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UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Modern Watch I

June 18, 2015 Guo Heng Chin 1 Comment

By Guo Heng

The Modern season is in full swing and as with every Modern season, there are bound to be multiple Modern cards spiking. It is easy to point fingers at perceived speculators buying out cards like Blood Moon or Jund mythics, but a more likely explanation is that we were watching market correction taking place in respond to the increased demand from an expanding Modern player base, as Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) laid out in his excellent article a few days back. After all, new Modern players looking to grind the Modern PPTQs or Grand Prixes are likely to have to acquire their Snapcaster Mages, Cryptic Commands, Blood Moons etc if they want to run a tier one deck.

The combo-infested caterpillar that was Modern in 2011 has, through an unpopular series of bannings, metamorphosed into the colorful, vibrant butterfly that is Modern in 2015. Modern is becoming more like Legacy, where the top 8 archetypes differ from week to week and from region to region. A format where familiarity with your deck far outweighs trying to out-level the metagame as most tier one and tier 1.5 decks stand a chance of making top 8.

A common complain I hear about Modern is the format’s increasingly high barrier of entry, especially after the recent spate of price spikes. However a fact that is often overlooked is how a lot of these Modern staples in question were only mildly expensive for a long time before their recent spike. Snapcaster Mage was hovering around $25 for the majority of his life since he was printed in Innistrad and he was hovering around $35 for the better part of last year, before moving up to $40 this February. Blood Moon tanked to $7 when it was reprinted in Modern Masters and went on a slow but steady growth over the last two years. It only broke $20 at the end of last year and remained so until March this year. I can go on and on with examples, but you get the gist.

In a way, buying into Modern is very much like buying into Legacy, as a friend and fellow mtgfinance enthusiast Reza (@rezaaba) once suggested to me. Like Legacy, one does not simply build a Modern deck within a day. Buying into Modern is a long-term effort that requires you to acquire key components strategically.

That approach formed the idea behind this series of articles where we examine top Modern decks and find out which of their components are in their cheap phase now. I use the term cheap phase rather than cheap as the cards discussed in this article may not necessarily fit the definition of cheap, but they are in the price trough segment of their price cycle, and is probably the best time to get your own copies if you have been holding out. For example, I don’t think we are going to see Dark Confidant drop any lower than the $46 he is currently at, after the release of Modern Masters 2015. $46 would pale in comparison with his price two years down the road.

Let’s start with the top two decks from last weekend’s Modern Grand Prix at Charlotte.

Collecting Elves

The deck that took down the Grand Prix (though it would be interesting to see how the games would have panned out had the opposing Blue-Red Twin deck not been given a game loss for decklist error) and one of the new Modern archetypes spawned by the existence of Collected Company. A couple of the deck’s key components spiked hard after the Grand Prix, chiefly Ezuri, Renegade Leader who tripled in price regardless of the fact that he has two printings, and Cavern of Souls which was due for a spike anyway.

I wouldn’t necessarily call Collected Company a good pick-up right now as its price is currently buoyed by the Modern hype surrounding it, but there are still a few key pieces of Elves that I think are going to be worth much more in the future.

Chord of Calling Price — After all these month’s I’m still calling Chord as a pick-up.

A number of my fellow MTGPrice writers called Chord of Calling a good pick-up. I myself wrote about Chord a few times, when Chord was $4. While Chord’s price bumped up slightly after Elves’ victory, $6 is still a good buy-in price, considering how Chord was once a $40 card. Chord is also found in multiples in Abzan Company. Modern rares that are played in multiple copies in multiple archetypes are going to be worth more than $6.

The next card was brought to my attention when I saw Corbin’s tweet:

Not that this one was hard to see coming, but I believe we have our next $3-4 Common on hand. http://t.co/RYp0Irkizj #mtgfinance

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) June 17, 2015

The link goes to the TCGPlayer page for the card below:

Nettle Sentinel was under $1 until last weekend. Now that Elves are a thing in Modern, Nettle Sentinel’s price shot up to $2.59. Yet I still think Nettle Sentinel has room to grow. Frankly I am surprised that a Legacy Elves centrepiece from a small set printed seven years ago could remain under $1 for so long. Now with the added demand from Modern, on top of the fact that Nettle Sentinel only has a single printing, picking up your own copies of Nettle Sentinel for under $3 does not seem to shabby.

