-Legacy or EDH-plus-Vintage. As it is, Sanctum is a $50 card waiting to happen and I’m glad I pulled one in a collection. I tend to try to avoid buying cards I advocate, and I strongly advocate Sanctum.)
Let’s build a Daxos deck that makes the most of Sanctum. But if we’re not sure where to start, what do we do?
Tapped Out
Tapped Out is a website where decks are listed, debated, analyzed, and scrutinized. I keep meaning to post my decks there to see what people think, but I’m scared of their criticism busy restoring old cars and chopping down trees and a third man thing.
I like the site a lot because it gives you a lot of data at your fingertips. The graphical representation of color balance, mana ratios, and other at-a-glance info is good, but there are other, hidden metrics that not many financiers are aware of, because why would you go that deep on an EDH website when MTGPrice tells you so much info on its home page? Well, there’s a good reason. I have covered this before, but I want to be sure people know this and that is the “demand” page as I call it. Clicking on a card in a deck list will take you to a screen with info for that card. Further down the page is a box with some tabs.
If you look at the “trade” tab or click on it, you can see who is offering the card for trade and who needs it and you can contact those users privately. This is a good place to find trades and you can potentially finagle them to be in your favor value-wise. Remember, these are players looking to play, not value hounds, so you can potentially get rid of downward-trending cards and pick up upward-trending ones. It’s worth playing with.
It’s also worth noting that despite its high appeal, eight times as many people have spare copies of this card than want them. It’s readily abundant. Despite Dictate of Erebos seeming like a slam-dunk of a card considering it can be found for under a dollar and it does the same thing as a $10 Grave Pact, it is going to take a while because copies are everywhere and lots of players have lots of extras. If you poke around long enough, you can find cards that have pent-up demand: more people who want them than people who have them.
It took me literally five seconds to try a few links in the exact same decklist and find that Greater Auramancy has pent-up demand. Do you think its current price will hold if it’s an auto-include in Daxos, people are building Daxos, it hasn’t been reprinted, and more people on Tapped Out want it than are willing to part with it? Maybe you can contact the people who have it and see what they want, thereby picking up a powerful, popular card for cardboard rather than cash. I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life, just how to make some value or pay $13 for a card that’s $20 or more next week that you want for your deck. I’m negotiating to trade for my copy since I want one in my deck.
Tapped Out can also give you a big list of other decks with the same Commander in the bottom right of the page. I like Tapped Out a lot, and whenever I’m brewing a new Commander deck, I like to see what people building the deck already came up with.
The suggestions people make are also very good, and a lot of the time, you can click on the link to the suggested card’s page and learn a lot about the card. Did you know about Koskun Falls? Not a lot of people do. It’s worth researching.
Ultimately, Daxos decks haven’t made it jump and neither did the printing of King Macar, the Gold-Cursed, but it is still an interesting card and worth knowing about. Homelands has exactly one worthwhile card in it, so there are loose falls everywhere, but you won’t suffer from having one in your binder to swap for a bulk rare from a recent set you think has potential. The card could have easily been something worth watching like another card from the list.
This card is way more interesting. Click around on some of the cards you may not be familiar with in the lists built by people who already built the deck you’re looking to “build” (theoretical or otherwise) and you may find some interesting cards. Contaminationdoes a lot of work in Daxos and other annoying decks. It’s a nonbo with Sanctum and getting white mana in general, so I’m not sold on it for this list, but if other Daxos players are toying with it, it’s worth knowing about.
Tapped Out is great for seeing complete decklists and seeing the cards in context of a deck, but it is really time-consuming to try and see which cards are used in common in a lot of the decks. Tapped Out doesn’t do that analysis for us. Fortunately, there is a site that does.
EDHREC FTW
Check out the EDHREC page for Daxos. It’s the data miner mother lode. There are a lot of obvious inclusions in the deck because the cards came bundled with Daxos, so for the time being, almost all Daxos lists online will contain Karmic Justice, Black Market. and Grasp of Fate. That’s not to say we can’t learn a lot from EDHREC even this early in the game. Really navigate the page just with your scroll bar for now.
