Inadvertent Investments

July 24, 2015 Cliff Daigle 6 Comments

By: Cliff Daigle

About two and a half years ago, I finished foiling out an EDH deck without paying cash for a single card. I was really proud of this. It’s a Grixis deck, tribal vampires with a lot of control elements. Foil shocks, filter lands, everything but duals and fetches, all traded for.

Recently I sold the three foil filter lands for $125, which is about three times the trade value I gave away to get them. This has taught me an important lesson: decks have value.

A lot of the MTG finance you read about deals with speculation. What will go up? What will go down? There’s an easier way to gain value, and that’s simply to put cards that are currently cheap into a place where you won’t remove them: decks you play.

Your cube will slowly grow in value. Your Commander deck will grow in value. Your Legacy burn deck will grow in value. Being in a deck just makes it less likely that you’ll take value out of it for a while.

Let’s get to some examples.

For anyone who wasn’t playing during Innistrad four years ago, this is annoying and amazing. A dozen Snapcaster Mages has about the same retail price as an Unlimited Mox Pearl.

Snapcasters were regularly found at $20 or $30 for the longest time. Really, that should have warned us. Tiago being a four-of all over the place in Eternal formats is an indicator too.

But if you played during Innistrad, and you put a Snapcaster in your Commander deck, or your cube, or a set of them into some wacky 60-card deck, then your value has gone up tremendously.

Lesson learned!

Today I want to try and look ahead four years. What’s (relatively) cheap now that could quadruple in value by 2019?

Before I get to my picks, a word of warning: Wizards is getting more and more aggressive with their reprints. It’s often been said by people that Wizards makes no money off of the secondary market, but while that’s directly true, it’s also indirectly false.

Wizards makes a lot of money off of selling packs. Booster packs mainly, but Intro Packs, Clash Packs, Fat Packs, etc. all add up. They raised the MSRP of boosters on Modern Masters 2015 to $10 from $7 simply because they could. This is the purest of profit, as their design and production costs didn’t change appreciably.

When Wizards puts together a set with reprints of expensive cards, they know what they are doing. They know not every card should be expensive, and some cards have to be saved for next time. Innistrad block cards in the next Modern Masters will be an example. What will Snapcaster be by next summer, or perhaps mid 2017?

So these predictions are hinged on the cards not being reprinted, reserved list cards obviously excluded from that possibility.

Diamond Valley – At Worlds 2011, I traded ChannelFireball three Snapcasters and two Liliana of the Veil to get one Diamond Valley. The Innistrad cards have just gone up and up, while the Valley has just crept upwards. Considering what cards like Angus Mackenzie, Invoke Prejudice, and Guardian Beast are at, this is kind of undervalued right now. It’s got a ridiculously low supply and is a reserved list card, yet it hasn’t seen the mega-spike. Eventually, though, it will.

Gaea’s Cradle – Let me balance my bad trade with a good one. At GP Anaheim in 2012, I traded two Commander Scavenging Oozes for enough store credit to get a SP Gaea’s Cradle. At the time, Cradles were about $80, and this was a card my token deck desperately wanted. If there’s even a chance that you’ll want a Cradle for a cube or a deck or for Legacy play, get them now. Having the judge foil version helps a lot to give collectors a target, but the nonfoil at $180 is reasonable by today’s standards. This has a very good chance to just keep climbing up and up, likely doubling in the next 18 months.

Cavern of Souls – This is a mortal lock to get reprinted…eventually. Its current price is based on how often decks want a playset, its use in eternal and casual formats, and the underwhelming sales of Avacyn Restored as a set due to crappy limited play. It will go back down to the $15 range when it’s printed, but who knows exactly when that will be. Until then, it will keep climbing upwards. Seeing this at $100 at the start of 2017 wouldn’t shock me if it avoided a reprint before then.

Mikaeus, the Unhallowed – I think that given Magic’s history, we are 2-3 years from FTV: Zombies and this will be a $30-$40 card by then. It has a human ability that might not fit into many sets, as well as undying, a very specific ability. Reprinting this in Commander is much more likely, fitting this into a set with foil possibilities is much trickier.