The Evergreen Blue-Red Twin

If there’s one deck that is the quintessential deck of Modern, it would be Blue-Red Twin. Twin was one of the few tier one decks that emerged in Modern’s first incarnation back in 2011 and remained a tier one deck up till today. It took down two out of the four Modern Pro Tours, survived the slew of bannings which killed off more tier one archetypes than I can recall, and some say Twin is the sort of deck Wizards likes to see in the format: a turn four deck that is also interacts with the opponent.

Wesley See's Blue-Red Twin — Wesley See’s Blue-Red Twin

While the Twin archetype has evolved from it’s initial combo-orientated game plan, adopting a tempo-based strategy with an infinite combo in which the opponent has to respect at all times (and together with it a playset of Snapcaster Mage), the core cards of the deck remained the same. Surprisingly, Splinter Twin‘s price only broke the $10 barrier in December 2013 and prior to its Modern Masters 2015 reprint, it was still averaging around the low $20s.

Splinter Twin’s recent reprint brought its price down a little, with the Modern Masters 2015 version trending at $17. If you are looking to get your playset of Splinter Twin, go ahead and get them now. With a Modern Masters 2015 reprint, I doubt we would see another reprint anytime soon. Gone are the days of under $10 or even under $15 Splinter Twin, but we have yet to arrive at the days of $30 to $40 Splinter Twin. As the key component to one of Modern’s most popular deck, Splinter Twin will unlikely remain at $17 for too long.

That’s it. Remand‘s price has finally hit its lowest point since 2012. The Jace vs. Vraska printing brought the $17 uncommon down to $11 for while, but it started inching up again early this year and by April Remand returned to its old price of $17. After all, there is only so much the Duel Deck could do with a singular copy of Remand in each box. Amid the big name reprints and big spikes, the community seemed to have overlooked the fact that Remand is now close to it’s 2012 price. Yup, the most popular counterspell in Modern, the sixth most-played card in the format as of writing, is back to single-digit price.

Now is the best time to pick-up your Remands, even if you are not planning to run Splinter Twin. It is one of the most ubiquitous blue card in Modern after Serum Visions and Snapcaster Mage. My prediction would be that by the next Modern PPTQ season in the summer of 2016, Remand’s price would be back in double-digit region.

That’s all for this instalment of The Modern Watch. I would be rolling out the next parts throughout the next few weeks. We are in an exciting month for Modern. After a dearth of high level tournaments for nearly half-a-year, we are getting a slew of Modern events this month and new decks and techs are bursting out of the gates. With two more Modern Grand Prix – Grand Prix Copenhagen this weekend and Grand Prix Singapore next weekend – I can’t wait to see what new tech surfaces. My only hope is that no Grishoalband makes the top 8 of Copenhagen this weekend. I would be running that deck in Singapore next weekend and it would be nice not to have the deck in the crosshairs.

Share your thoughts below or catch me on Twitter at @theguoheng.

Conjured Currency

Nothing is Sacred

June 18, 2015 Douglas Johnson 20 Comments

I used to be like you. No, not you. You. Over there. With the funny hat. Yes, you.

I was a player at heart, instead of a cold-hearted, finance-focused individual. The endgame of value trading was putting together my Tezzeret control deck for Standard, rather than selling cards on eBay. I didn’t even know that “Magic finance” was a thing, much less that it was possible to use it as a primary source of income. I’m sure that many of you are in the same boat: you’re players that don’t really buy or sell collections on a large scale, don’t try to make hundreds of dollars through speculating, and just want to trade cards away when they’re high and trade for them when they’re low.

So What Changed?

I don’t remember the exact card that I first bought at a buylist price when I didn’t need it for a deck, but it happened because my old LGS doesn’t buy singles for cash—it just has a trade credit list that can be used for other singles. Someone had shown up to the store looking to unload a few random cards and been disappointed to find that the owner was not willing to pay in dollars and cents. He walked into the game room and started asking if anyone was willing to buy his cards. I had a tiny bit of personal spending money from a part-time job at K-Mart, and thankfully, being a high-school student comes with having zero actual real-life bills.