Hover over the numbers under the card and it will tell you what they are. I’ll also explain. The first number is straightforward: 94 percent of the decks in the database with Daxos the Returned as their commander run this card. Simple. The third number tells you the same information, but also how many decks there are total, which is useful to know. The middle number may be confusing—finance websites have trained us to see that as a trend number—maybe 50 percent more decks run Phyrexian Arena than last week because they all just busted one in a precon?
That number is actually called the “synergy rating.” Per the website: “How often this card is played in Daxos the Returned decks, vs. other black+white decks. A positive percentage means the card is played more often in comparison to other decks, negative percentage means it’s played less frequently than usual. A number near zero means it’s mostly likely a staple for those colors.”
This is great info, as it tells us whether a staple and shoo-in for a deck like Daxos the Returned is just good for the deck or is good for the colors. Cards with high percentages might not be the best investments, because they may be somewhat fringe-playable in the format as a whole. However, a high percentage means the popularity of the commander can be what drives the price, meaning the commander gaining popularity will be a factor in the price, especially when there is low supply, like on older cards. Daxos can’t drive Dictate of Erebos by itself, but maybe it can shove up a card like Heliodwhich has a 53-percent synergy rating and is a mythic that just rotated out of Standard. Heliod also spits out enchantments, which is perfect for a deck with Serra’s Sanctum.
EDHREC has a lot of useful features. You can see the cards used in the decks where Daxos is in the 99 rather than the Commander. You can see the decks where combinations of cards are used by clicking the advanced filter at the top next to recent decks.
You can also get some help if you’re not too familiar with EDH by using the manabase crafter, which is a lot of help in identifying cards you might not know and which may be EDH staples you weren’t aware were cards you should pick, stock, or maybe speculate on. Not every card you see for the first time is a hidden gem, but you’re going to get a greater understanding of a format that can move prices profoundly and is not to be overlooked if you want to make money slinging cardboard.
Really peruse the site carefully. It’s chock full of features, and even if you don’t plan to ever sleeve the deck you “brew,” you are still going to want to know the most common cards in the deck. That’s what other people are using, which means they need them, which means they will need to buy them. The release of the five precons this month is a significant event for prices and that’s putting it mildly. Don’t miss being ahead of the curve.
Eating Pumpkins
I am going to cheat a little, because I already brewed my decklist so we can basically skip to the end if we want. That’s not to say I didn’t check both of the sites I mentioned when I brewed this deck, because I absolutely did that. I plan to build the deck, I plan to use some of the alternative methods for card acquisition I talked about in this piece, and ultimately, I have my eye on a few cards that I think could move based on what we learned on Tapped Out and EDHREC.
Are you going to build your own deck? Ezuri, Claw of Progress? Animar, Soul of Elements? Gisela, Blade of Goldnight? Whatever you decide to think about how to build, going through the motions of researching the deck is going to show you a lot of cards you should be paying attention to just as a matter of course. As far as theoretical exercises go, one that shows you a lot of data and leaves you with a decklist you could build if you wanted is pretty useful if you ask me. Until next time!
Hey guys! GP Pittsburgh was a great event to go to if you were looking to grind the tables and buy some cards. With prices in their seasonal decline, many opportunistic players were there looking to acquire underpriced staples and discounted deals. I myself did not play sanctioned magic at all during the weekend, and I’m sure that the other price writers present will be covering what happened with the TO and the GP as a whole. I can say that because the venue was packed, many grinders had extremely good weekends and I was lucky enough to partake in the spoils. After feedback on my twitter account from these articles, I also will be grading the vendors just like school. Let’s get into the plethora of vendors!
Strike Zone
StrikeZone seemed to barely be vending this weekend. They left early all three nights, and were one of the later vendors to be arriving on site during Sunday morning. I think they ran out of cash due to their proximity to the entry hall, and as a result didn’t have to grind the long hours that the vendors farther away from the action had to. Their buy prices weren’t the best, but there were enough people selling to them to make their booth worth it. The weirdest part about buylisting to StrikeZone was the fact that they make you organize the buy piles into set and alphabetical order, which is something few lazy Magic players do. They used to be one of the top vendors to sell to, but it seemed that their prices waned with the sun at this GP. I sat down with them as they perused through my binders, but said no to all of their offers confident that I could get more for my cards elsewhere this weekend.
