A Relatively Boring Day in the Life of a Low-Tier MTG Financier

July 30, 2015 Douglas Johnson 5 Comments

Remember how last week I wrote about how I wasn’t going to try to find the next Outpost Siege or Mastery of the Unseen? While they’re both from a small and relatively unopened set and saw competitive play, they yielded very short-lived spikes that provided a limited window for making money before crashing to their previous fake-bulk-rare statuses. If you follow either me or MTGPrice’s own Sigmund Ausfresser on Twitter, then you may have seen this conversation pop up a couple days ago:

In my opinion, Rally the Ancestors is the next version of Outpost Siege or Mastery of the Unseen. It saw camera time for a few minutes, smashed an event, and jumped on a hype train to $3 town. Sigmund and I disagreed in that I suggested that buying in at $1 is not correct, where he believes it could be a $5 card for long enough to make a reasonable amount of profit. As someone who refuses to pay retail on Magic cards practically on principle, I did not like the $1 buy-in on a Standard legal rare when I felt that buylists wouldn’t peak past 50 cents. I’ve seen too many Standard cards crash and burn to want to be a part of this, so I put my cards where my mouth/virtual pen is:

I only owned three copies of Rally, but I only paid 30 cents total for all of them. That’s one of those neat little side advantages for when you offer to buy or trade for everyone’s bulk rares at 10 cents each. As soon as Twitter proved me wrong about buylists willing to rally together about Rally, I dumped the few copies I had to ABUGames for a free $5, allowing me to move on to the next purchase. More often than not, that purchase will be buying staples at below buylist from people who have a need to sell. I’d rather spend that $5 on a Godless Shrine from someone who needs to pay her car insurance than on five copies of Rally the Ancestor while crossing my fingers and praying that they hit $2 to $2.50 on a buylist.

So About That Title…

Oh, right. I had this amazing ide—I mean…

Jared Tomlinson had this amazing idea where I’d go through and detail what my daily ritual as an MTG finance guy was. Let’s do that, because it sounds like fun, and I’m always a fan of being an open book about what my work actually looks like.

Dawn of the First Day

Everyone should get used to checking the MTGstocks Interests page every day, including the oft-forgotten foils tab. Add it into your morning routine, check it while you’re eating breakfast or in the shower. This is one of the best ways to maintain an up-to-date finger on the pulse of what spikes have already happened, and it’s also a good way to predict future spikes before they happen. Without this page, I wouldn’t know that Life from the Loam had crept back up to $8 over the course of a few months.

On a similar note, my daily ritual also includes scanning through my email for any new collection sellers, reader emails, school info, and ProTrader daily emails. If you’re not a ProTrader and are interested in becoming one, the the daily emails resemble something like this:

We have a lot of detailed and up-to-date information on the most recent inventory shifts from major stores, note buylist changes on hot cards, and inspire lots of regret when you realize you didn’t buy Hangarback Walker at $1 even though you just needed one for your artifact EDH deck. While I don’t get a whole ton of emails about my Craigslist advertisement, I still try to update the listing once a month or so. A lot of the casual players or returners who buy my instant-collection 1K boxes end up being recurring customers who keep my phone number for future reference.

Call Me, Beep Me

Speaking of “customers keeping my phone number for future use,” locals texting me about their needs is one of my biggest outs for cards. I’ve talked about this at length before, but it’s the biggest lesson I think I can impart about how to make money off of this game: be the first one that everyone texts to buy or sell their cards. Networking is key, and I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

As such, part of my daily MTG finance ritual is pulling out lists that I get sent, compiling them into neat little piles, and giving out price quotes on how much a list will cost a customer. Sometimes I have to use outside resources to complete the full list that I’m sent, and that’s where PucaTrade comes in very handy.

When you can sell cards locally at close to full retail, buying PucaPoints from third-party sources at 70 cents per 100 points doesn’t seem like a bad deal. I buy a bunch of points, wait for a list to come to my phone, and then end up selling the cards that I pick up from Puca at close to TCGplayer mid, depending on what the cards are. I use Twitter, Facebook groups, and the PucaTrade subreddit to find third-party PucaPoint sellers, and treat it just like a Facebook collection purchase: I only buy if the seller is reputable with multiple references that can be confirmed, and pay with Paypal non-gift if there are any questions about the seller’s ability to immediately send me the points. So far I’ve had zero troubles, though, and don’t mind jumping through a single extra hoop to convert PucaPoints into cash at a 100-percent rate.