For theoretical argument’s sake (since I don’t actually remember), let’s assume that it was a few copies of Mox Opal. Back in the day, Opal was a $20 card, and Modern was a format that only existed in the minds of those that worked at Wizards of the Coast.

I had my Standard deck completed, Modern didn’t exist, and I sure as hell wasn’t getting into Legacy anytime soon. At the time, I had no idea what EDH was or why I should care about it, because nobody at the store played it. I had enough store credit to keep running drafts back every week, and I knew that booster packs were a money pit. So the question was always there: what should I buy with the minimal amount of money that I had to spare?

When this person was asking around if anyone would buy his cards from him, what went through my head? Well, it’s more than likely that I considered the future possibilities of how I might use those Opals. What if I needed them for a future Standard deck? At the very least, it would be a great deal if I could get them for $10 each and then trade them out at the full retail value of $20 in the future. So, I bought them at half of the TCGplayer mid price. I wasn’t planning to resell them l online, nor was I speculating on them with intent to sell for $50 each four years later. I resolved my cognitive dissonance of, “Don’t buy cards that you don’t need,” with the argument of, “But I got a really great deal, and I might need them in the future.” I wasn’t ready to make the jump to selling cards online (though if I was offered full retail for a card I wasn’t using, I was more than happy to oblige).

Majoring in MTG Finance

As I graduated from high school and moved to a college town with a new job at a local videogame store, I started to have more and more disposable income, and was also learning about the various outlets of moving my cards for cash. I discovered individual seller TCGplayer accounts, the dozens of online buylists that weren’t Star City Games or ChannelFireball, and the Brainstorm Brewery podcast, which I started listening to religiously.

I wanted to catch the big cards before they spiked and make money speculating. After all, that’s where all the money was, right? I wanted to be the Speculator King™. Meanwhile, I started to attend the weekly Magic night at our college. I mainly just went to play EDH, test Standard, and hang out with new friends, but I also happened to be one of the only people there who brought a reasonable amount of cash. Players would stop by with their winnings from FNM, their off-color shocklands that they didn’t need, and their bulk rares. While they found plenty of trade partners, I was the only one paying with actual currency.

I started accepting pretty much anything while quoting buylist numbers that I would look up on my phone. I paid $5 on shocklands, 10 cents on bulk rares, whatever—I started to just buy everything, assuming I could afford it, and since I was at a college campus with a lot of newer players, I didn’t have to make any too backbreaking purchases. The worst-case scenario would be that I had to buylist cards back to an online store and break even, so why not? I could eventually out the bulk rares to a vendor at a GP for at least what I bought them for, and sometimes more. Throughout my freshman year, I ended up leaving my flag in the ground as “that guy who will buy your cards, no matter what they are.”

That being said, my buylist prices differed depending on how easy the card was to move and how many copies I already had, just like any other buylist. I paid less on Hallowed Fountain number 15 than I did on Fountains six, seven, and eight.

Stepping Up

Sophomore year was an even bigger step up for me, and I think of it as sort of the diverging point when I decided to give up on the competitive side of Magic in favor of buying, selling, and trading full-time. At the beginning of the school year, a long-time friend and would-be LGS owner messaged me and let me know that he would be moving across the country at the end of the year. He was getting out of Magic because he knew that taking a job offer he got in Oregon was a much better decision than trying to start an LGS from just a pile of cards and comics.

He asked me if I wanted to buy his entire inventory. I had been buying and moving a lot of stuff over the past year, but was I ready to fully commit to buying a collection like this? It would be a huge time investment to sort everything, learn how to move all of the bulk commons and uncommons, price out the higher-value stuff, synch it into my own collection, and then sell enough to make a profit.

