By Guo Heng
It’s that time of the year again. Pro Tour Magic Origins is taking place at Vancouver this weekend, and here are my predictions for the breakout cards of this weekend.
ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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!
Happy Pro Tour Friday! I was off last week on a (much appreciated) vacation, but I’m glad that I made it back in time to enjoy one of Magic‘s four biggest weekends of the year1. Today is going to be one of those days where we just hit a whole bunch of different stuff at once, but I do want to talk a little about Standard going into this important event. I’m going to try to make the content relevant for the whole of the Pro Tour, and not just dated speculation after round eight.
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<center>ProTrader: <i>Magic</i> doesn’t have to be expensive.</center>
by James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)
In just over a year, PucaTrade has become a dynamic and somewhat controversial new platform for Magic players across the globe to trade cards without worrying about immediate fees or payment processing.
The heart of the platform rests within the use of a pseudo-currency, Pucapoints, that stands in for actual currency when pricing cards on the site. On PucaTrade, Magic: The Gathering cards are priced in Pucapoints in a bounty board model, wherein whoever claims another user’s posted Want first gains the right to send that card and receive the associated point value once the recipient confirms receipt.
PucaTrade claims that their algorithms crunch prices from across the globe, but in my experience, from a practical perspective, they seem pretty tightly tied to TCGLow NM, with a delay of a couple of days. (Note that this makes capitalizing on flash-in-the-pan spikes tougher, as is likely intentional.)
Many users have certainly expressed concerns over their inability to have specific high demand cards shipped to them, and these concerns are accurate on a platform where many of the most active users are often looking to do the same things at the same time. If a card gets hot, a la Collected Company, there is an initial flurry of activity as speculators dump their copies into the system to reap profits in the form of points gains. (Note: The fact that many users do not make use of recently introduced upper limits provides an ability to ship falling cards into lessened true demand.)
Later on however, if the card settles into staple status, there will be far more demand than supply within the platform, often making it tough to get the cards you want as soon as you want them.
Another problem with PucaTrade is the inability to out your Pucapoints easily into real dollars, something that MTGO investors have been able to do fairly reliably at rates between .90-.95 USD/tix over the last few years. Without a deep network of bots in need of the currency during periods of high activity, and with many users having trouble turning points into high value cards, the Pucapoints to USD exchange rate has been seen as low as .70 on Twitter and relevant message boards.
With all of this in mind, I felt that as a fellow owner and advisor of startups I still at least owed the ambitious PucaTrade team a chance at winning me over as a champion for their platform. As a result in late March 2015 I set out on my personal Pucatrade adventure, with a few specific goals. Having chatted with some peers with similar ambitions, I figured out the angle of attack that seemed right for me:
1. Trading up seems to be one of the best modus operendi to adopt on the site. Generally, trading up defines any trade where you end up with fewer cards of higher individual value that what you laid out. An example would be trading 10 LOTV for an Unlimited Mox Emerald or the trade I made into an Unlimited Black Lotus at GP New Jersey last fall. I prefer to trade up wherever possible because my work schedule leaves a limited amount of time for handling cards, and there are already several thousand taking up space where they should not be. As such, trading up allows me to lock in profits across a broad range of earlier specs without taking the reductive margins of a buylist order, and with the additional potential upside of one holding one of the most powerful and desirable cards in the game. Ultimately, my goal is to trade the majority of my specs up into a formidable collection of high end cards, and then out those cards to private sellers to fuel some major future life event.
2. As with any move on PucaTrade, trading is first prefaced with the acquisition of points. To do this, you need to add your inventory to the site, watch for good opportunities to ship at a profit, and accumulate enough points to fuel the trade-up level you are targeting. In my case this was a minimum single card value of $500 USD. My timeline for accomplishing this goal was 6 months or less. The other part of this process is to severely limit what you add to your Want list as you’re building up your point base, so as to accelerate your accumulation of points and ensure that you aren’t just cycling points from one set of cards to another. (Its worth noting that this may represent an equally valid strategy if you’re using Future Value Trading methods, but that’s a separate discussion.)