Case-by-Case Basis

Finally, let’s talk about my display case that I mention in almost every single article I write. Contrary to what might be popular belief, I don’t have some huge LGS-level inventory that’s constantly filled with shocks, fetches, dual lands, and other staples. Because the videogame store where the case is located doesn’t hold FNMs or other Magic tournaments, there isn’t a huge demand for staples in the case. The competitive players all know me and can text me like in the above situations if they need staples.

So what do I fill the case with? Well, mainly I just throw a bunch of $1 to $3 cards in it that are popular in EDH or casual deck archetypes. When I first started out with the case, I initially had it full of Vendilion Cliques, Tundras, and other pricey, competitive cards. I stocked lots of high-end staples at reasonable prices, and I expected to sell a bunch of them to the competitive players in my area. The problem was that most of the Magic players coming into the store were gamers of a different breed: they were looking for N64s, Xbox controllers, and Nintendo DS cartridges, and they played Magic on the side as a kitchen-table hobby. They didn’t care for the $70 singles in the case, so I adapted and made some changes. Although the case doesn’t look like anything special, I sell a lot more copies of Reliquary Tower, Sanguine Bond, and Imperious Perfect now than I ever sold of Steam Vents.

And just in case I do find a wayward competitive player who didn’t expect the video game store to sell Magic cards, I have a full stock of business cards behind the counter for the employees to hand out. If someone is looking for a complete Modern Affinity deck, they’re more than welcome to text, call, or email me and we can work something out where I compile the cards for their own list.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “Lol, that case has like practically nothing in it,” then I don’t blame you. I probably only sell 15 to 20 cards a week out of it, and the $1 to $3 rares don’t make me a massive amount of money. I get more from the 1K boxes and 25-cent bulk rare boxes that sit above and next to the case, and they’re more consistent sellers.

However, the presence of my cards in a physical retail store offers me a larger advantage on collection buying than most of the other competitive buyers in my area. Instead of a Craigslist-esque meeting where you agree to meet under a Walmart street lamp at 10:00 p.m. while wearing dark baggy clothing, it’s much more simple for me to tell people to meet me at an established retail location where I can sit on the other end of a counter before I roll out the typical vendor mat.

I even get collections sent to me that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise without the storefront. Believe it or not, there’s an overlap between people walking into a used video game store who are looking to relive their childhood memories with Mario Kart 64 and those who have old collections of Magic cards in their basement that they’ve forgotten about. Every now and then, my old manager at Infinite Lives tells me about a conversation he had that went something like this:

Seller: “Hey, I used to play Magic. I didn’t know you guys sold the cards here.”

IL: “Yep. We have a guy who comes in and fills up the case. He does this for a job.”

Seller: “Does he buy cards? I think I have a bunch in my basement from like ten years ago.”

IL: “Yep, here’s his business card. Call or text him and he’ll be glad to look through your stuff.”

While most of you probably don’t have this type of situation, I think it’s important to look around at the connections you might be able to make, niches to fill, and see if you can’t establish a position in the community similar to what I’ve done. It wasn’t more than a few years ago that I was a simple high-school FNM grinder with limited cash from a part-time job at K-Mart. If I can turn this into a daily ritual with multiple sources of income, anyone can. Good luck!

As always, feel free to shoot out any comments or questions using the multiple methods you have available. If this article shows anything, it’s that I’m an easy-to-contact individual.

Going Mad

Going Mad – Picking Targets for Investment

July 29, 2015 Derek Madlem 5 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

There’s been a lot of comparisons over the years between #mtgfinance and the stock market. Weekly fluctuations have become daily or even hourly fluctuations at this point and some sites even have a crawling price ticker to keep you informed on up to the minute changes in the values of everything.

