The Finance Article That Reddit Wants

September 17, 2015 Douglas Johnson 12 Comments

So my articles are tossed out into the wild of the internet for all to see on Thursdays, right? Well, that means I sit down to write them on Tuesdays, usually at 11:00 p.m. in a hurried rush so that I can get enough sleep for class the next morning.

On Wednesdays, the /r/mtgfinance subreddit posts an AMA thread where new players and budding financiers can post questions relating to card prices or market trends, no matter how specific or weird. I’ll link you to the one from September 9, 2015, right here. I have a tendency to browse through the thread every week, often trying to find something that I can configure into an article, unless I already have something at the ready.

I’m assuming that you guys don’t really want to read yet another installment of, “Here’s this collection I bought, this is how I’m going to organize and process the whole thing, and this is how I plan on selling all of the different pieces of it.” I mean, if you do want to read more of that, then please let me know. It’s kind of my niche on this website, while Jason pleasures himself to the number 99 and Travis buys out the internet of Dragon Whisperer (hint: there’s still time to buy that card, and there’s a reason that SCG is sold out at $3 right now).

Assuming that you didn’t want to read more about my collection-buying exploits, and recognizing that Reddit is a good place to search for ideas, I went fishing. The thing is, I couldn’t find one specific question on the subreddit’s weekly AMA to constitute writing an entire DJ Johnson article. I’m determined to make this work, though, and I noticed that there were a decent number of cold, abandoned, answerless questions lying around on the thread. I’m going to use this week to answer several of those inquiries to the best detail of my ability, and then message this article to those Redditors who asked the questions.

Can You Make Change for a Canadian 20?

Yeah, I ran into this problem a while back. No, not being Canadian. Why would you assume that being Canadian is a problem? Canadians have way better healthcare than we do, although apparently that doesn’t prevent them from falling into the same trap as us Americans. I’m saying that I bought a bunch of FTV:20s a couple of years back at the set’s release, thinking that it would be a slam-dunk long-term investment. I had a hook-up with a shop owner so I only paid $100 USD each, and I was fully prepared to reap my rewards a few years down the road. Welllll…

Yeah, that didn’t exactly turn out well. If I sold them right now, I wouldn’t even make any money after shipping costs and eBay fees. That’s a really mediocre two-year investment. About six months ago, I actually ended up just deciding to crack all of the boxes and sell the singles, because a local player wanted to buy a couple copies of Jace, the Mind Sculptor off me, and the only ones I had were locked inside their sealed-product prison. As it turns out, the contents of the box are more valuable cracked than they are sealed, according to MTGPrice’s Fair Trade Price list:

Even if we ignore the garbage towards the bottom, we still make out better by moving the top five or so cards through TCGplayer, Facebook, or a similar out. You’ll almost certainly pay less in shipping as well, with Jace being the only single I would ship with tracking in a bubble mailer.

To answer your question, Hiroshimarc1, I wouldn’t sit around expecting FTV:20 to continue to grow in value. You’ll waste a lot of time sitting on gains that don’t exist, or you’ll suffer from very, very small marginal increases at best. I recommend cracking your FTVs and selling the singles inside. The higher-end stuff will move a lot faster, and you can ship the cheaper stuff to buylists to recoup the cost. We both lost on this one, but it’s better to try and recoup your losses instead of sitting on dead weight.

Guide Me to the Delta

Thanks for the question, Farsho! As of right now, the total Puca value of what you have is 6150 points, and the 3 Polluted Deltas will run you about 7122 points. I hope you have some extra points to push towards the Deltas, otherwise you won’t have enough. I definitely support trading the two Guides for three Deltas, for multiple reasons other than it just being a good trade for value.

Right now, you’re not using the Goblin Guides for anything else (at least I assume so from your post). Even if the lack of a recent printing means they will marginally increase in value by a couple of dollars over the next month or so, is that really worth not being able to optimally play your UR Delver deck with the Deltas? If you’re a player, there’s an inherent value in actually being able to, well, play your deck. Even if the Guides were $37 each and beat out the Deltas in pure TCGplayer mid value, I’d recommend trading cards you’re not playing for cards that you will play. Neither card will see a reprint anytime soon, unless WOTC really surprises us.

Hedron-Shaped Box

Well, hey there, gravitygroove. By the time you’re reading this article, your comment will be at least four days old. Getting a case at 540 seems like a perfectly fine deal, considering we’re seeing a lot more hype for whole cases with this set. We can give thanks to the Zendikar Expeditions lottery for that, bringing approximately one golden ticket to every six boxes of BFZ.