Grade: C (Average)
MTG Card Market
MTG Card Market was at the very end of one of the two rows of vendor tables. They seemed to get little traffic because of this, and their buy prices weren’t amazing. They did however grab quite a few quarters this weekend out of my ogre box, perhaps in an attempt to get cards in at all! Jameson was quite friendly to everyone who stopped by however, and quite a few Chicago locals were selling to them this weekend.
Grade: C (Average)
Channel Fireball
Channel Fireball had a booth about four booths down from the GP entrance. They were packed all weekend, and paying highly on miscellaneous cards. As a GP mainstay, many people were selling to them due to their brand loyalty and credit bonus. Their buyers were very friendly and I sold a couple hundred dollars of mid-priced cards to them. Taking credit, I was able to pick up some blue-chip modern staples such as Noble Hierarch and Thoughtseize that I’m confident will see nice returns next year. They also bought over 100 Snapcaster Mageand 100 Rhystic Study from individual buyers, which was pretty funny to see.
Grade (B) Above Average
Savage TCG
Savage has vended the last couple GPs in a row. They always seem to attract a crowd, but didn’t have any stellar buy prices this weekend. They did, however, have low prices on played cards and had multiple Legacy staples at attractive buy prices all weekend. It seemed that they sold a lot of these to cube enthusiasts as quite a few happy people walked away with new cards. I didn’t sell anything to them or buy, but I always like to stop by and see what they have for sale.
Grade ( C) Average
Gaming ETC
Gaming ETC had an interesting booth setup this weekend. Half of their booth was covered in miscellaneous Magic products such as playmats and sleeves, compared to other vendors’ higher-margin items like packs and played binders. I wasn’t happy with their high sell prices and low buy prices, and the demeanor of their buyers didn’t make it seem like they were happy to be there.
Grade (D) Below Average
Jupiter Games
Jupiter seemed sparsely populated all weekend. They had both low buy prices and high sell prices. Their buyers seemed to be on their phones for most of the GP, and they only seemed animated during the busy Saturday morning. Next time, I don’t think I’m going to stop by Jupiter if this trend continues.
Grade (F) Unsatisfactory
Wizard Tower.com
Wizard Tower was one of the most interesting vendors this weekend. They had electronic boards that made seeing buy prices easy. They also had some of the highest buy prices on casual cards this weekend, and had the line to show for it. The weirdest thing about their buying practice was that they manually looked up inventory numbers of each card that they were interested in buying. Selling to them took about twice as long as usual, which was fine for me as I wasn’t playing in the GP, but could be harder for those who were. They almost ran out of money on Saturday, as I was paid quite a bit of money in $5 dollar bills. However, their buying staff was top -notch and friendly. I’ve never seen them vend a GP before, but they will be one of the first stops I make if I see them at another. Phil was one of the nicest buyers I worked with all weekend, and made small talk with me while waiting for their inventory to load on his computers.
Grade (A-) Excellent
Ice Imports
Ice Imports is another vendor that has been showing up lately at many of the GPs. They had sell prices somewhere between TCGLow and TCGMid, which was pretty good for a booth. I wasn’t a fan of their buy prices, but they did have quite a few people selling them cards. Their buyers were asking people as they walked buy to sell them cards/ look at their shelves, which means they weren’t just sitting there during slow booth times. Busy times for booths happen between the breaks in each round when players are killing time, and slow times happen during the first 15 minutes of each round.
Grade ( C) Average.
Kirwan’s Game Store
Kirwan had a small booth in a corner of the room. It didn’t seem that they were buying many collections, but the people selling to them were selling giant collections that took quite a bit of time to buy in. I didn’t sell anything to them, but their hotlist was around 5% less than the top buylists in the room which wasn’t bad if you were looking to get credit for a specific card.
Grade (C ) Average
MTG Deals
MTG Deals has earned the reputation of one of the top vendors to stop by first at any GP. They definitely lived up to it as this GP. They had a pretty busy booth, and solid buy prices. I sold 10 Expeditions to them at barely below TCGLow, and their buyer Dave was friendly. He also offered a higher number on cards after I said no to the initial offer, which was a nice change of pace. At GPs you can always barter with vendors on high-end cards on the numbers you want, but it was nice to see him haggle with me on $20-$50 cards. I would recommend stopping by MTGDeals as one of the first booths at any GP.