Foil Shocklands and Fetchlands – I’ll keep banging this gong until people listen. Both of these are at their lowest points, for the Khans fetches and for the Return to Ravnica shocks. Get them now. Put them in every deck you can. You’ll thank me later, when these have done their own impressive rise.

MPR cards – I think that Wizards has done players a disservice by discontinuing the Magic Player Rewards cards, but they represent an opportunity. Some of the cards are dirt cheap, but other reprints might cause them to go up, as happened to Sign in Blood this past year. Picking up the textless cards on the cheap is an easy way to sock away value. Textless foils are also excellent targets, as they resist the financial hit of reprintings well.

Corbin Hosler, ProTrader

PROTRADER: A Look Back at Fetch Lands

July 23, 2015 Corbin Hosler 7 Comments

Several witty titles floated around my head for this article, mostly some kind of lame pun involving the word “fetch,” but then I decided it just wasn’t ever going to happen, so here we are.

Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with straightforward, is there? And that’s where I want to be this week: some good, old-fashioned analysis of Standard’s five most important cards, the fetch lands from Khans of Tarkir.

And I will. But first I figure I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the state of Standard after last weekend’s first preview of it.

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Conjured Currency

A Gentle Reminder: Looking Past Origins

July 23, 2015 Douglas Johnson 9 Comments

It’s not a very well-kept secret that I strongly dislike speculating on anything from a new set. When almost every single card in every new edition is at a high price from hype alone, I’m not a huge fan of trusting competitive players’ instincts about what card will be the next Deathmist Raptor, Boros Reckoner, or Courser of Kruphix. I’ll leave figuring that puzzle out to the people who actually play this game for a living, and try to focus on the most consistent and loss-proof ways to grind value out of the game on my end.

Don’t Call Me a Speculator

As you can tell by a majority of my articles and Twitter activity, my time and cash is usually spent buying collections and singles at buylist prices from people who need or want to liquidate their investments in the game, and then reselling those cards through outs like Facebook, TCGplayer, my display case, and Craigslist. When I do dabble in speculation, I try to minimize my risk as much as possible, even if it means waiting on a long-term investment over a number of years.

That’s why instead of writing a listicle like “Top Five Origins Cards That I Think Are Undervalued!” I’m going to try and remind everyone that you don’t have to be looking for money in Origins just because it’s the hot new thing off the printing presses. Instead of trying to crack the Magic code and find the next Outpost Siege or Mastery of the Unseen, I have my sights set on targets that I think will avoid a reprinting in the long term, hold a strong new price point if and when they do spike, and are relatively cheap and easy to buy into right now without anyone else fighting over them.

That being said, I still very rarely “buy into” cards with cash at full retail anymore, even for speculating purposes. Most of my owned stock of the following list comes from PucaTrade credit that I have stored up, picks from bulk lots that I’ve pulled for essentially free, or singles that I bought at buylist prices but didn’t want to sell at the moment because I felt that the card had a bright enough future. Now that those statements are out of the way, let’s get to the list of cards that I think you should have your eye on instead of Origins, especially if you’re not exactly a Standard player.

Yes, one of them is a common and the other is an uncommon. Glistener Elf also got thrown its own Event Deck printing and FNM promo, so I’m not entirely sure if the ceiling on this is equal to good, old Exarch. However, I pull these constantly from collections, and the buylist outs are only ranging between 20 and 35 cents. That just doesn’t feel right for a four-of staple in a competitive Modern archetype that was from a set like New Phyrexia. Every time I pull these, I simply set them aside, and I’m willing to wait the required months before we start seeing this as a $2 common that the Modern format has come to accept as a normality.

While I don’t think there’s any rush to go buy out the internet before they spike tomorrow (as you can see, I tweeted the above over a month ago and have seen next to zero gains), it’s something that I would get in on sooner rather than later if you plan on playing the deck, and something I would hold back on buylisting for now if you’re comfortable with waiting into the long term for larger rewards.