Personally, I really don’t think you want to hoard them. I went over a few of the reasons that sealed product is problematic back in the first question, and sealed booster boxes are even more of a pain to move than From the Vault product. They weigh more, and it’s harder to find that one guy looking to crack them for drafts a few years down the road. In addition to that, we really haven’t been seeing the returns on sealed product that we used to.

My colleague Sigmund Ausfresser can tell you a lengthy story about his first-hand battle with Innistrad sealed product, and how it was an absolute nightmare for him to move. While those eventually ended up being a slam-dunk, it’s the last booster box to ever take off like that, and we have the dynamic duo of Liliana of the Veil and Snapcaster Mage to thank for it. Boxes of Return to Ravnica really hasn’t seen any signs of growth at all. In fact, we can still pick them up for $90 with free shipping on eBay:

Remember that Expeditions cards will likely water down the rest of the set, simply by flooding the market with non-Expeditions stuff. Vendors will be cracking hundreds and hundreds of these cases, looking to complete playsets of those full-art lands. You’re one small case in a large ocean of vendors, so these cards will be on the market for years to come. I really don’t think there’s any value to be gained on stashing a $500 investment that also takes up a non-zero amount of closet space, when we don’t see clear signs of significant returns down the road.

If you’re looking for a quick flip, you might have some luck selling individual boxes locally at $100 to $110 each, especially if your LGS runs out of product on the weekend of release. That would net you a $60 or $70 profit with almost no work involved—you would just get to be the middle man. However, if you’d rather get that high from cracking packs and sitting in a pile of bulk commons/uncommons, tokens, and booster pack wrapping, there is a third option.

Cracking everything and moving it as soon as possible is a way to get value, but it’s obviously a gamble. Opening that $200 (or more?) Expeditions Scalding Tarn cushions your case cost by a significant margin, but opening one of the new BFZ duals will leave a bad taste in your mouth. If you’re fast and efficient with how quickly you move a lot of the mythics, rares, and uncommons before they plummet to their bulky graves, it’s not out of the question that you could recoup 80 or 90 percent of the value of each box, or even come out ahead in the long term.

Fed Up With Standard and Looking for Something More, Ahem, Modern

Nice, a two-for-one!

Users bananaderson and Marcoox here are both on the same page, and are wondering what the likely price trajectories are for Eidolon of the Great Revel and Thoughtseize, once they leave Standard and head off into the world of eternal-only play. For cards like these, I like to use the good old analogy of Snapcaster Mage.

Snapcaster didn’t plummet at rotation. He may have dipped by a dollar or two if my memory serves, but he certainly held his value as he made the transition to the world of eternal. Everyone knew already that he would find homes there, so a large majority of Standard players kept their copies because they knew that they would continue to find use for them. Thoughtseize and Eidolon will likely follow a similar pattern: they’ll barely (if at all) drop when they rotate out of Standard, and will continue to hold their own or increase as time goes on. If you need either card for a deck, either now or in the near future, I recommend biting the bullet, taking that shock to the face, and buying in or trading for them right now.

End Step

Some of these questions had a bit more of a “Finance 101” feel to them, but I think that’s alright. I enjoy answering these questions, because it reminds me that while it might seem “easy” or “obvious” to me, there are still newer players and growing financiers who are still just starting to explore the world of Magic finance that I discovered several years ago.

Maybe I’ll turn this into a semi-regular thing, using the Reddit thread as a solid crowdsource for specific finance questions that I can answer in an article. At the very least, it gives me something to write about every week. Hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit if you want to talk, suggest a topic, or provide constructive criticism. Oh, and the comments section exists, too. Use it.

Jason Alt, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Boats Run Aground

September 16, 2015 Jason Alt 3 Comments

Landfall is coming.

We’re all already very aware of how much fun landfall can be. Who doesn’t like to smash people in EDH with Avenger of Zendikar? That’s such a cliche at this point that a reader of mine called its inclusion in a deck where I was doing crazy landfall shenanigans questionable, as if Avenger of Zendikar had jumped the shark. Screw that, landfall is awesome and landfalling feels good and I’m going to keep doing it. We’re going to want to landfall a lot more in the future, and there are a lot of cards people are going to look back at coming up here pretty soon, and I think it’s worth buying ahead of them. Battle for Zendikar is about to make it cool to landfall again, so let’s be ready.