Grade (A-) Excellent
Coolstuffinc
Coolstuff Inc also had a ton of traffic this weekend. I bought quite a few $16 original Modern Masters packs from them. Although the EV of the packs was great, my pulls weren’t. I sold them quite a few cards that they were paying extremely highly on, such as Modern Masters Slaughter Pact at $7. Their buyers were friendly, and I was satisfied with some of their cards in their played/ foreign binders such as a japanese copy of All is Dust at $4.
Grade (B) Above Average
RIW Hobbies
Being one of the booths directly next to the doors of the room, RIW was quite busy this weekend. They had cards at retail prices, but had a ton of people buying from them. Customer service was exemplary with Marcel doing his best to accommodate weird card requests and talking about the history of the shop with people. They brought all of their sealed product and product damaged from their fire that had happened a couple months ago in a discounted binder. The cards didn’t smell smoky, but the prices were on fire in this binder. I picked up a promo Eternal Dragon for $5 in the binder, and one of my friends got a foil Sphinx’s Revelation for $10. I recommend stopping by RIW in the future if they still have this binder in the future, or to pick up packs for drafting with your friends.
Grade (B) Above Average
Brimstone Games
Brimstone brought the greatest amount of sealed product to the GP this weekend. Although their buy prices weren’t stellar, the selection of packs was quite insane. I bought a few original packs of Ravnica for fun at $20 each and pulled a Remand and an Overgrown Tomb. Their buyers were quite friendly with many people coming over to admire their sealed wares, asking how much they were, and then leaving after hearing the answer. For example, there was a sealed box of foreign Urza’s Saga on display. Many people incredulously walked away after hearing the number, but it didn’t seem that bad if you were in the market for something so rare. In the future if you want to see some unique stuff, I recommend stopping by Brimstone Games in the future.
Grade B (Above Average)
Face to Face Games
Face to Face was also situated near the doors of the venue, leading to a high amount of people stopping by. Their buyers were very friendly, but it seemed like the exchange rate of the Canadian dollar hampered their buying power this weekend compared to other vendors. They had prices around retail as well, but due to brand loyalty still had quite a bit of traffic. I was sad to say that their booth this weekend didn’t stand up to the pleasure of their game center in Canada. Had their buy prices been higher I would have sold them some stuff, but I was in the business of making the most money on my cards this weekend.
Grade (C ) Average
The Comic Book Store
These guys had solid traffic all weekend, with many locals stopping by to sell cards. I wasn’t a fan of most of their buy prices, but they were paying highly on Command Tower which meant that there must be a huge casual market for them. Their buyers were friendly, but I didn’t sell them many cards.
Grade ( C ) Average.
Aether Games
Aether has consistently been one of the first vendors I have stopped at at nearly every GP. This weekend was no different. They were paying $17 on Thoughtseize, $2 above the TCG Low at the time. I sold them quite a few Emrakul, the Aeons Torn at $19 and Leyline of Sanctity at $7. They were paying the highest in the room on the fetch land Expeditions, and also were paying $50 on the SCG Tasipurr playmats. They bought so many of these cards at their high buy prices that they dropped many of them after their quote was filled. One person singlehandedly sold them almost 200 Thoughtseizes. Their buyers were friendly, and very professional. I also bought quite a few cards from them this weekend. I bought them out of Japanese foil Plains at $5-6, depending on the art. With those prices barely above English, this is something that I expect to see better returns on then their English counterparts. I also bought quite a few Russian fetch lands since I like Russian more than English cards. Overall, I would recommend making Aether one of your first stops at any GP.
Grade (A-) Excellent
Troll and Toad
You could barely tell that Troll and Toad had a presence this weekend. Whether it was their low buy prices or shipping practices, they had almost no traffic this weekend. They have also been known to not honor their online buy prices. Cards were haphazardly flung into their cases in different directions, and their buyers seemed quite moody as well. This is the exact opposite of what a vendor should be like at a GP, and I was extremely unimpressed.
Grade (F) Worst Vendor at the GP.
Empire Cards
Empire had a good selection of high-end cards and sealed product this weekend. I sold them quite a few standard cards that were not tier 1 anymore. I also bought a few RTR packs for fun, but didn’t open anything worthwhile. If I see them at a GP in the future, I’ll probably stop by again but nothing they had blew me out of the water.