Apparently my memory wasn’t entirely accurate in the tweet, since Phyrexian Unlife originally jumped to only $3.00 from 30 cents—so only a 1,000-percent increase instead of what I had originally remembered from a year ago.

Something else I remember from a year ago is everyone calling Amulet of Vigor an inconsistent cheese deck that was just a simple flash in the pan. The deck was cheap and easy to build at the time, and Amulet itself had already jumped once. Another New Phyrexia card highlighting the awesome mechanic that is infect, and I can’t see it being printed again until Modern Masters 2017.

Is Ad Nauseam going to take Twin’s place as the throne holder of the most popular combo deck in Modern? No, probably not.

However, Living End didn’t have to put a bunch of copies into the top eight of a Grand Prix to convince the world that it needed to be a $13 in the past couple of weeks. It had a severe case of “being a Modern-legal rare with zero reprints and seeing play in a deck,” which caused it to jump. It’s also the cornerstone of one of the cheapest decks you can build in the format, with the most expensive card being a $15 common that we all know and love (Serum Visions, for those who were scratching their heads). You can purchase the entire deck for less than three copies of Tarmogoyf, and that’s certainly going to be an attractive dealbreaker for new players looking to enter the Modern format on a budget.

While there are still 100 to 200 sellers of each combo piece on TCGplayer, and I don’t expect a buyout within the next few weeks, I don’t think these two cards are safe from jumping up with sudden demand. If the deck starts to see even a glimmer of a consistent competitive showing or a banned list announcement shakes up the format with the coming of Battle for Zendikar, I want to be the one holding these cards months in advance to sell into any future hype.

One of the last cards I want to talk about this week is Shelldock Isle.

You’re probably thinking right now:

But DJ! You just listed three niche Modern cards that have already seen competitive play and haven’t spiked yet. Is there some sort of amazing Shelldock Isle deck that’s going to spike the next Modern Grand Prix? How many hundreds of copies should I buy?

Well, don’t get your hopes up. I don’t exactly know what deck is going to play this. Maybe it spikes eventually due to some crazy Modern deck, and maybe it slowly creeps up over time because casual players are infatuated with the idea of reducing an opponent’s library to zero cards. Either way, we have a utility land with no reprints, a weird mechanic, casual appeal, and theoretical competitive appeal.

If someone told you a year ago that Nourishing Shoal would be a $10 card, you would have called them an idiot. I would have called them something less mean than idiot, but still would’ve given them a stern talking to about their life choices that had led up to that pronouncement. However, Magic: The Gathering players proved us both wrong, came up with a silly combo deck that uses a bulk rare from Kamigawa, and ta-da! $10 card overnight. And Shoal doesn’t even have an ounce of appeal to EDH or casual players, or a weird mechanic that would prevent it from being reprinted in another set in the future.

…

If you’re still tapping your foot and waiting for an example of where I actually made money off of this strategy (I wasn’t one of the people holding onto dozens of Nourishing Shoals when they became relevant), then I ask you to look at another card in the Ad Nauseam deck that recently came to fruition.

Spoils of the Vault was, up until quite recently, a near-bulk rare. Every now and again when I bought collections, I would pull these out of the pile of bulk rares that I picked up at a dime a piece, and throw them into my spec box. “Maybe one day…” I would think longingly. Ad Nauseam didn’t have to win an event for Spoils to give me my spoils, and it certainly won’t have to for either of its other friends in the deck to see a bump. While Spoils was printed approximately sixteen-thousand years before New Phyrexia or Shards of Alara, I still don’t think we’ve seen the last of this deck rearing its’ head in the finance market.

End Step

Maybe you’re a Standard grinder and you found this article completely useless. You bought into Thopter Spy Network and funneled your entire Swiss bank savings into it, and now you feel like an evil genius because you just unloaded your four-hundredth copy for $3 after you bought in at $1. Why jump in on Shelldock Isle, which will take several months (optimistically), if you have a hawkeye for what’s going to be playable in the first few weeks of Standard? Well, I don’t have a counterargument for that.