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City of Traders

UNLOCKED: A Demanding Supply

September 16, 2015 Travis Allen 13 Comments

By: Travis Allen

This spoiler season has been bittersweet in a way that none other (except maybe Khans of Tarkir) has come close to. Every morning around 10:40 a.m. EST, I’ve started mashing F5 on MythicSpoiler.com and alternating between that and Twitter to catch all the new hotness.

Then immediately begins the excited chatter about the new cards. Is From Beyond better or worse than Awakening Zone? Did anyone use Awakening Zone in the first place? How cool is Bring to Light? What stupid synergies can we spot that seem to be excellent now but will be awful in hindsight?

For those that are inclined to read this type of article, spoiler season also carries for us the additional layer of price considerations. What does Greenwarden of Murasa do to See the Unwritten? Is Herald of Kozilek a real card in Modern, and if so, should I be buying out Chromatic Star? (No.)

All of the above is the sweet stuff. Expeditions bring the bitterness. Why are they bitter? Well, aside from those frames being ugly as sin, there’s the fallout of their rarity. Expeditions are going to be so rare, so in demand, and subsequently so expensive, that Battle for Zendikar cards are going to be nigh incapable of sustaining any meaningful price tag. So great will this impact be that I have made a rule for myself: no speculating on Battle for Zendikar cards, ever. Just don’t do it.

Yes, some cards will change in value. Some card out there is wildly undervalued and may even pull a Hangarback Walker. Someone will make money on BFZ cards. It just won’t be me. It’s going to be so damned difficult to find the one or two cards that will spike, and the spike will be so much less pronounced, that it’s simply not worth it. We’re better off writing off the entire set as cards with virtually no value and looking for financial upside anywhere else. For a financier, effectively being locked out of seeking monetary gain for the next two sets is a bummer. We don’t get any new toys to play with.

If you don’t quite understand why Expeditions are going to crush card value in BFZ, then there’s a good lesson here for you this week. I’ve written down some variant of “not everyone gets supply and demand” in no less than three places I keep article ideas, so clearly it’s a topic I feel the community would be well served to discuss.

This week I’ll expand on the economic laws of supply and demand and how they apply to Magic. Hopefully by the end of this, you’ll understand a bit better why one card is $10 while another is $1.

Supply

The formal economic laws of supply and demand are not terribly complex, but admittedly beyond the scope of this article. I’m going to shrink their applicability to Magic.

When we talk about supply in Magic, it’s straightforward and easy to grasp. It’s a question of how much of a given card is available. Even though we’ll never know it, there’s a discrete quantity of any given card. For example, there are hundreds of thousands of copies of Khans of Tarkir draft chaff Woolly Loxodon out there in the world. Zillions of packs of KTK were opened, and as a common, enough Woolly Loxodons are out there to rebuild the half of California’s trees that have burned down recently.

Furthermore, nobody is holding onto their Woolly Loxodons. They aren’t stored in people’s collections because they’re not eternal playable or something people collect. If SCG tomorrow said it would pay 25 cents each on Woolly Loxodons, they would have tens of thousands before the close of business.

On the opposite end of the scale of supply is any of the power nine. The absolute quantity of Black Lotus is extremely low relative to nearly every other Magic card in existence. It’s at the rarest rarity in the sets with the smallest distribution in the game’s history. Off the top of my head, the only cards I can imagine existing in fewer absolute quantities are Shichifukujin Dragon, 1996 World Champion, and probably the summer Magic rares. (Feel free to point out all the other cards I’ve missed that are more rare than Lotus in the comments.)

Not only is there an extremely small amount of Black Lotuses out there in the world, the ones that do exist aren’t necessarily liquid. A great many of them are locked away permanently in people’s personal collections, the owners unwilling to part with them. This further reduces the quantity of available Black Lotuses on the market. At the end of the day, there are only a few hundred or thousand copies readily available on the market at any given time.

While Woolly Loxodon and Black Lotus represent extremes in terms of supply, usually we’re thinking about cards closer to the middle of the spectrum. Consider Thoughtseize and Scapeshift. Both have been printed in modern-border sets, so neither is comically unavailable like Alpha rares are. They’re both rares.

They’re also from two different time periods in Magic. Thoughtseize was originally printed in Lorwyn, and then again two years ago in Theros. As a rare in Theros, there is a considerable amount of available supply on the market. Fewer copies of Pyxis of Pandemonium exist than Thoughtseize.