The floor was extremely busy this weekend. With the venue packed to capacity, most of the grinders there Saturday sat by the last row on circular tables. Many people gave up value to get Expeditions at a loss, and as you’ve probably read by now Expeditions are finally rising from their floor.
Trinisphere was virtually nonexistent in anyone’s binders, and had a strong demand from grinders even though no one had any. There were many established shops grinding inventory, with many getting rid of fetch lands for local goods as fetches have finally started to dip back down.
I also helped a friend get a Black Lotus this weekend. He came up Saturday afternoon with a binder full of dual lands. I had already asked each vendor their buy price on duals, and had calculated the amount of credit/ cash he would receive in order to make it easier on him since he would only be at the GP in a couple hours. We ended up trading 24 mainly non-blue duals for a MP- Black Lotus that Aether had at 2300 in buylist. Aether was offering the highest in the room on dual lands this weekend, which was odd as I had heard that almost no vendors wanted duals the week before. Coolstuff also only wanted mint duals and had extremely low prices for even SP duals, something I think more vendors will be shifting to in the future.
After four straight weeks of GPs, many vendors were also out of cash. Only Aether, Deals, and CFB had cash left towards the end of Sunday, meaning that desperate or lazy Magic players got the lowest amounts of cash offered and still took it. If you want to sell at a GP, make sure to sell before the GP even starts Saturday morning.
Overall, GP Pittsburgh was a fun time from a financial perspective! With no GPs for the next six weeks, I expect card prices to drop more overall as people try to sell off inventory by the end of the year. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments, or reach out to me on twitter @LengthyXemit.
Bonus Bits
“The only difference between half the vendors and the grinders is a table” – @Zachsellsmagic
“I’ll take bulk rares over staples any day” Thomas Dodd (Owner of CardAdvantage)
First order of business this week: congratulations to Alex Bianchi (@gemmanite) for his Grand Prix Pittsburgh win this past weekend. Of the twelve of us that traveled to the event together, nobody was even remotely considering winning the whole thing. The dream was top eight and/or going 13-2; that was the threshold. Any accomplishment beyond that was completely out of mind. To see a friend win a GP basically out of nowhere is astounding and exciting, and of anyone in Buffalo, I can honestly say that Alex is the most deserving of this accomplishment. He’s devoted a great deal of time and effort to the game, yet has remained friendly and humble, a feat whose difficulty is evidenced by the attitudes of many road-worn grinders. (Though he perhaps enjoys strangling cool deck ideas to death with his own brand of Magic conservatism a bit too much.) To all of you, it’s just another no-name player that won one of hundreds of GPs, but to us, it’s a friend and devoted player that was finally rewarded for his commitment and passion.
@wizardbumpin, @gemmanite, @deejfordicus, and some randos
Alright, on to why you bother to read this at all: my exceedingly clever word play paired with incisive and urbane observations.
Last week, I covered a lot of cards that are in difficult spots. For each, the answer wasn’t clear whether to hold on and look for more profits, or to sell and move on to something else. As long as you’re making a profit, “sell” is never a truly wrong answer, though realistically, our goal is to do so within 10 to 20 percent of the peak price. I mostly erred on the side of action: sell your cards. Most of the examples fell into one of two camps; either they had gained a great deal of value recently, or they have been losing value continually for a while and show no signs of changing that anytime soon. Investing in Magic cards, as with anything, is always a battle against opportunity cost. The question is less about whether something will make you money, but rather, if it will make you money faster than another option.
One metric served as a tool for evaluating all of the cards, and even if I didn’t explicitly mention it in each example, there was not a single time it didn’t come into consideration. Many of us writers cite it frequently, though I realize it may not be completely obvious why we do so. I’m talking, of course, about buylist prices.
Knowledge is Power
The buylist number is how much a vendor will pay you for your card. It’s the amount that Star City Games or ChannelFireball will give you in cash for a specific item. This number represents the absolute minimum value you should receive for a card at any given time.
Today, right now, Strikezone will give me $30 for an Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. Why should I as a seller ever accept less than $30 for my copy of Ugin, then? At any given time, I can stick it in an envelope and receive that amount. If I wanted $30 for the card, I’d already have it. If I haven’t yet sent it to SZO, it means that I’m either A) in an extreme hurry to sell the card, or B) unwilling to take $30 for Ugin. Scenario A comes up occasionally, but scenario B is our day-to-day reality.
