Grinder Finance – Are you a Rick or are you a Morty?

*burrrp* I’m going to preface this article with a belch, and the fact that I’ve just finished binge watching Rick and Morty.  If you have not watched Rick and Morty, I’m sorry to hear that.  You’re doing a great disservice to yourself and your Rick.  I assume if you’ve not watched the show, you’re probably still a Morty.  It’s okay though, I’m here to help you blossom into a beautiful (if you can call it that) Rick.

I’ll assume if you’re still reading that you haven’t stopped to binge watch Rick and Morty.  It’s a shame but I suppose I will need to briefly describe the dichotomy of their relationship.  Rick and Morty are a lot like Batman and Robin, except Batman is a time-traveling genius and Robin is a naive, gullible child.  Okay maybe that wasn’t the best description and it doesn’t quiet fit what I’m trying to explain here but bear with me.  Rick is a quick decisive thinker that analyzes all outcomes of a scenario before proceeding.  Morty is a whimsical character that often goes through life flying by the seat of his pants.  Whenever Morty decides that something that Rick is doing is immoral, unfun, or stupid, he challenges Rick based on some very loose ideas.  Rick is not the kind of guy who cares enough to prevent Morty from failing so many of these adventures end adversely for Morty.  In Magic finance you want to be a Rick.  You want to be able to call your picks early while having sound information to back up your claims.  If you are a Morty and wait for other smarter people to figure out you end up the greater fool.

If you read James Chillcott’s article this week, you may have noticed my pickups were pretty solid given the weekend’s events.  I was definitely a Rick last week and upped my Rick game this weekend.  I was reading Twitter (as I am known to do) on Sunday night and Mtgprice.com writer, Travis Allen, posted this pertaining to the stock of Demonic Pacts on TCG Player.  It was a card that I’d personally played with and it was powerful but it didn’t make the top 8.  I quickly browsed through remaining copies and there were only a handful of sellers with the card in stock.  I noticed ChannelFireball had listed theirs at a whopping $20 per copy.  My acquisition price was a mere 425 Puca Points (which are like not even real dollars, right?) so I was cautiously optimistic about listing my copies for $15.  It seems like a no-brainer to list the cards but I am also a player of the game.  If this card breaks out and becomes really popular in Standard there is a chance of it being worth big bucks and I will need it to play.  The reality of the situation is that in my testing it always felt like you had to jump through too many loops to make your deck able to play the card.  It will be fringe and it might be good for a weekend but it’s unlikely to be an all-star $40 mythic for it’s lifetime in Standard.  The opportunity cost to rebuy the cards later is unlikely to be more than the amount I would get for them now.

I listed my copies and took a non-proverbial poop.  I returned to my computer to continue chatting about the exciting Pro Tour results and I found a bite.  A greater fool had rushed to purchase their copies and snatched up my playset.  While you won’t always sell your cards in a single night, or poop (like in my case), but there you always have the ability to be in the right place at the right time.  It takes a real Rick to known when an opportunity has come along and pounce on it.

Ok Morty, enough talk about being a Rick.  We’ve got some card prices to briefly talk about.  Unfortunately, as I have mentioned before, articles are an extremely slow way to relay information.  If you waited for this to come out to get advice about pickups over the weekend then we’re far past that point.  Fortunately, a lot of people had been banging pots and pans and shouting from the rooftop about what cards to pickup before this weekend.  If you don’t have a twitter account you’re really doing yourself a disservice and probably costing yourself a lot of money.  Twitter, like most social media, is a very social platform that people talk about their interests on.  While you may think it’s a place for mostly pet pictures or food pictures there are some people who would rather talk MTG finance.  You can quickly browse the #mtgfinance hashtag but I find it extremely difficult to glean any real useful information from it.  All of the writers here at MTGPrice have a twitter account that post great up to the minute information.  But sometimes you have to deal with Jason Alt tweeting @Midnight hoping to become funnier somehow when they hopefully retweet him.  If you had been following me, however, you may have been able to be the smartest Morty around! In between the all the “I called it”s, I posted this innocuous tweet.  Now I’m not saying you should follow me for my insightful tweets, but I’m not saying you shouldn’t.