Scapeshift’s only printing was in Morningtide, though. Morningtide was printed shortly after Lorwyn, so it wouldn’t be unfair to say there’s about the same number of Scapeshifts as there are Lorwyn Thoughtseizes. That’s only the Lorwyn printing, though—the Theros printing added a magnitude more copies to the world.

How many fewer copies of Scapeshit are there really? This is extremely difficult to put a number on. Wizards doesn’t release sales numbers like this. We have no idea how many cases of any given set were printed and/or sold. All we can do is make semi-educated guesses. Without doing any digging, I’d guess that Theros probably sold in the ballpark of 5 to 30 times as much product as Morningtide. That’s a tremendous range of course, but you get the idea. The difference in quantity between Thoughtseize and Polluted Delta is measured in a single digit percentage, while the difference between Scapeshift and Thoughtseize could be 1,000 to 3,000 percent.

When considering the supply of any given card, there are two major factors to take into account. What set is it from, and has it been reprinted? Cards in the early Modern and pre-Modern era have dramatically smaller print runs than cards printed today. Cards from Eighth Edition, Ninth Edition, Mirrodin block, and Kamigawa block are far rarer than cards from the block immediately following, Ravnica, which itself is hilariously rarer than Zendikar or Innistrad. The difference in quantity between old blocks and new is a tremendously important factor in why some card prices skyrocket out of control with little demand, while others that are in high demand are worth so little.

Siege Rhino, a Standard staple and Modern role player is currently under $3 on TCGplayer, while Sedge Sliver, a three- or four-of in a single Modern deck that may or may not be any good at all is worth nearly $10. Even though compared to Sedge Sliver, Siege Rhino is played at some ridiculous rate like a 100:1, Rhino is much cheaper. While it may see play at a 100:1 rate, at the same time there could be a 1,000:1 rate in the same direction when we’re talking about supply. 1,000 Siege Rhinos for every Sedge Sliver. If those comparisons are correct (which they aren’t, they’re exaggerated for illustrative purposes,) it would mean that Sedge Sliver is actually ten times more desirable than Siege Rhino!

The other major factor goes hand in hand with the first: what types of reprints has the card seen? Tarmogoyf is originally from Future Sight, a set with one of Magic’s lowest supplies in the last decade. For a card as important as Tarmogoyf, that sets up a price tag that would make today’s $190 look like a down payment. Except that Tarmogoyf was also printed in Modern Masters. And Modern Masters 2015. So while it’s from an era of low supply, it’s also been reprinted twice in the last few years, adding dramatically to the available quantity.

An even more recent example exists. Felidar Sovereign is a mythic from Zendikar. Over the last few years, its price has climbed to north of $10. As a mythic from a set six years ago, supply was quite low. With the upcoming reprint in BFZ, though—at rare, nonetheless—the supply is going to increase by probably tenfold. If there’s no change in demand, that means the only variance in the equation would be the amount on the market. Ten times more copies suddenly becoming available means that we’ll see the price drop to perhaps 10 percent of what it is today. By December, I’d be surprised to see Felidar Sovereign over $1.

Demand

Supply in Magic is fairly easy to figure out. Look at what set the card is originally from, then see what reprints exist. If reprints exist, see what era they come from. A card printed in Eighth Edition will be fleetingly rare, and one in both Eighth Edition and Ninth Edition is still going to be scarcer than a card newly printed in Khans of Tarkir.

Demand is much tougher to understand, because it’s not simply a number to be feebly guessed at. While we may not actually be able to know it, there exists some true value for the supply of any given card. Demand, though, is not so quantifiable. How much demand is there for Scapeshift? We answer that qualitatively—“a lot” or “not as much as for Thoughtseize.”

When we talk about demand, in essence, we’re talking about who wants to play with the card. Typically, this is categorized roughly by format: Standard, Modern, Legacy, EDH, etc. Understanding what demographics desire a card is vital to making accurate predictions about price trajectories.

Languish is really only in demand in Standard. Modern players don’t need it, as there are better options. The same goes for Legacy and EDH. Casual kitchen-table players are unlikely to want the effect, either. The demand for Languish comes from two places, then: some Standard players, and players in other formats who A. don’t want to fork over the cash for Damnation, and B. don’t have access to white mana.

Tarmogoyf is in demand not from Standard players, but certainly from anyone playing Modern or Legacy. Despite what the price may indicate, it actually misses EDH and casual demand.