Knowledge of a card’s current buylist price serves as a useful piece of information when transacting Magic, and its existence is a net positive for each actor in the small drama that is Magic finance. In fact, most markets don’t even have something so clean. The used car market, for example, lacks a buylist with the same functionality of Magic. If you decide to sell your car, there’s no obvious number that serves as the lowest cash value you can receive. You can’t just plug your car into a website, see exactly how much cash someone will give you for it, and then ship it over (or drive it over, more realistically). Yes, there’s lots of ways to hone in on what number you can expect, such as Kelly Blue Book, Edmunds, auction results, etc. These only serve to give you a rough estimate, though, and more importantly, none of those places will actually buy your car. They’ll tell you what you should expect to receive for it, but they themselves are not the buyer. You’ll still need to go through Craigslist or trade your car in at a dealer, and they may have a very different idea about what a fair number for your car is. There’s also the possibility that they’re not interested in a fair number at all. The fact that we can, on any day, put a card in the mail and be guaranteed to receive a certain dollar amount is a unique facet of the secondary Magic market.
From both sides of the deal, buylist numbers make life considerably easier. There’s no debating about what a card may or may not be worth, and no wondering whether or not you may be able to find another buyer. As the seller, you know exactly the minimum value you should receive, and it gives you a position to bargain from. As the buyer, it gives you a target. The buylist price is the absolute best price you can expect to pay for a card, and paying that price is about as close to “perfect” of a deal as you can get. Both sides having this information means that there’s a lot less haggling, a lot fewer people getting screwed, and overall quicker and more pleasant transactions.
Of course, the utility of the buylist in relation to a private-party transaction is only one component of how useful it is. The true value in buylisting is not as a frame of reference for a buyer and seller, but rather, as a gauge of overall market demand for a good.
Grey Matter
Cards generally have two prices. The first is the fair market price. That’s what MTGPrice puts in big bold text when you look up an Ugin. Some will arrive at this number differently—they may strictly take TCGplayer low or average, or just use SCG’s price (both strategies which have their own flaws)—but in essence, this number is the cost to acquire a card at any time. Fair market price is dichotomous with buylist prices, which is what an individual can sell her card for at any time, and is the second of our two-price model. The market price is how much it costs to buy this card whenever I want it, and the buylist price is how much I receive if I sell this card whenever I want. In between is where people negotiate.
What’s unquestionably useful to us as financiers is the gap in between those two numbers. Specifically, the size of the difference between the two relative to how much the card costs. That’s known as the spread. Several writers here at MTGPrice have written about spread, and understanding it is essential to being successful in this field.
Very quickly, you find the spread by dividing the highest buylist price by the lowest possible retail price, and subtracting from one.
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon Spread Equation Best Buylist: $30 Lowest Retail: $42
The larger the spread, the larger the gap between the market price and the buylist price. The lower the spread, the closer the two numbers are. When it’s a negative number, it means there’s an opportunity for arbitrage.
Allow me to illustrate, since I’m sure many of you are visual learners like I am. Here’s an example of a large spread.
And here’s an example of a small spread.
Finally, here’s an example of a negative spread.
On October 2, you could have bought foil Mind’s Desirefor less money than another vendor would give you for that card. Buy it from SCG for $5.50, put it in an envelope to CFB, and they’ll give you $8.05 each. Nifty.
Arbitrage is a fun way to grind out profits, especially when you start utilizing credit bonuses for trade-ins. Sigmund has written about it recently, and I know others have as well. I’ve been doing it myself lately. Last week I found a vendor who was paying $1.81 cash for Sigil of the Empty Throne, while another vendor was selling them for $2. At cash prices I’d still be losing, but with a trade-in bonus, I was paying $2 cash for Sigil and getting $2.25 in store credit. Buy out one vendor, ship to another, and increase your overall store credit value by 12.5 percent. Do this a handful of times with an increasing amount of store credit, and suddenly you’re gaining 10 to 30 percent on a rolling ball of several hundred dollars. I’m actually finding that my store credit is quickly beginning to eclipse the total value available in a transaction. I may have $500 in credit, but no vendor wants $500 worth of Sigil of the Empty Thrones.