We look at Magic cards like investors look at corporations. We’re trying to target the most successful cards to acquire just like a stock market investor targets strong companies to acquire stock from. Some cards pay us dividends in the form of improved tournament results while others we target purely on growth potential. We even use the term “blue chip” to refer to longtime strong performers, just like we would in the stock market.

You know what else the stock market has in common with Magic cards? Indexing.

With the stock market, you can theoretically get lucky and pick only winners but that’s rarely the case. Even the best investors have a hard time beating the growth performance of the market average consistently. In stock investing, picking single stocks to go all-in on is a trap. You’ll find very few people without a time machine that would advise you not to diversify. Buying into a little bit of everything spreads out the risk and assures you a steady growth rate over time.

We fancy ourselves savvy investors, but if we’re so savvy why do we constantly fall into the trap of picking individual cards to invest in? For many it’s likely just a knowledge gap, and I’m here to bridge that gap.

I confess that a lot of my success in Magic finance was discovered almost purely by accident. When I was deciding where to park my funds over the years, I didn’t realize what I was actually doing: indexing Magic.

I started out just trying to expand my collection to something operable, I wanted to play formats other than Standard so I first started buying into cheap decks for Extended and Legacy but quickly realized that I didn’t want to limit myself to those budget decks and started acquiring more cards for more decks and eventually more formats. Now I have multiple decks in Standard, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, and Commander…I even have a completely foiled-out cube that features only cards from the two Ravnica blocks, so I’m into a little bit of everything at this point.

Origins

My first Legacy pickups were Wasteland and Aether Vial. Why did I pick these two cards? Because they could be played in two relatively inexpensive decks: Goblins and Merfolk. As I finished these decks I looked to the next decks that I could complete in short order and started picking up dual lands (this was around the time of $75 Underground Seas). As I acquired more cards, more decks became within reach and filling in the gaps became very easy. The side effect of filling in a master list of basically everything playable in each format was that I didn’t miss any of the huge gains. While I could have made a ton of money buying only Force of Wills and dual lands, I would have missed out on all the other increases on cards like Flusterstorm, Stoneforge Mystic, Gamble, City of Traitors, Lion’s Eye Diamond, or Omniscience. Even Modern staples like Serum Visions, Path to Exile, Inquisition of Kozilek, and Kitchen Finks were big winners for me, as most of these were acquired for less than $1.

I even got into Vintage all stars like the Power Nine and Mishra’s Workshop before the double up that the last couple years gave us. At the time I was acquiring them I didn’t have any real ambitions to play Vintage, but figured I should get them “just in case” I was ever interested… and I still haven’t played vintage to this day.

Almost all of these cards appreciated over time. Sure I lost on cards like Standstill and Manabond, but gained just as much on Grove of the Burnwillows and Show and Tells. I owe almost all of my collection’s growth to the simple strategy of owning quality cards over time.

Where to Start

Identifying where to start is pretty easy. The first thing to do is pick which format you want to index. Then you want to break down possible targets into three categories: staples, role players, and everything else. How do you tell them apart?

Staples – these cards show up in a variety of decks in the format and are not dependent on other cards for their power. Great examples include cards like Force of Will, Tarmogoyf, Snapcaster Mage, Liliana of the Veil, and cards of this caliber. You’re never going to have a hard time getting rid of these cards and they’re the most likely to pay dividends as long as you own them.

Role Players – not to be confused with people dressing up and fighting with foam swords in parks or sitting around a table rolling dice while talking in character. Role players are cards that make great decks work, usually by a combined synergy with other role players. The perfect examples for this type of card is Lord of Atlantis. Lord of Atlantis (and his fishy brethren) are typically abysmal on their own but create an extremely powerful force when played within the same deck.

Everything Else – these are cards that are “great in draft” or just have no remarkable or unique abilities. Sure, people may become personal intrigued by these cards, but it’s unlikely that a card like Mahamoti Djinn is ever playable in a constructed format ever again.

Staples

Staples are the cards you see people filling up page after page in their binders, these cards almost always only have on direction to go, it’s just a matter of time. Fetchlands, shocklands, Snapcaster, and Abrupt Decay are great examples of this. These cards will always be needed in just about any deck of the appropriate color for as long as they’re legal… or until a card comes along that outclasses them completely (extremely rare).