Not all formats are created equally, either. If 70 percent of Standard players want Card X, and 70 percent of Modern players want Card Y, Card X is going to have considerably more demand. The sheer number of people playing Standard means that it tends to create the largest demand of any competitive format. In general, each format’s ability to generate demand decreases in roughly this order: Standard, Modern, Legacy, EDH, Cube, and Vintage. Standard cards generate the most demand, Vintage the least, EDH drives more demand than Cube, etc.

You’ll notice I left off casual demand. Kitchen-table and casual Magic isn’t a format, per se, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Quite a few months ago, I wrote about Consuming Aberration. Consuming Aberration sees absolutely zero play in any format except for possibly some mild EDH play, and yet as a rare from what was a recent set at the time, meaning it had tremendous supply, it was still (and is still) $3. That a card with so much supply and so little competitive demand could cost $3 tells us that casual and kitchen-table Magic can generate some intense demand that is otherwise invisible to more enfranchised players such as we tend to be.

Demand isn’t limited to simply counting how many formats are interested in a card, either. Here’s some quick hits that contribute to demand for a card.

Collectors

Cards that are unique or remarkable in some fashion outside typical gameplay generate additional demand. Nobody plays Richard Garfield, Ph.D. or Little Girl, but foils are still an exorbitant amount because people collect them for various reasons. Mint Alpha and Beta cards carry additional demand relative to played copies because people want to collect pristine sets of Magic’s initial run.

Rarity

Absolutely nobody wants Shichifukujin Dragon in order to add it to their dragon deck. People want it because it’s the only one in existence. Summer Magic cards are in the same boat. The fewer of something there is, the more people care. If Shichifukujin Dragon was a rare in BFZ, nobody would want copies. Make it the only one in the world, though, and suddenly there’s a lot of potential buyers. This is essentially what the entire miscut market is predicated on.

Aesthetics

Lorwyn Thoughtseize is twice the price of the Theros one, and not just because there are fewer copies. Many players strongly prefer the original faerie art, in which a faerie steals thoughts out of someone’s ear, rather than the Theros art, in which a guy is turning to dust because, well, *phbt.* Better looking editions of cards will cost more than their ugly counterparts. Aesthetics, along with rarity, are why foils cost so much more than non-foils.

Quantity

Decks rarely need more than one Iona, Shield of Emeria. It’s just not a card you tend to play four copies of. Siege Rhino, on the other hand, rarely shows up with anything less than a full herd. If you’re going through all the trouble to pay three colors across four mana for Siege Rhino, you probably want as many as you can get. Cards that players only need a single copy of are simply going to generate less demand than cards players buy in playsets.

Replaceability

How vital is the card to the deck it’s played in? A Twilight Mire can instead be a Woodland Cemetery or another Overgrown Tomb in a pinch. There’s only one Cavern of Souls, though.

All these different factors work in concert when determining the total demand for a card. When reading my discussion of cards as speculation targets, you’ll notice I sometimes use the term “demand profile.” What I’m talking about is the sum total of all demand for that card.

Wingmate Roc, which is only played in Standard, has a small demand profile relative to Polluted Delta, which is used by everyone that plays Magic, though Wingmate’s profile is still large compared to Pearl Lake Ancient. The larger the demand profile, the more sources have an interest in the card. If only a tiny fraction of Magic players are in the market for a specific card, it has a small demand profile. On the flip side of that, if players from across the spectrum want copies, that’s a huge demand profile. The larger the demand profile, the more expensive the card.

Intersection

Supply is how many of a given card exist in the world to be bought and traded. Demand represents how many people want a given card, and how many copies of it they need. The intersection of these two factors is how much a card ends up being worth.

Looking back at Thoughtseize and Scapeshift will help us understand how this works. Scapeshift and (Theros) Thoughtseize are nearly the same price. Yet they vary wildly on the supply and demand scales. What’s going on?

On the one hand, Scapeshift is a rare from Morningtide, making it one of the rarest Modern cards that sees play. It’s the lynchpin of a tier-1.5 combo deck in a competitive format. Scapeshift is irreplaceable in the list, and is invariably played as a four-of. All of that works towards increasing its price. On the other hand, the demand profile is actually fairly low. Yes, it’s important in that one deck, but that’s the only place it’s important. Nobody uses it in any other DCI-sanctioned format. It’s not a popular EDH card. Casual players enjoy it in some capacity, but not overwhelmingly so. All of that works against its price. Basically, Scapeshift is extremely important in one narrow application. Given its low supply and moderate demand, we end up with a price around $20.