Indexing
Alright, that was a useful little aside, but not exactly my point. Getting back on track, spread is not only good for occasionally making money, but is more importantly useful as a tool for evaluating demand. The smaller the spread, the more “true” demand there is. Inversely, the greater the spread, the less true demand there is. What do I mean by true demand?
Imagine for a moment that you decided to make a big move on the secondary market. You’re going to corner The Great Aurora. You dutifully buy out every vendor online. TCG, SCG, CFB, eBay—you hit them all. Vendors relist, so you buy them out again. Over the course of a week, you obtain a majority share of all the loose copies in North America. Now begins your evil plan. After having paid between $.25 and $2 a copy, you relist them all on TCG for $15 each. It’s genius! If anyone wants a copy, they’ll need to pay you $15. Other vendors will scramble to match your price, unwilling to sell theirs at $2. After all, if you’re asking $15, why wouldn’t they just ask $14? You singlehandedly swing the market upwards, and soon prices across the board have risen.
Except that this is all predicated on a flawed assumption: you assume that people actually want The Great Aurora enough to pay $15 a copy. Before they were only willing to pay maybe $1 each. Why would they suddenly pay 15 times that? Someone is going to see the card, think “boy I could use one of those,” notice the price, and tweet some awful words about #mtgfinance before skipping it and moving on. While you may get a few fish to bite, nobody is really buying The Great Aurora for $15. There’s simply no true demand for the card.
While this is all happening, vendors are trying to keep up with the market. They’ll dig a few copies out of a collection they have yet to sort and they’ll list them for between $10 and $20. They’ll keep their buylist extremely low, because they don’t actually know if this card can sell for that much yet. As copies of The Great Aurora continue to sit in their inventory, unsold at $10, their buylist will similarly sit where it was pre-spike. The only reason to raise that number is to get people to sell you copies. But if you can’t sell the copies you have, why would you buy more? People will see a massive spread looking at MTGPrice, with the market price north of $10 and buylist prices of $.25. As people continue to not buy $15 copies, individual sellers and vendors will keep dropping their prices until somebody bites, and it won’t take long before the card finds itself at $1 again. People will look back at the incident and see a huge rise in the market price on the graph, but the blue buylist line won’t have budged. No stores will have been offering more money for the card because nobody was in turn buying it from them.
On the other side of the spectrum is true demand. A dealer lists its Flooded Strands at $17. They are completely bought out within a few hours. Their buylist is at $10, but they’re not receiving many copies at all. They raise it to $12, and someone sells them three Strands. The dealer relists those copies, and they’re gone again almost immediately. Dealers across the market are realizing that Flooded Strands sell quickly. Cards that sell quickly are great as a dealer, because you make your money in volume. The more Strands they can pass through their store, the more money they’ll make. The buylist will rise. A small margin between what they pay for the card and what they sell it for doesn’t matter much, since their goal is to sell as many as possible. Market prices will rise too of course, but not as fast as the buylists will. Eventually you’ll end up with dealers selling copies at $21 and paying $18. Sure they’re only making $3 a copy, but if everyone is selling you their Flooded Strands, you actually get to keep them in stock while your competitors run dry. The margins are small, but so long as you’re churning through as many as possible, you’re making money. If you start paying less money for them, or charging more, people will stop selling to you or buying from you accordingly.
In the first example with The Great Aurora, we see possibility of how the secondary market price can explode while actual demand from the player base hasn’t truly increased. It’s highly unlikely that the scenario is in actuality committed by someone hoping to corner the market in such a diabolical fashion; that scenario simply served to illustate the point.
In the Flooded Strand example, we see how the player base has a rabid hunger for Flooded Strand, and how that drives a narrowing gap between buylist prices and market values. Because lots of real human beings (if you can call Magic players that) truly want to own Flooded Strand—unlike The Great Aurora—stores will continue to up their buylists. Spreads will shrink, and the gap between the green line and the blue line will narrow.
Understanding this process is key to understanding the future of a card’s financial trajectory. Let’s look again at a card I advised selling last week, Scavenging Ooze.