If you’re good enough at predicting the Standard metagame and you have the ability to move a lot of cards as soon as you get them in, then you have no reason to cross your fingers on the long haul like I’m doing with the above cards. It makes a lot more sense for you to pinpoint the exact card in each new set that everyone else considers to be best for kindling a dumpster fire and haul in your profits on the Tasigur of the new set. If it works for you, there’s no reason to quit now.

Good luck, and I’ll see you next week!

Going Mad

Going Mad – Checking the Aftermath

July 22, 2015 Derek Madlem 3 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

For those of you unaware – Magic Origins was released last Friday. While I’m not sure how you could simultaneously be unaware of that and still reading this, I’m sure there’s one of you out there. You’ll also be stunned at the news that an SCG Open was held in Chicago, giving this latest and final iteration of the Core Set a grand stage to display it’s powerful contributions to the Standard metagame and boy-howdy was it… lackluster.

Pro Tip:

The first week after a new set is released, it’s often better to play a well tuned deck with very few new cards because it’s going to perform better than a brand new archetype in a vacuum.

The Desks that Weren’t

Coming into this event we all expected to see some sweet Elf on Goblin action… two enemy tribes that have been locked in an eternal struggle ever since they decided to start making Duel Decks.

~~We were not disappointed.~~ Ok, maybe we were very disappointed. Goblins fared better of the two decks, posting an 18th, 24th, and a 39th place finish… hardly a second coming. Elves… well they did a lot worse, posting a single copy in the top 64 at 41st place. As many commentators of old would point out, a ham sandwich could get a 41st place finish in the right hands.

Outside of these failed archetypes, what’s making a splash?

Abbot of Keral Keep only showed up in two mono-red decks, one with a 20th place finish and another in 49th. While this is hardly an impressive finish, it’s almost enough to overshadow all the attempts to run Ire Shaman thus far, a card that has been used to gauge Abbot’s power level.

Woodland Bellower? Nope. Zero. While it’s not a resounding endorsement of playability, it will likely give us a little bit of a downward push. I’m still a fan of this card and look forward to picking them up on their way down with hopes of a big payoff on the horizon.

The Archangel here did manage something that none of the cards discussed so far were capable of: cracked the top 16. Showing up in the 14th place mono-white devotion deck, the Archangel joined a laundry list of value-adding creatures like Brimaz, King of Oreskos and Wingmate Roc to overwhelm opponents. This deck took great advantage of the absence of control decks, an archetype that would have normally tear it apart. With multicolored mana so easy to come by, this strategy just doesn’t seem worth the restriction… on the plus side, I’ll have a little more time to get rid of these Archangels I opened.

Erebos’s Titan – Conditionally powerful card with a prohibitive casting cost? Zero. None. I’m obviously still cold on this guy for reasons I’ve already discussed. Maybe there’s still a chance for this guy and his friend Gray Merchant of Asphodel to stake a claim on Standard, but they didn’t pull it off this weekend.

Evolutionary Leap – My pet card, also a no-show in the top 64 decklists. I’m not at all surprised this card wasn’t broken within the first week, it’s going to take a brewmaster to crack this one… I’m looking at you Sam Black and Conley Woods. Though, I admit I am more than willing to settle for a Travis Woo brew just to get the ball rolling. I’m still going to be trading for every copy of this leper that I can get my hands on, it’s only a matter of time.

Liliana was destined for great things, like showing up as a one of in Modern Collected Company decks or greedy Rally the Ancestors decks in Standard. I’m still not impressed with Liliana, especially for how much hype she was getting before this weekend. The fact that this card is within $2 of Nissa, a card that fared much better, still baffles my mind. I’m either greatly underestimating the casual appeal of these cards or there’s a lot of people that are going to feel bad about their $25 copies of Liliana going forward.

Jace was one of two walkers to show up in force this weekend. As it turns out, Merfolk Looter is really good alongside Jeskai Ascendancy…landing this Jace in the top 8 with a 6th place finish. Some non-ascendancy Jeskai decks also featured Jace and round out the top decks with 17th, 30th, 31st, and a 34th place finish. Combining the looter effect with delve spells is proving to be a very powerful combination, especially when Super Sayain Jace starts flashing back Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time. While his inclusion in these decks is impressive… being limited to one archetype is generally not enough to maintain a $20 price tag. As supply continues to enter the market, expect Jace to start winding down to a more maintainable $10 price point.