The great thing about staples is that they’re subtle and steady, often with small incremental growth that doesn’t even show up on the daily movers pages, allowing them to exist somewhat under the radar. These cards are low risk, pay dividends in increased tournament wins, and don’t spike nearly as hard as other cards unless a major retailer makes a move (like advertising a strong buylist price).

Role Players

These are the cards that only fit into one or two decks but do some serious work within those settings. Our previous example Lord of Atlantis is terrible in Grixis Delver despite being a powerful blue card, but is the bee’s knees in Merfolk thanks to the synergy with all the other fishlords.

Role players can be wild cards from a financial perspective. When an archetype dominates a single weekend, we can sometimes see a strong response in the market, like we did with Tron pieces recently after the deck took first place in both the SCG Open and the SCG Invitational all in the same weekend. When a deck containing Snapcaster Mage gets first place we respond, “of course it did, Snapcaster’s awesome,” but when Oblivion Stone and friends show up in first place we get excited and buy all of the Tron things!

If you’re able to time your buy-ins and cash-outs correctly, you can make some pretty decent money off of these cards. These cards often settle into cycles where they’ll spike and slowly deflate from there. While these cards mostly climb over time, it can take a few spikes to really hold any increase.

Take a look at Food Chain as a great example, this card languished at $3-4 for over a decade. With the printing of Misthollow Griffin in Avacyn Restored we saw a brief uptick but it rapidly deflated until later in March 2014 after putting up a 4th place finish in an SCG Open. The deck’s surprising finish combined with casual demand from Prossh players pushed it up all the way to $19. Since then it’s slowly creeped back down to $16 and will probably continue a ponderously slow downward slide until it hits center stage again.

Everything Else

Simple: don’t buy it. Unless Wizards decides that some day to create a card that that is simultaneously really powerful and says, “If you have a copy of Mahamoti Djinn in your hand, you may discard it to search your library for this card and put it into your hand,” we’re just never going to see Mahamoti Djinn being actually worth money, no matter what some cheeky folks did to manipulate the TCG price.

Indexing for Players

While picking specific winners is hit or miss, acquiring a good mix of staples and role players will yield you great results over time and the easiest way to do that is just acquire all the cards to play as many decks as possible. This gives you a greater access to the game while simultaneously diversifying your “portfolio” across a strong base.

This has the additional advantage of protecting you from risk. Cards like Deathrite Shaman seem like such easy calls to make, the card was so obviously good in basically any deck that could cast it that many players bought in big, buying up dozens or even hundreds of copies; but how much money did all of those players make? Spreading your risk out over a variety of investments lightens the blow when a single investment is affected. If those players had instead bought a cross section of Modern staples and role players instead, they’d be very happy with their investment right now.

Diversification is key when investing, regardless of how you choose to invest. While you might feel like you missed out when you see the guy tweeting pictures of the 500 Sphinx’s Revelations they preordered at $5 each, you’ll feel a lot better when you see the guy tweeting pictures of the 500 Aurelia’s Fury that he preordered at $5 each.

Shameless Self Promotion

I’ll be working in my home town this weekend as a buyer for MythicMTG booth at Gencon then I’ll be hopping on a plane a couple days later to work with the Aether Games crew at Grand Prix San Diego.

City of Traders, ProTrader

UNLOCKED: Authenticity

July 29, 2015 Travis Allen 13 Comments

By: Travis Allen

The introduction of fake cards into the market bears poorly for Magic as a whole. Intended to be a cheap alternative to authentic cards, they’re created with the express purpose of allowing players to get their hands on cards they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) otherwise afford. Frequently the quality has been poor, especially so in the past, but they’re getting much better. Their existence undermines the premise of Magic as a collectible card game by devaluing authentic copies. We need to be aware that these exist, and that they contribute to making the game more unstable as a whole.

You guys are thinking of proxies too, right?

Proxy Wars

For those unfamiliar, proxies are fake cards that make no effort to disguise their identity. As homemade cards, there’s no restriction on not only what art is used, but every visual aspect. Borders are extended or removed, power and toughness boxes shift, set symbols may disappear or change, and the art ranges from renaissance paintings, to high-quality digital pieces, to manchild ponies, to topics too vile to mention here.