Yes

Long story short: yes, I bought it all. And ever since that collection, I’ve been willing to buy pretty much anything, so long as I don’t dip into my personal emergency funds. I give my phone number out to every player who buys or sells cards with me, and I make myself available as quickly as possible when negotiating to buy a collection. Do you have a playset of Force of Wills that you want to sell as soon as possible so you can afford a car? I am your guy. Do you have 40,000 commons and uncommons in your basement that have been accumulating over the past five years? I’ll be glad to drive over tonight and take them off your hands. Is that a stack of 380 bulk rares? If they’re all NM and English, I’ll be glad to pay cash on them. Being open and willing to buy all types of cards at buylist instead of restricting myself to high-dollar staples or just bulk has been one of my biggest arsenals in becoming one of the most well-known buyers in my area.

(Almost) Nothing is Sacred

Allow me to present you with a scenario that you may have been a part of in the past. You’re trading, you open the other trade binder, and point to the Snapcaster Mage on the front page.

“Snapcaster?”

“Nah, man, sorry. I’ve got to hold onto it, I think it’s gonna keep going up.” You actually really need these for your Modern deck at FNM this weekend, so you decide to be a bit more aggressive.

“Would you sell it? Cheapest copy on TCGplayer at the moment is $76 plus shipping—would you sell yours for $80? I have the cash right now.”

“Hmm…. Nah, I think I’m gonna hold onto it until it hits $90. Thanks anyway, though.” You flip through the rest of the binder to find nothing, defeated. The binders close, and you walk away.

How often has a similar situation happened to you? I’ve personally been on both sides of this interaction. I used to be “that guy” who had stuff in his binder that wasn’t for trade or sale for one reason or another. I’ve also tried to buy cards at practically retail simply because I wanted to play a card in EDH and the other party couldn’t find anything in my binders. It can definitely be a frustrating situation for both traders, and I have a simple piece of advice that can help resolve the situation.

Sell it

If someone offers to buy one of your Magic: The Gathering cards at full retail, there are very few situations in which you should refuse. The only reasons I can think of are either that you need it for a deck that will play in a sanctioned event in the very near future or that you have a very good reason to believe that the card will massively spike in the next few days. Speculating is fine, and I have a spec box myself, but it’s something that I hold entirely separate from my inventory, and pretend that it doesn’t exist except for once a week or so when I skim through it to check for spikes. This is something that took me a while to learn, especially as someone who was ingrained in speculating and being afraid that all of my cards would increase in value the very next day if I were to let go of them.

If it’s in my binders or boxes that I lay out during the weekly gaming night, it’s for sale or trade, no matter what. There’s no need for the customers to ask whether or not something is for grabs—they just have to ask how much something is worth. It smooths over everything, and prevents you from being tempted to move cards that you’ve dedicated to being labeled as “holds.”

If a person wants a card from you so badly that she is willing to pay full retail, make the deal. You can almost certainly just find another copy for a few bucks cheaper on eBay or TCGplayer, ending up a few dollars ahead just for being patient and waiting for your new copy to arrive. Obviously, this goes out the window if you’re using it for an event, but even EDH singles can be proxied temporarily, and your playgroup probably won’t hate you for it.

While it isn’t going to hold true for a lot of players reading this, I treat every card I own as inventory, and I treat every card in every collection as potential inventory. Liberating myself to be a walking buylist exponentially increased the number of purchases I was able to make at low prices, as long as I had cash in hand. Freeing my collection to view the entire thing as sellable made transactions much easier, and resulted in more players willing to come up to me to buy, sell, or trade.

End Step

Is this kind of information going to help you guys make money in Magic? I tried to entwine my own personal experiences a bit deeper this time to show you guys and gals the progression of how I went from “FNM grinder looking to value trade” into “walking local buylist who’s always willing to drive to your house and buy your entire collection.”

I understand that not everyone is going to want to take this step, but hopefully I shed some light on an option you may want to pursue, should you have the right circumstances available to you.

Thanks for reading, as always, and let me know in the comments if you want to discuss this further!

Corbin Hosler, ProTrader

PROTRADER: A Million Modern Decklists

June 17, 2015 Corbin Hosler 7 Comments

I was lucky enough to be on the coverage team for Grand Prix Charlotte last weekend, and it was a hell of an event. I saw a bunch of Merfolk players in day two, I saw some really cool decks play out, and I saw a super healthy and diverse format at the biggest Modern event in four months.