Under the hood, Thoughtseize looks quite different. Unlike Scapeshift, the supply on Thoughtseize is quite high. As a rare in Theros and in Lorwyn, there are more copies of Thoughtseize than nearly any other Standard-legal rare. Also unlike Scapeshift, demand for Thoughtseize is widespread. Everyone playing Standard, Modern, Legacy, or Vintage needs to have a set available to them. Anyone with a cube has a copy, as well. While the supply of Thoughtseize is considerably greater than of Scapseshift, so too is the total demand. It seems that the supply and demand end up at about the same ratio as Scapeshift, as it to lands right around $20.

The lesson to be learned from examining Scapeshift and Thoughtseize is that supply and demand each play an important role in establishing prices, and they play off each other considerably. A card with moderate demand and low supply can end up with the same price tag as a card with tremendous demand if it also has an abnormally high supply.

Application

Our goal when speculating on cards is to identify those cards which will make us the most money. Those, of course, are cards with the lowest supply and the greatest (potential) demand. What’s that mean?

First of all, it means anything from pre-Zendikar days is going to be worth a lot of cash with only the slightest hint of demand. Supply is so low from those early sets that barely any demand will easily force prices into double digits. That’s why I can get away with speculating on cards like Retract or Restore Balance. Neither of those cards has any demand profile at all right now. Nobody cares about them. But if even a single person does well with a deck that uses one of those cards, the demand could easily increase one thousand times over, and that’s going to mean big profits.

With specs like Retract and Restore Balance, I’m not expecting them to become wildly popular. I’m banking on the supply being so low that any demand whatsoever will make me money. We saw this most recently with Sedge Sliver. People aren’t falling over themselves to play slivers in Modern, but with supply as low as it is, it only takes a few interested people for copies to dry up quickly.

Alternatively, finding cards with massive, widespread demand can be lucrative as well. Buying fetch lands in the spring was a wise decision because you knew that basically anyone playing Magic needed copies. Even though supply on Deltas and Flooded Strands was immense, so too was the amount of people looking to buy playsets. You couldn’t have expected a sudden spike in prices, but what you could expect was consistent, reliable growth. Supply was great, but so too was demand.

Where you get into trouble is with cards that have tremendous supply, but not enough demand to overcome the glut of copies. A card I’m eager to play with, Bring to Light, is a good example of this. Bring to Light both tutors for a spell and casts it for free, two things that historically have had no trouble being broken. It could possibly end up as a role player in both Standard and Modern. Yet, this card is not going to be expensive anytime soon. The supply will simply be too great. As a rare in Battle for Zendikar, there will be millions of copies of BTL opened as players search for Expeditions lands. Even if BTL shows up in a big way in two competitive formats, there simply will be too many copies to make it a meaningful speculation target.

Instead, players should consider what BTL will be searching for. If a BTL deck shows up in Modern, what spells is it trying to cast? This is how I ended up on Restore Balance and Wheel of Fate, by the way. BTL will be too commonplace to meaningfully grow in price, but if it’s searching for Time Spiral rares that have never been reprinted, those could certainly gain value in a hurry.

As cards are spoiled and new, profitable interactions appear. Remember that a deck is more than one card. When Vampire Hexmage was spoiled way back in Zendikar, Dark Depths was maybe $1. If you had noticed this synergy, speculating on Hexmage would have been idiotic. Why buy into a a brand-new uncommon? Instead, had you bought into Dark Depths, a rare that was several years old, you would have made a disgusting amount of money per copy (this example is painful for me to highlight. I remember reading Hexmage the morning it was spoiled and immediately thinking about Dark Depths. Unfortunately, I wasn’t attuned to the market the way I am today, and didn’t bother to buy any copies. Aghhhhhhhhhhh).

Another perfect example of this lesson showed up in my Twitter timeline today. I saw someone claiming that buying foil Mortuary Mires at $1 was a great spec. Mortuary Mire is a common from Battle for Zendikar. Let’s apply what we just learned about supply and demand.

Foil Mortuary Mire’s supply is going to be the largest of any foil in BFZ, equal to every other common in the set. As far as foils go, Mire is as available as they come. We already talked at the beginning of the article about how Expeditions lands are going to result in an abnormally large supply of BFZ cards, even more so than most fall sets, which are already the most available of any sets.