3. To compensate for the time and cost of shipping dozens of cards, my intent was to ensure that my outbound cards were part of at least one of the following parts of my collection:
4. Trading up on PucaTrade is all about networking. To date, the platform is not doing a great job of connecting users that want to make deals in general, rather than deals that are about a specific card. As such, you need to be paying attention to which users are involved in major deals on the site by reviewing recent deals, checking who may be advertising cards for trade on Twitter, Facebook or other social forums, and start building a contact list you can reach out to when trying to trade up.
Using the above as a template for action I spent the next few months trading for value by sending the following cards out to PucaTrade members.
You’ll note a number of noteworthy cards in this list, including:
Sum total, I’m proud to say that I took zero losses on the cards shipped, and that average profits vs. original costs varied from 15% to well over 300%. It would be foolish of course, to underestimate the real costs of shipping all the cards, and the value of my time in prepping all the cards for shipping, with total time spent likely equaling a few hours. This was however mitigated somewhat by the fact that I already have a daily ritual of prepping shipments while I’m watching online media/TV, allowing me to distribute the time cost across additional sales.
Along the way I also let a few inbound cards slip through the cracks, creating a minor drain on the accumulation of points:
So by late June I had almost $1300 USD in points built up and a strong hankering to find a strong card to trade up into and demonstrate that my trading thesis was feasible. Now along the way I had taken note of many PucaTrade users complaining about getting stuck with points. Simultaneously however, the community was definitely growing month to month, with a lot of trades in motion and a number of notable deals getting done in the $500-$1000 range. Our very own Travis Allen notably managed to acquire a Judge Foil Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, which seemed encouraging. This only served to reinforce for me that networking was the key to success along this road.
As a result I started stalking the biggest players on the platform, tracking them down on social media a few at a time, and letting them know I was looking for something big to trade into. I barely bothered with a Want list at all, opting to instead make a note in my profile that I was looking for big ticket items and had points at the ready. The various parties I ended up engaging with tended to be either judges, major collectors or small to mid-sized vendors.
Along the way I was offered several pieces of Unlimited power, including Moxes and blue power, mostly at MP-HP conditions. I had decided however that to ensure maximum future liquidity for my acquisition I would try to ensure that my “purchase” was of at least SP quality. The idea was that my deal cycle would not truly be complete until I had managed to sell whatever I acquired, and that reselling a higher quality card would be easier down the road.
It was a few weeks into my sporadic probing that I stumbled over the following tweet:
The Workshop looked in decent condition in the provided photos and the price was right, so despite the seller not mentioning PucaTrade as an option, I spent the extra few seconds to ping him and see if he was game to negotiate. As it turned out he was indeed on PucaTrade, and open to the idea since he had been trying to sell the card for a short while without success via other venues.
After a bit of a hassle getting the situation straight with my seller (who had ultimately shipped the card without my consent based on my initial expression of interest), we reached a reasonable price of 80,000 points for the SP+ Mishra’s Workshop. This represented a fair discount against the NM point value of 87407 noted on PucaTrade and was also a successful profit taking on less than $400 worth of cost that fueled the points that were spent on the deal. That’s an easy double up with the potential for additional upside, depending on the length of the hold and the method of the eventual sale (due to potential fees on Ebay or TCGPlayer.)
Workshop also represents a near ideal card to trade up into as a card that is on the Reserved List, and hence unlikely to be reprinted. It had also been showing signs of an imminent price increase with low supply across the major vendors and rising buylist prices. As an essential part of artifact based Vintage decks, it also seemed likely to hold it’s position in the Power 20.
Noteably another Workshop changed hands at NM quality this week for 91, 275 points, and the lowest priced of only two copies on TCGPlayer is sitting at $900, so there’s a decent chance I should hold the card for a few months to see how things shake out towards the holidays.
With the Workshop in hand my confidence in PucaTrade as a solid option for trading up has now been solidly established. With my account standing at $600 in Pucapoints or so, I shipped an additional $400 in cards this week to set up for our next PucaTrade adventure. See you guys next time!
p.s. A special shout out to @nathanjweber for making this deal possible. Nathan was a stand up operator in the end, and you should definitely connect with him as a potential trading partner on PucaTrade.
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, “The Future of Collecting”, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