There sure is a lot to take in from the event. We had seven distinct archetypes in the top eight, and even better is that several of them were absent from last weekend’s top eight at the Invitational. I know people get riled up over the Modern banlist and things like that, but it’s hard to look at Modern over the last two weeks and say it’s anything but an awesome format.

At least, that’s my take on it. So much so, in fact, that when I was typing up the decklists you can find here, I was amazed by just how deep the list went. We decided to post unique decklists going down to 64th place, and by my count, there are nearly 30 in that range. Absurd diversity.

So much so that when I submitted the piece to my partner-in-words Adam Styborski, I jokingly titled it “a million decklists.” We almost ran with that title on the coverage page, but while it didn’t quite make the cut there, it’s more than good enough as a title for today’s article.

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Going Mad

Going Mad – GP Charlotte Roundup

June 17, 2015 Derek Madlem 5 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

Another weekend, another event in the books. I forgot to mention in my last article that I would be working at the Aether Games booth for GP Charlotte this last weekend, so I’m telling you now: look for me at the Aether Games booth last weekend and make sure you say hello!

Grand Prix events are often where metagames are cemented into place. Sure, we had a double header last weekend with the SCG Open and the SCG Invitational both including Modern in their schedule; so we had a pretty good idea of what to expect this weekend. Let’s take a look at the decks and associated cards and see how they fared this weekend.

Amulet Bloom

There was a lot of talk last week about this deck being “just too good” and that there was sure to be a banning because it was so overpowering. Well I did some detective work and a little independent research of my own: it turns out this deck is actually borderline crap. If you take a look at the results of the GP, there is only a single copy in the top 32 decks. Furthermore, that deck was piloted by a guy who wins so often that they added the word “Insane” into his name to illustrate the point – Alexander “Insane” Hayne. If we’re being fair, he could have piloted a ham sandwich to top 32 with very little effort. I wouldn’t worry about the sky falling any time soon on this one.

Can it kill quickly? Sure, but you’re going to need to create your own starting hand – wait, that actually happened. This deck kills no faster and less consistently than Infect so expect a banning about the same time that we see Glistener Elf taken out of the format (0 Infect in top 32 FYI).

Tron

This was the deck to beat this weekend after it finished first in both the SCG Open last weekend AND the Invitational. Urza’s lands, Oblivion Stone, All is Dust, Karn Liberated, and Wurmcoil Engines were all extremely popular cards this weekend. You’ll see a low representation of these decks in the top 32 because the deck had a giant target on it’s back.

Expect prices on these cards, especially Oblivion Stone, to slow down a bit as most of the people that set out to build this deck have completed it and the lack of a top 8 finish is going to dull down the hype a little bit.

Crucible of Worlds is one of the peripheral cards associated with this deck that many players “rediscovered” this weekend. Aintrazi had two copies in his sideboard last weekend along with two additional Ghost Quarters for the mirror match. Combine that with the casual appeal of Strip Mine locking all your best friends in Commander and you have yourself a dual-threat winner.

Splinter Twin

This was expected to be a breakout weekend of the Splinter Twin decks, and it’s fair to argue that it was with two copies in the top 8 and eight of varying varieties in the top 32. Splinter Twin also has a unique relationship with it’s natural enemy Spellskite. One of my bosses pointed out this weekend that the two have seemed to form a symbiotic relationship, as one grows more popular the other does too. Expect these star crossed lovers to be entwined for a long time.

One of the clutch sideboard plays to see camera time this weekend was Cavern of Souls + Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir to lock out an opponent from interacting with your swarm of Pestermites or Deceiver Exarchs. Teferi has already been seen putting in work in last year’s “Blue Moon” deck so he’s likely a card to watch going forward. Time Spiral was not a huge printing and FTV: Legends printings can only stretch so far.

The other big winner from this deck is Snapcaster Mage, a long-term “obvious winner” for #mtgfinance heroes everywhere. StarCity has them listed at $99.99 now which is about as close to $100 as you can get without going over. I don’t know if this price is realistic or sustainable, but it’s there and if you didn’t listen to the dozens of finance wizards on this one, you probably missed out.