How about demand? It was highlighted in the context of EDH. That would mean that the bulk of demand will come from players that only need a single copy, rather than a playset. It may pop up in Modern or Legacy, but again, as a non-basic land that only taps for a single color of mana and enters the battlefield tapped, there are extremely few lists that will want more than a single copy.

If we look at Bojuka Bog, another common, utility, black-producing land from the original Zendikar, we can perhaps get some perspective on Mire. Foil Bojuka Bog is about $6 right now. If your spec climbed from $1 to $6, you’d be pretty happy. That would be worth buying into—if it weren’t for the fact that Bog is now six years old. How long will you have to sit on those Mortuary Mires before they’re $6? Will they ever be? With supply as large as it will be, and demand so low, the opportunity cost of tying up money hoping to make $4 a copy five years later is simply way too high. Instead of buying ten $1 Mires, just buy three or four Siege Rhinos and double your investment in two months.

When evaluating a speculation target, make sure you take time to fully consider what set(s) it has been printed in, and how many people will actually want copies. Is it a three-color role player in a single Standard deck? Or is it a mythic, mono-color spell with applicability in Standard, Modern, and Legacy?

By appreciating how supply and demand interact in the Magic market, you can begin to understand why some cards have such exorbitant prices, and also why it’s a terrible idea to speculate on certain cards. The key to success is making an accurate evaluation of demand relative to supply, which is no mean feat.

Going Mad

Going Mad – From the Ashes

September 16, 2015 Derek Madlem 3 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

Rising from the ashes like a phoenix this fall, we have the return of Zendikar…one of the most popular planes of recent years. In mythology, a phoenix appeared and reappeared infrequently with great spectacle and awe inspiring destruction following in it’s wake… after all it was a giant bird made of fire and lava and ash flying across the sky; how can that not be epic?

Here’s how:

Why does this suck? Well let’s take a stroll through Phoenix Memory Lane to see where we’ve come from and the high and low points of this underperforming tribe.

In the beginning there was Firestorm Phoenix, it was awesome purely because it was the only phoenix in the game and it did something neat. This certainly wasn’t the most aggressively priced creature at the time, and it basically died to everything that had the same mana cost…but from a design standpoint, it did everything you would expect of a phoenix. We’ll also cut them some slack because card design hadn’t become real refined yet…1994 was pretty much the wild west, you never knew who or what was going to turn up.

Fast forward a few years to Visions where we first met the Bogardan variety of Phoenix. This phoenix returned to play automatically, but not repeatedly. They got a little more aggressive with the casting cost and made what was a surprisingly reasonable card for the time.

Shard Phoenix is arguably the most powerful phoenix ever printed. Showing up in Stronghold, this not-so-fiery bird was a board wipe tacked onto a recyclable threat. This is pretty much the top of the phoenix design game for the Magic’s 22 year history.

By the time Urza’s Legacy rolled around, Firestorm Phoenix was on the reserved list; this mean that you couldn’t print a functional reprint of any existing card… but that didn’t stop Wizards from printing strict upgrades like they did with Shivan Phoenix. The design for this bird was simple and reasonable. It just came back. I’m going to go ahead and quote that here because it might be relevant later:

“It just came back.”
-Me, just now

After this, it would appear that R&D simply forgot about phoenixes for the bulk of a decade or so. When we returned we ended up with an attached guild mechanic:

Did I forget that the guild mechanic was also a conditional requirement for returning the phoenix to it’s owner’s hand? Yeah, it doesn’t just come back. Skarrgan Firebird had the upside of potentially being the biggest phoenix ever printed if you were fortunate enough to get that sweet sweet bloodthirst trigger, but it was also the most mana intensive of the entire species.

From there we went to a color shifted alternative in phoenix design. This card originally appeared in white, and looked a little something like this:

While Molten Firebird was far from the best phoenix, or even playable really, it was at least a derivative of being a color shifted reprint. Phoenixes were seemingly back on the design table now, and after taking Lorwyn off, we were given this pipedream in Conflux:

While it was unlikely to ever happen, Worldheart Phoenix did have the intent of being a pretty sweet recurring threat in all those five color draft decks that just never really happened at the time. From a design perspective, it was at least a refreshing twist on an old trope.

Magic 2010 and Zendikar gave us no phoenixes, but in Magic 2011 we got a pretty reasonable likeness to Shard Phoenix. Its stats were pushed a little further, but it didn’t have the ability to self-destruct, thought it did pose some really great judge calls when equipped with a Basilisk Collar…hint: it works out in the best way imaginable.

