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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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:
pack opened cards from my collection that were gathering dust outside of my collection of decks and playsets
successful specs with solid upside from the last few years that would allow me to lock in solid gains without the immediate downside of sales fees on platforms like Ebay or TCGPlayer
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.
Cards Traded Up on Pucatrade
You’ll note a number of noteworthy cards in this list, including:
RTR dual lands that were acquired in the $3-4 range and finally provided a double up after sitting on them for a couple of years
A couple of copies of Tarmogoyf and Leyline of Sanctity that I got out of just in time to avoid the inevitable price drop that came out of the reprinting in MM2. The Goyf’s were picked up at GP Toronto at $130, outed over $188 in points, and reacquired for cash from a local player after the fact around $110 USD after the MM2 release weekend drop.
A few copies of the the IDW Duress that I snapped up at a local comic shop that still had them sealed and at original prices below $5.
Steady gainers driven by a lack of reprinting this year including Magus of the Moon, Blood Moon, Sensei’s Divining Top, Wilt-Leaf Liege, Horizon Canopy, Chalice of the Void, Cavern of Souls, etc.
A variety of cards acquire at steep discounts from a dealer at SuperFanComicon in the spring of 2014
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:
In the case of Inkmoth Nexus and Celestial Collonade I fell victim to leaving up a Future Trade Value oriented Want list heading into a price spike, but the cards in question have held steady, so no harm done.
The Abrupt Decays and Eidolons are Future Trade Value plays, made on the assumption that those cards had major upside. As they’ve both gained since being acquired, I’d say they were fine acquisitions.
Surrak, I just needed for a deck, ‘natch.
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.
The upcoming product Duel Decks: Zendikar vs. Eldrazi has yielded its first spoiler from Battle for Zendikar, and it’s not bad at all. Oblivion Sower can get you up to four lands from the top of your opponent’s deck (although I’m sure you’d rather have them draw land for four turns in a row).
Six mana is perfect in EDH, but this may be too slow for Standard unless Battle for Zendikar is like last Zendikar block: lots of mana ramp, cost reducers, and ways to slow the game down. While Oblivion Sower isn’t the kind of Eldrazi we’re used to with humongous stats, a gigantic mana cost, and annihilator triggering on attacks, it is interesting and gives us some clues into what Eldrazi may look like in the upcoming set.
If we’re not going to get annihilator, you can bet we’ll get some more abilities that trigger when the creatures are cast. We may see more reasonable mana costs like what we’re seeing with this card, accompanied by smaller bodies. Eldrazi won’t be the giant Eldritch monsters Emrakul and Kozilek are, but they will still be formidable. However, if you compare this to a card like Sun Titan or Wurmcoil Engine, it comes up short in my view. I’m hoping this is one of the lesser Eldrazi, included in a duel deck because it was deemed similar in size and castability to Avenger of Zendikar (which didn’t need another reprinting) and not indicative of what Eldrazi will be like in this block—or we’re all in for a disappointing time.
I don’t know what Oblivion Sower will sell for on presale, but the Duel Deck printing coupled with its effect that I’m having a hard time judging outside of the context of the rest of the set, I imagine its price will be too high to bother. It’s a cool card, but if all Eldrazi are like this one, I don’t expect Eldrazi to capture the imagination of casual players the way the last batch did, and that’s too bad.
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.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