A word of caution: now is not the time to buy in on this target, it’s at or near it’s peak and it is clearly on Wizards’ radar as a reprint target.

Collected Company

Creature decks were long at the mercy of being required to play creatures at sorcery speed, opening a window for the combo players to “go off” without fear of you interacting. Collected Company allows these decks to play the “before the end of your turn” game just like the blue decks, shifting the balance and tempo of the match.

Chord of Calling is a card that’s success is going to depend on Collected Company just like it did before with Birthing Pod. While we don’t see any copies in the Naya Company decks, it is critical to the success of the Abzan Company and the Elves decks. The ability to search out silver bullets at instant speed is critical to the success of these decks. This card is already seeing movement, but it’s definitely not too late to hop on this bandwagon as there’s plenty of room to grow and it’s unlikely we’ll see another reprint on this any time soon.

Ezuri, Renegade Leader is another breakout winner from the elves deck. For far too long this guy has been teetering back and forth between being a $2 card and pure bulk… turns out that having a reusable Overrun on your person is a useful ability in an elves deck, especially with the help of Elvish Archdruid. Heritage Druid is another card from this deck that saw “speculation” hype take it above $20, but that train is running out of steam and it’s falling back down. This card is a pretty easy guess for ancillary products like Duel Decks, so I would only get what you absolutely need to play with.

Goryo’s Vengeance

If you didn’t see this one coming for the last year or so, then you haven’t been playing attention. Any time you can cheat fatty boom booms into play, you’re a lock for shenanigans. This card is exceptionally more powerful than most in this category because it works on Emrakul, a card that’s supposed to dodge reanimation with it’s shuffle effect.

Goryo’s Vengeance decks are likely tier 3 for the most part, but make it up by being tier 1 fun. If you have any doubt that this card has a cult-like following, just search #Griselbanned on Twitter and see the rabid salivating fans every time these cards show up on camera.

Griselbrand is definitely not the spec here, with 2,000+ of these Grand Prix promos being handed out every weekend (8,000 in Vegas), the supply is more than keeping up with demand right now. Nourishing Shoal is an interesting one, but this card has already spiked 2,000% so I can’t imagine this niche card in a sub-optimal build of a tier 2 deck is realistically priced at $10, but it’s definitely cute pitching a Worldspine Wurm or a Borborygmos Enraged to to gain some more life to draw more copies and repeat.

Speaking of which, Worldspine Wurm and Borborygmos haven’t even moved the dial on price changes, so if you’re feeling froggy and want to drop $10,000 soaking up all the copies of these cards available on the internet – have at it!

Affinity

Affinity is still Affinity. There’s always at least one copy of this deck that sneaks into the top 16 of a Modern event. It’s almost a mathematically probability that one of the million people playing this deck will get handed “can’t lose” pairings all day long and crack the top of the charts.

We’ve already established the winners in this deck right now: Inkmoth Nexus, Arcbound Ravagers, and Glimmervoids should be your first pickups if this is a deck that interests you as none of them made the reprint list in the latest iteration of Modern Masters. I wouldn’t go too crazy on these as one of the biggest draws of playing affinity (or burn) is that the deck is (was) inexpensive to build, so players of this strategy are notoriously cheap.

Rebounds

Tasigur, the Golden Fang appears to have bottomed out and will continue to show up in basically any deck that’s running black cards. As it turns out, one mana 4/5 creatures are pretty good. I still especially like FOILs of this card because they’re very modestly priced in the low $30s right now.

Monastery Mentor saw dark days in the past but has found his niche and is growing in popularity. This is another card I really like in FOIL due to the almost certainty that it will show up in Modern, Legacy, and even some Vintage going forward.

Expect a renewed interest in Legacy cards going forward as people take their “Modern Masters Money” and trade those cards into older formats. We saw this big time with the last Modern Masters, everything Legacy and Vintage related saw a surge in price as players traded away stacks of Modern Masters chaff for cards that they’d always hoped and dreamed for.

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