Proxies are almost exclusively used in noncompetitive environments. Cubes tend to be the most common home of proxies, for two reasons. The first is that cubes are often considered a vehicle for personal expression, a reflection of the individual that owns it. Personalization of cubes can manifest in more than one manner. Draft archetypes can be aligned with the owner’s personal preference, such as whether to make the black and white combination aggro, enchantments-matter, spirits, or to not even include an archetype for that pair. Aesthetics are no different. Cube owners already spend time debating which version of Demonic Tutor they prefer—Beta, Divine vs Demonic, or the judge foil—so the option of adding completely custom card faces is a natural extension.

The second, more obvious reason that cubes frequently take advantage of proxies is that cubes tend to include expensive cards. While not all cubes include the power nine, many do, and we’re all well aware of how expensive even played Unlimited power is. For a cube owner seeking to have beautiful cards in each sleeve, the idea of shelling out for SP Alpha or Beta copies is unpleasant to say the least. With proxies offering substitutions for Moxes at 1/100th the cost, along with the additional option of customizing the appearance with unique or personal art, it’s no surprise that this is a common path.

Proxies are popular in EDH as well, another singleton format with many of the same characteristics as Cube. While the default method of upgrading an EDH deck is to foil it out, many choose to take other routes, including custom alters or proxies for most or all of the cards in a deck. While power is banned, there is still no shortage of expensive cards to use in EDH, and as such proxies often appear in this format as well. When choosing between an authentic $180 Gaea’s Cradle and a $10 Gaea’s Cradle proxy for use in a strictly casual deck, the choice for a cash-strapped player is often simple.

Cradle to Ghave

If we consider what “proxy” actually means, it may help to illuminate the gap between their use and their intent. In natural, non-Magic English, a proxy is something that stands in for something else. Pinch hitters in baseball are proxies. A proxy server stands in between you and the website you’re attempting to reach, acting as the true content while sidestepping network security (which is especially useful when a content site like SCG is blocked at work but the proxy website isn’t). In Magic, when your draft deck is 39 $.10 cards and a single foil Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy, you don’t want to bother sleeving up. You sharpie “Jace” onto a basic Mountain, and voila: that card is a proxy. You get the idea. A proxy is meant to stand in for the real thing.

Consider again that proxy Gaea’s Cradle in an EDH deck. What is that standing in for? For a real copy of Gaea’s Cradle, right? But which real copy?

When you pull a foil mythic in a draft and don’t want to bother sleeving up the deck just for a single card, you shove a proxy into your deck and keep the foil in your deck box. The proxy card refers to something quite real: that card, right there, in your deck box. You can lift that card up and hold it and put it on the table after you’ve cast the sharpied Forest in your hand. The proxy is a substitute for an immediately available card.

How about that proxy Cradle in the EDH deck though? If you don’t own a true Gaea’s Cradle, what is it proxying? It’s not proxying your judge copy that you’ve got set aside so that you don’t have to shuffle it. It’s not a substitute for any card in your home. No, it’s proxying some other copy. A copy that belongs to someone else. Your proxy Cradle is there, representing the real Gaea’s Cradle still in your LGS’s glass case, the one you didn’t purchase. It’s proxying the real Cradle still in that person’s binder that you didn’t bother to trade for because it was too expensive. It’s proxying any real copy of Cradle—none of which you own.

People don’t feel bad buying a proxy Cradle because it looks nothing like the real thing. How close can it get? How similar can the proxy and the real card be before you’re uncomfortable with it? If I start selling fake cards that are identical to the real thing and I market them as proxies, am I really selling a proxy, or am I selling a counterfeit?

Fiat Currency

Counterfeits are fake cards. People buy them so they don’t have to own the real cards. Real cards are expensive, and counterfeits are cheap, and they get the job done just as well. If it looks like a duck, and taps like a duck, and costs a small fraction of a duck, why not buy the counterfeit duck? (This has been answered before, so I’ll refrain from explaining why counterfeits are bad for Magic today.) Sounds a lot like a proxy, right?