This is where the designers started to get themselves into trouble. Phoenixes were to be a regular thing, but realistically how many ways can you recreate the flavor of a 3-4ish power bird that comes back from the dead. This left design with a problem that had a clear and terrible answer: block mechanics. They had already done it once with the Gruul phoenix to a lesser extent, but this is where it began in earnest.

That next summer we got what is arguably the most playable phoenix ever printed. Chandra’s Phoenix has a conditional return clause, but it’s about as conditional as water being wet. The low casting cost and haste also made this creature not only annoying, but also a reasonably priced threat. It’s all down hill from here.

Yay! We made another phoenix! Ravnica and Innistrad didn’t feature lame block mechanics that they could tack onto a mediocre flying body in red, so it wasn’t until Born of the Gods that we got to see another phoenix (though Chandra’s Phoenix did make another appearance in Magic 2014).

Tribute, a truly terrible and unplayable mechanic. Giving your opponent the choice will always result in you not getting what you want out of a card. Always. At this point it’s really time to just open the floodgate with rapid-fire mediocre birds!

See what they did there? Block mechanic. Ashcloud wasn’t the worst phoenix ever printed, but it rarely felt like the right thing to be casting while your opponent was dropping Siege Rhinos.

What’s this? Another block mechanic, Ferocious! As you can see with that landfall trigger above, phoenixes might just be steaming turds from here on out…and there’s a good chance that turd is a going to take up a mythic slot as well. Here it is again so you don’t have to scroll up to see what treasure awaits you in Battle for Zendikar:

The real problem here is how “safe” all of the designs we’ve seen in Battle for Zendikar are. I’m sure Battle for Zendikar will be a compellingly epic limited format. Rise of the Eldrazi was one of the most revered limited formats of all time and most of that set is pretty durdly, just like we’re seeing this time around…but we need SOME cards to peak their heads above water, it can’t be all bulk rares.

What do I think about what’s been revealed since last week?

I think Shambling Vent is easily the worst of the cycle so far. Yes, even worse than Lavaclaw Reaches…at least THAT had firebreathing so you could dump a boatload of mana into it and end the game. Shambling Vent is a tired uninspired design. Lifelink on a black/white card?! Never saw that one coming!

Here’s another great example of R&D dialing back design to “make the limited format more dynamic.” What’s the solution to making it so that rares don’t decide who wins a limited game? I guess it’s to make rares into uncommons. Last time we came to Zendikar, we had Rampaging Baloths. They started bigger and gave you a freaking 4/4 for every land you played. You want to know a secret? We never played it either. Why would we want to play a bad hydra?

While this is seemingly an irrelevant uncommon, it furthers my point: we’re at a state where design is getting very stale. What’s between Mind Stone and Dreamstone Hedron? I’m really looking forward to the eight mana artifact that taps for four and draws four cards when you sac it!

Taking a look over the rest of the spoilers we see more of the same, reprints, or even more sweet “devoid” reprints or existing cards. But these are totally different because their devoid, right? Right?! Did the world really need Dragonmaster Outcast and Felidar Sovereign brought back? It’s becoming clearer and clearer why they chose to include Expeditions in Battle for Zendikar: the design team turned in their assignment and when the number crunchers finished grading it, they had a big fat F on their hands. Add in some hundred dollar bills randomly and you can slide the grade up into the D+/C- range. Congrats Wizards, you passed.

Let’s hope this level of design is temporary and not phoenixical™. Yeah, I’m trademarking that word…so what?

Silver Lining(s)

Void Winnower has received a lot of “that’s interesting” nods from the collective peanut gallery, but this card does have one legitimate use: reanimator decks. “Winny” might have a place in eternal metagames as a sideboard card against combo decks, or as an Oath of Druids target. Shutting off roughly 50% of the spells your opponent could cast is a good way to keep them from comboing. Here are some classic combo finishers that Winny voids without going too deep:

Is that going to be enough to make this guy worth a million bajillion dollars? Unlikely. BUT…IF…the price of FOIL versions of this card dip below $10 at any point, I’m going to feel pretty safe picking up a few copies to stow away. Niche play in eternal formats + being an absolute nut-kicker in Commander seems like a combination for long-term success to me. I’d love to see a world where we could reanimate this in Standard…but any such spell would most likely have converge and be all but unplayable.

See you next week, hopefully with some cards worth talking about!

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