If there was a clear winner based on overall inclusion, it’s gotta be Nissa. Apparently Borderland Ranger is an effect that’s welcomed in the plethora of Abzan decks (and few G/R) that Nissa made an appearance in. The ability to ensure that a turn four Languish or Siege Rhino resolves appears to be more than enough to trump the forest-only limitation.

In total, Nissa appeared in twenty of the top 64 decks at this weekend’s open, just under 1/3rd…a fairly impressive number. This is the point in the article that I admit to totally misjudging this card. Nissa’s presence in so many decks is a clear sign that this card has struck a chord with the player base and is going to continue showing up in the top decks, especially as long as so many powerful green cards exist in the format. If Nissa posts a strong finish at the Pro Tour, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this spike up to the $35 range as players scramble to acquire copies while supply is still relatively low. Six months from now I expect Nissa to be somewhere between $15-$20, so I wouldn’t hold onto this card past a spike if you don’t plan on using it.

The quiet breakout hit of the SCG Open is not a new card, but a forgotten friend returned to us. Gaea’s Revenge ruined a number of games for Jace players back in the day, dodging countermagic and spot removal gave this card a huge advantage against the blue decks that only had one real answer: Day of Judgment, and many times it was already too late as Gaea’s Revenge has that whole hasty giant fatty thing going for it.

Currently listed under $1 a piece, there has to be significant upside to this card… keep in mind that the first time it was printed it was at Mythic, so the existing supply is not even that extensive. Gaea’s Revenge will be exceptionally powerful going forward as it’s going to require a Crux of Fate or an End Hostilities for control decks to take it out…Languish just isn’t going to cut it.

Day’s Undoing did make a couple of appearances at the SCG Open this weekend. One in the latest iteration of everyone’s least favorite deck: Turbo-Fog and another couple of Legacy decks: Affinity and Omni-Tell, both of which managed to crack the top 8.

We were already warned about some of the sicko affinity hands that could dump and reload thanks to this card, but as it turns out: that strategy actually worked. It also turns out that this card was powerful in the Omni-tell, a great way to rebuy those Show and Tells and cantrips, or just refill after sticking an Omniscience.

The Turbo-Fog deck took advantage of the “free refills” this card provided despite the counter-intuitive interaction with it’s main win condition: Sphinx’s Tutelage. Reloading with a fist full of Fog effects wasn’t enough to crack the top 64, I imagine due to the reality that Fog doesn’t work very well against a fist full of burn spells.

Day’s Undoing is clearly a powerful effect, but how pervasive will that effect be? That remains to be seen. This price on this card has already mellowed from that $20 preorder to a more reasonable $15, but I imagine that number will continue to shrink as more and more Standard players finding themselves asking, “What the hell am I going to do with this?” I’m on the same train as a number of other writers with this one: I’m not excited at $10, but if it hits $5 you can bet that I’m a buyer.

Caution: Wet Cement

The format is far from solidified. We’ve come a long way from the days when a new brew was sure to tear up the first big tournament. Much of today’s innovation comes from MTGO and those results transfer to paper on a slight delay, which is unfortunate because Magic Origins isn’t even out on MTGO yet.

While we have an initial sampling, it’s clearly not time to panic sell yet. There should still be a fairly substantial shift in the metagame coming as players are able to acquire and try out more of these cards over the next couple of weeks, culminating in a grand hurrah at Pro Tour Magic Origins in less than two weeks.

Shameless Self Promotion

I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead of me, I’ll be attending GP Dallas this weekend working with those Aether Games folk followed by a four day stint at GenCon in my home town of Indianapolis at the MythicMTG booth and finally at GP San Diego with Aether Games. Like always, I hope to see you guys there and make sure to introduce yourselves when you come up to the booth.

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