Counterfeit cards are not created or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast. They are not official cards. They exist so that people can buy them instead of real cards. When you buy counterfeit cards, you’re undermining the market for Magic cards. Instead of investing in genuine product, you’re giving it to people who are actively devaluing authentic product. All of this is true of proxies as well.

Clearly there is a difference, and I’m not blind to it. Counterfeits are designed with the express purpose of tricking people. They’re intended to deceive players and judges in competitive environments. Even if the counterfeit websites don’t say “fleece some idiots” on them, and instead recommend them only for kitchen table play, that’s obviously a weak deflection of responsibility. There’s deliberate malicious intent in the creation of counterfeit cards, just as there is with counterfeit handbags and shoes and watches and everything else.

I don’t believe that there is much or any malicious intent in the creation of proxies. No one is trying to deceive others into believing these cards are real. In fact, it’s just the opposite: proxies are remarkably and expressly different from real cards so that there is no chance of confusion (or lawsuits). Proxies are all about exploring different art styles and layouts that Wizards can’t, adding custom imagery to your game, and spicing up your decks. And as per @theproxyguy, they’re about “making Vintage, Cube, and EDH accessible since 2010.”

While counterfeits are intended to deceive and proxies are not, the two are opposite faces of the same coin. Both are fake cards that players can use instead of real cards. Fake cards that cost way, way less than real cards do. On one hand, it’s a predatory business model that seeks to steal profit from Wizards. On the other, it’s a bunch of folks looking to add flavor to their cubes and skip spending thousands of dollars on power. Intent is a dividing line here, and while counterfeits are ill-intentioned and proxies are well-intentioned, you know what they say. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

All Things Considered

I’m not blasting people that make proxies or use proxies. That is not my goal. Hell, I’ve done it myself. In what was theft twice over, I found myself lacking a Reaper King for my Reaper King EDH deck. Shamelessly lifting the idea from elsewhere, I printed out a QR code that linked to Reaper King’s magiccards.info page and shoved that into a sleeve instead.

My goal in bringing this to everyone’s attention isn’t to ruin the party, but to make it abundantly clear that while you may love the images and artwork of proxies, they are not an entirely innocent practice. No, you’re not looking to scam people with them, but you are indirectly taking money out of WOTC’s pocket, just as counterfeits do. It’s not as extreme or deliberate, but the end result is still similar, if certainly less pronounced. If you scoff at this, imagine someone proxying an entire EDH deck. Would you be thrilled about playing against that when you had saved to buy all the real copies yourself? How about if she’s proxying a Gaea’s Cradle, a card currently missing from your deck because you haven’t yet been able to purchase it? Do you think perhaps it’s going to burn you just a little when she’s tapping her fake Cradle while you lack one yourself?

Now how about an entire local community that proxies their EDH decks? That LGS owner is going to have a lot of unsold Sol Rings in his case that he wouldn’t have if everyone hadn’t used proxies.

Proxies occasionally look phenomenal, and the well done ones are certainly striking. A well-curated cube of all proxies can be packed with flavor and personality that makes it uniquely yours. Just remember when you’re considering them as an option, a proxy is only a proxy if it’s standing in for a card you own. If you don’t have the card you’re proxying, it’s not a proxy anymore. It’s a counterfeit.

[/hide]

Jason Alt, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Equipped Like a Battleship

July 29, 2015 Jason Alt 1 Comment

Battleships are boats, man. Try and prove me wrong. You can’t. The Wiki page for “battleship” defines it as a warship, and Wiki defines a war ship as a class of naval ship which Wiki goes on to define as “a military ship (or sometimes boat, depending on classification) used by a navy.” Do not even try and dispute my boat-referencing game—it’s way too strong. While we’re talking about the boats that could be raised by a rising tide, why in the world would we not talk about boats that are equipped to throw down and go to war? We wouldn’t not, that’s why. So let’s not not. Let’s get into some talk about why Magic Origins has a card that makes even people who hate the set look at it and say, “Who is your daddy and what does he do?”

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

To learn how ProTrader can benefit YOU, click here to watch our short video.

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

MTGPrice Blog