 

Now is the part where I drop a little Rick insight into you about what I think are great pickups this week.

fulminator

Modern Masters 2015 foils have begun to rise.  Much like non-foil Modern Masters 2015 cards, a rising tide will lift all boats.  I think the product for this has stopped being opened and with Modern purchases pretty much bottomed out there is no where for this card to go but up.  It is unlikely people will need less of them with the constant threat of Tron and Bloom rearing their ugly heads.

heath

Windswept Heath (more specifically the clash pack if you can still find them under $25) is a fickle beast.  It took a huge hit with it’s inclusion in the clash pack but this is not Bloodstained Mire.  Arguably one of the best fetchlands in Modern, it’s hard to see this ever command a sub $10 price tag ever again.  If you don’t own a set there isn’t really any incentive to wait any longer.

dragonlord atarkathunderbreak

My last pickups are a pair of red dragons!  Dragonlord Atarka is the clear standout among the crowd of Elder Dragons right now.  This card has the biggest upside if See the Unwritten becomes popular with some Eldrazi in Battle for Zendikar.  Thunderbreak Regent is a card that will become a lot more popular in red mirrors because of it’s huge size and punishing trigger.  It’s even a fringe Modern playable card.  I don’t expect to see any more dips in it’s price as we get closer to rotation when there become less good four drops.

PROTRADER: Why the Pro Tour Results Don’t Matter As Much As You Think

For our purposes as financiers, the results of this Pro Tour don’t matter that much. Granted, if you were holding a whole bunch of copies of Abbot of Keral Keep or Demonic Pact, they certainly matter in the short term, and as Sigmund illustrated yesterday, you should definitely be cashing in on these specs sooner rather than later.

But in the grand scheme of things, here’s the situation: half the cards in the format are going to rotate in less than two months. Basing your decisions as a financier on what happened last weekend is short-sighted at best, but we should absolutely take a look at the top Standard decks to see if anything will remain largely intact post-rotation.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

 

PROTRADER: Pro Tour Origins and Some Important Numbers

Rumor on the street is that my article last week on credit buylisting was unlocked for everyone to see. Whether or not it was intentional, I’m delighted at the positive feedback I received on it. Due to popular interest, I intend to revisit this topic at a later date. I’m still actively testing my hypothesis—that anyone can turn store credit at one shop into greater store credit at another shop, and so on. Once I have some worthwhile data, I’ll share some steps along my credit journey.

For this week, however, I believe something more timely needs to be discussed. Of course I am referring to Pro Tour Origins, which took place in Vancouver last weekend.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Buying Foreign Foils

By: Cliff Daigle

I have spoken before about my love of not only foil cards, but foreign language foils. You may not agree with me, but I am really in touch with the collector nature of my soul.

Until relatively recently, I had two options when it came to picking up foreign foils. (Busting open foreign boosters does not count.)

1) Browse eBay continuously. I admit, I have a number of weird alerts set for eBay. There are probably not five other people on this earth who have a alarm set for when a French foil Vindicate shows up on eBay.

I have been known to lose a lot of time in the evening just clicking through the many pages of four and offerings on eBay, with some bids and purchases making Commander decks a little more exotic.

2) Magiccardmarket.eu and its sellers. For quite some time, this was the only organized way to look for non-English cards. Star City would list when they had such versions of a card, but it was very hit-or-miss. MCM runs much like a TCGPlayer for Europe, allowing players to sell cards at a price of their choosing, and taking a cut of sales.

There was a big problem, though. Shipping was pricey, yes, but international shipping will never be easy. MCM did not allow for American residents to join as buyers or sellers. Instead, you had to sign up with the admins and basically pay shipping twice. Once for the seller to ship to the admins, and then they would send to you, for an additional percentage.