Notice how in the last two years, the best buylist has only dropped. More importantly, since December of last year, both the market price and buylist price have remained completely stagnant. Neither has shifted appreciably in either direction. For the last year, Ooze has been at perfect equilibrium. If there were a great demand for this card, we’d see a slowly rising buylist, accompanied by a market price growing either slowly or spiking. Either way, we’d see dealer confidence in Ooze increasing. But we aren’t. Dealers aren’t any more confident they’ll sell this card today than they were a year ago. That means they aren’t selling that many copies, and that there simply aren’t that many people out there buying it.
Scavenging Ooze has a poor buylist trend, as does Deathrite Shaman, two cards that I advised you sell. When buylist numbers look like that, there’s simply no reason to be holding onto copies.
Ooze is showing no signs of gaining, and DRS is only losing ground. You can tell me until you’re blue in the face that Ooze is a great spec target for Modern, and I don’t fully disagree that eventually it may be worth quite a bit more than today. I’m looking at the data, though, and the data is telling me that right now we have no reason to expect Ooze to move anytime soon. Once that buylist starts creeping up, that will be the time to revisit it.
Forecasting
Let’s now look at the Expeditions copy of Flooded Strand. It’s quite a new card, and the data is not plentiful yet, but we immediately see a trend.
As of November 5, the buylist was $100. As of the 22nd, it was $127. Over the course of three weeks, dealer confidence in this card rose by 25 percent. At the same time, the market price rose from $200 on the 7th to $220 on the 22nd. That’s a rise of 10 percent. Here’s that comparison in graph form.
Expeditions copies of Flooded Strand are growing in dealer confidence faster than in market price. That’s extremely useful information, because it tells us that dealers are selling through their copies of this card and they want to own more of them. When buylists are rising at a faster rate than the market price, we’re due for a price correction. Flooded Strands are not going to be $220 market for much longer.
How about another example?
Here’s a segment of Ugin’s price history, from two to 20 weeks ago. On July 24, the buylist was $16 and the market value was $28, for a spread of 42 percent. On October 2, the buylist was $20 and market value was still $28. That’s a 25 percent increase in the buylist value, with no change on the market price. Unsurprisingly, the market price had jumped by October 30 by 25 percent—exactly the buylist change that had occurred over the last three months.
And one more just for kicks.
Who Watches the Watchmen
This isn’t a call for you to buy Flooded Strands (although it’s probably not a bad idea), but rather to illustrate that rising buylist values relative to market prices indicate increases in true demand, which will eventually lead to those market values adjusting appropriately. There’s a massive card-buying community out there, and they aren’t all hopping on Twitter to tell you what they’re purchasing. In order to know what cards people actually want and subsequently what prices are going to rise, you need to watch buylists. Rising buylists tells us that real people are buying cards, and being on top of those trends is the most surefire avenue to make a profit in this business.
Think of buylists as a poll of Magic players as a whole. Buylists are a way to measure the silent majority, to observe card-buying trends of a population that would otherwise be invisible to people like you and I. SCG and CFB are large enough to analyze their own sales data and see what’s moving, then make decisions based on that. We don’t have that data, so instead we look at vendors who do have that information and what they’re doing with it. They have a bunch of data, and that data is telling them to pay more money for Expeditions Flooded Strands. If you don’t have access to raw sales figures, your next best strategy is to observe the behaviors of those that do.
We can sit around all day long speculating on cards that we think will rise or fall. Scavenging Ooze is going to spike this spring! This is Necrotic Ooze’s year! 2016 is year of the ooze! While I do my fair share of this, and I enjoy it, recognize that some specs are based on the potential for a breakout performance, which will cause prices to skyrocket, and some specs are based on increasing demand, which lead to slower, sustainable growth. Trying to nail the breakout specs is amusing, but it’s extremely difficult and really just a crap shoot.
Our more reliable venture should be identifying cards with increasing demand and getting in ahead of market corrections. Holding onto Scavenging Ooze is neither of those things—we aren’t going to see any breakout performances, and at the same time, the buylist is telling us there’s been absolutely no growth in demand for two years now. Expeditions Flooded Strand has a growing buylist relative to its market value. We’re seeing the seeds for a growth in market value. There are plenty of cards like this out there, you just have to find them. That’s the type cardboard you want to own.
Watch the blue line. It will tell you where to go.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