I went through this process once, and while I got the cards I wanted, I paid a significant markup that left me unwilling to do it twice. I argued, unsuccessfully, that they were losing out big time, but they wanted to remain Euro-centric.

TCGPlayer now allows sellers to list foreign-language cards, and this is amazing for those of us with a magpie’s eye. It also offers a unique opportunity to test the presumptive value of the individual languages.

It’s been said by myself and others that Korean, Russian, and Japanese are the more expensive languages, with Italian, French, Spanish, and other Continental languages often going for less than English.

Many sites don’t bother with foreign cards, but with many individuals able to list their singles, TCG offers a marketplace more defined by what people will pay, as opposed to what some think a card ‘should’ be worth.

I’d like it best if TCG offered a version of eBay’s ‘completed sales’ but that’s me being greedy.

Let’s get to an example. I want to use a recent card (higher supply) that gets Modern and Legacy play (greater demand for exotic foils) and compare what the sites offer. Monastery Swiftspear makes for a useful comparison point.

First up, magiccardmarket.

swif

208 foils! I can, with a couple of clicks, narrow that to non-English ones…still five pages of listings! So here, for comparison’s sake, are the first page and the last page.

swift2

Look at that selection. Lots and lots of shiny Swiftspears, in just about any language.

Sure enough, Spanish and French foils set a low bar.  Eight Euros is less than $10, but we will get to the conversion rate and why it’s important in a moment.

Let’s jump to the end.

swift3

Japanese, Russian, and Korean top the list, though there’s a wide range for any of the languages. Still, that’s what we get when we allow people to set their price.

Now, TCG’s low on foils.

tcg

Now, the cheapest English NM foil is $14, noticeably under the cheapest foreign foil…though that’s a Spanish foil, not really the chase version.

Let’s uncheck the English box…

foreign

Wow. Only three non-English Swiftspears on TCG. That’s a surprisingly low amount of stock. Or is it?

There’s a problem with my method, in that I can’t tell if TCG just moves more cards. This is a snapshot, not a documentary. I don’t have access to the sales that have happened. It could be that people have simply bought a lot more of these cards from TCG than MCM. It could be that the prices were better. I wish I could make a definitive statement about why MCM has more than a hundred available, and TCG has three. Note that TCG doesn’t currently have anyone selling Spanish, Italian, German, or French foils, but I can’t say why.

Just for the comparison, let’s look at eBay.

ebay 2

One sold listing for Russian foils, six weeks ago.

Korean had one in June, Japanese has six in the last two months.

If you can find it on eBay, you’re likely to get a better price than TCG, but hopefully that’s not news to you.

So what can we take away from all of this?

First of all, if you are in Europe or have a friend that is, you should be on MCM. If I had someone I trusted on the continent to be my letter drop, I’d do that in a heartbeat. The selection and price are the best you’ll find, most likely because of the additional costs and headaches of being an American or Canadian buyer on the site. Because they have limited their market, there’s more available at a lower price.

It bears mentioning that the euro has fallen dramatically against the dollar recently. Just a handful of months ago, it took $1.40 to get one euro. Now it’s down to $1.10, a price that means conversion gets us more.

For example: there’s a Korean foil Swiftspear for €60 listed. Forgetting shipping and admin costs, that would have cost us $84 at the beginning of the year. Now it’s $66, just because of the fall in conversion rates. That $18 is a big fall as exchange rates go, so this might be the lowest point for currency exchange, but that’s not my field of expertise at all.

Second, the price hierarchy for the assorted languages is still holding even when marketplaces are at work. People are paying more for some languages and less for others, even in the absence of hard data about the print runs. I’d love to dive into that information. Does Portugese really outsell Spanish? Are there that many more German cards than Russian?

Finally, TCG is apparently a more popular method of moving non-English foils than I thought. Looking at other cards, there aren’t many with a huge selection of languages, but again, I’m not sure if that’s a lack of supply or cards getting snapped up as soon as they are listed.

So if you see what you want on TCG, you should get it. Stuff isn’t staying there for long. Get out there and buy some foreign foils!


 

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