The End of the Spikes?

June 25, 2015 Corbin Hosler 20 Comments

Another week, another crazy round of Modern price hikes. It seems like everywhere you look, you see another ca…

Wait, what is this? I’m sorry, I need to interrupt this article quickly for a pretty important update.

MERFOLK WON GRAND PRIX COPENHAGEN!!!

If you didn’t know, I’m the world’s biggest Fish fan. I just finished my set of Champs Mutavaults and I’m the proud owner of this custom playmat. My entire Modern Merfolk deck is foiled out, and acquiring every card in it through trading is one of my proudest Magic accomplishments.

So to see Merfolk put two decks into the top eight of a Grand Prix and then win the entire thing is a huge moment for me. I’ve been telling people for years it’s the best deck in the format, and while that’s mostly been a joke, suddenly it doesn’t seem quite like it anymore. Basically, this is awesome.

Anyway, back to your regularly-scheduled article.

It’s All About the Climb

Let’s be honest: it wasn’t exactly hard to see this explosion in Modern popularity coming. We’ve seen steady growth on a bunch of format staples over the past two years, and despite all the complaints about Modern Masters 2015, the fact is more people have cards to play Modern, and (go figure) that means more people are playing Modern.

That’s one large piece of the puzzle. The other is the return of “seasons.” Some of you may not have been around four or five years ago, but banking on Extended season used to be the easiest money there was. People didn’t care about Extended until the Extended PTQ season came around, at which point everyone suddenly needed cards. You could pick up staples for absurdly cheap in the spring and cash them out at double in the fall every year, like clockwork.

Then, Extended died. Modern, a non-rotating format, took its place. This lessened the impact of the PTQ season, but it didn’t eliminate it.

Until, that is, Wizards of the Coast decided to nuke seasons entirely. The PPTQ system and leaving the option up to the stores running tournaments meant basically everything was Standard, all the time. While Modern still existed as a popular format, there wasn’t really any urgency to picking up particular cards.

This year brought back the return of seasons, and the fact lost in all of the Modern Masters 2015 hoopla is that we’re actually right in the middle of Modern season right now. It’s not just Grand Prix Charlotte and Copenhagen leading people to pick up Modern cards, it’s the fact that they need them for that PPTQ next week.

Of course, this doesn’t account for all of the spikes we’ve seen. Nourishing Shoal and Lantern of Insight were clearly buyouts, and that’s just kind of what it is. But when it comes to the real cards, like Snapcaster Mage and Liliana of the Veil and even smaller stuff like Terminate or Raging Ravine, I believe it’s real demand that’s pushed these cards. Snapcaster hasn’t just risen steadily—it’s held its price every step of the way, as has Liliana after spiking earlier this year. That doesn’t happen unless it’s real demand from people biting the bullet and pulling the trigger on buying in. And they’re doing that because of Modern season.

Those two factors account for most of the gains we’ve seen this year. Truthfully, now is not a bad time to cash out of many specs. After all, a lot of the stuff that’s risen has been stuff we’ve been talking about for at least six months here, so in all likelihood you got into some of these specs on the cheap. There’s nothing wrong with locking in some profits, especially given what I’m going to posit next.

…Until It’s About the Fall

Travis Allen and Sigmund Ausfresser, both great writers here and whose opinions I respect, have voiced similar concerns to mine. Travis, in particular, knocked it out of the park with his comparison of Snapcaster Mage this year and Scalding Tarn last year. While there are certainly some factors that make them different (namely, people anticipating a Tarn reprint in MM2 and then in Battle for Zendikar) the point is very well taken: further growth is not a given.

In fact, there’s historical evidence to suggest that prices may not continue to grow. Even if we discount Scalding Tarn, the fact remains that the most growth—as an overall index—that non-Standard cards experience comes in the first six months of the year. Go look at the price charts of staples over the past few years (dual lands spring to mind): you see price hikes in the first half of the year, with small dips in the second half before rising again come the turn of the calendar.

There’s a lot of theories I’ve put together for this: holidays strapping cash, tax day providing a lift, summer doldrums pushing people outside and away from Magic, etc. Whatever the reason, the facts remain: cards perform better in the first half of the year than the second.

So then, what about all these shiny new Modern cards that have spiked like crazy? There’s a lot of reasons to believe prices will stay steady or even continue rising. After all, the format is very healthy right now, the current spiked prices have mostly held, Snapcaster and Liliana of the Veil aren’t getting any worse or facing an immediate reprint.

But as Travis pointed out, that’s been true of other cards before, and it hasn’t panned out that way.

Decision Time

All of this, of course, leads to a very basic question: is now the time to sell out?

The answer to that question depends on where you fall on the line of prices. Will this growth continue? Will Magic: Origins and the latest Duels of the Planeswalkers bring enough new players in to bring on further growth? There are reasons to believe these things are the case, and if so, you may want to hold onto your Modern specs.

Or are you on the other side? Will the historical reasons to be concerned repeat themselves and make the best decision to sell cards now? Will people care about Modern after its PTQ season is over? Will Standard rotation take enough attention away from the eternal format to send people’s money that way? If so, selling out now isn’t a bad choice.

Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle, and the fact that I’m in for so many of these cards at such good prices does sway me. I know that “technically” my buy-in price shouldn’t affect my decision-making here, but the fact is I’m not opposed to locking in money. Profit is profit, after all, and the Myth of Making Money™ tells me it doesn’t matter what TCGplayer says if I never sell my cards.

So I’m hedging. I’m moving some cards but holding a few copies. For instance, I have a few dozen Snapcaster Mages, and while some of them have come in since the price spiked a great many were acquired in the $20 to $25 range. That’s a lot of profit waiting to be realized, so rather than hold two dozen Snaps I’ll never sell through, I’m going to buylist some number of them to lock in profits while still exposing myself to additional upside.

As for the in-season spikes we’ve been ahead on, like Nettle Sentinel, Heritage Druid, Wanderwine Hub, Glimmervoid, Arcbound Ravager, etc? I’m happy to move them at a profit. If there’s one thing this game has taught me, it’s that there’s always another target. Sure, some of the cards that have spiked this year will likely spike more next year. But some of them won’t. Something will be surprise-reprinted. Something will fall out of favor. Something could be banned.

So I don’t mind selling out of many of them, and happily walking away with my profits. After all, there’s plenty of targets already on the horizon for next season. Glistener Elf, Blighted Agent, Thought Scour, Silvergill Adept, Gavony Township, and more may not hit this season, but I can already start stocking up on them cheaply in anticipation of movement a year from now. Why chase down another 10 to 20 percent on this year’s specs when I can stock up on cards that could turn a 500-percent profit in 2016? I’m happy taking my own advice and leaving the last 10 percent to the next guy.

Of course, that’s my usually-conservative take. What will you do?

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter

Conjured Currency

The Immortality of Planeswalkers

June 25, 2015 Douglas Johnson 10 Comments

It’s been almost eight years since the planeswalker card type was introduced. Before that, the lore of the game cast planeswalkers as legendary pseudo-gods that were almost always too powerful to print. I mean, we got Nicol Bolas back in Legends, but he felt like more of an “attack with big dragon that roars” instead of “archmage that casts multiple spells to obliterate his opponents.” We never got a card for Urza, because Wizards claimed that he would be far too powerful to see play. Neither did we ever get Serra or Leshrac from the pre-Mending era.

Planeswalkers were basically gods that would far overpower the “normal” creatures of the time, and WOTC didn’t yet have the design knowledge to make world-crushing nigh-unstoppable beings in card form.

During the Time Spiral block, we saw the last of the “planeswalkers imagined as creatures.” Jaya Ballard had multiple activated abilities to show the versatility of her spell weaving, but it wasn’t enough to make her feel awesome. Teferi controlled the flow of time by slowing down his opponents, but he was still just a creature. I’m not going to write an entire lore column, because you guys aren’t here for that, but the Mending was Wizards’s way of fixing and adjusting the walkers to a power level where they were more feasibly printed.

October of 2007

Enter Lorwyn. With a brand-new card type that was hinted at by Tarmogoyf itself, planeswalkers and the rules surrounding them were the talk of the town. At least, I assume they were. I barely knew how to play Magic at the time, and I wasn’t paying attention to new set releases until closer to Shards of Alara. But as a casual player, I fell in love with planeswalkers as soon as I saw them. Ironically, I was the last person in my small casual group to actually attain one, and that was only because my friend took pity and traded Garruk to me because he had two from the Garruk vs. Liliana Duel Deck.

Anyway, the point here is that the planeswalker card type was a home run on pretty much all fronts. Casuals foamed at the mouth at the chance to summon an ally to the battlefield and cast spells every turn, and the Spikes of the world enjoyed how difficult to remove and mana-efficient they were. While there were balancing issues over the first few years, ‘walkers as a whole were appreciated by the entire community. Savvy traders who navigated the rift between casual and competitive caught on quick, and learned that converting tournament staples into undervalued loyalty counters was a quick way to make a profit.

This mantra has held true for as long as I’ve been in this business. If your trade partner’s binder is stretched thin, just target pretty much any planeswalker ever. I’ve sold more Vess than Veil in my time buying and selling Magic, and it’s not close. Hell, even Tibalt is worth trading for because he’s so goddamn infamous. There are multiple people out there who collect exclusively Tibalt because he’s regarded as the first “obviously bad” planeswalker. I’ve traded for a Tibalt before, and it was intentional. I wanted that Magic: The Gathering card because I knew another human being on this planet actually wanted to own it, even though the card is obvious garbage and is basically a recurring joke at this point.

In years past, $5 was always the benchmark for “cheap planeswalker that you should probably buy, because it’s going to rebound back like an Immortal.” If the garbage version of Gideon can float around at $5 despite seeing zero play, then that should be the benchmark low (the one exception being our beloved Fiend-Blooded friend).

However, it looks like we have a few challengers in our midst who are refusing to make the climb:

I can come to terms with the fact that Architect and Vraska won’t rise to the occasion. The Duel Deck skewered their prices and sealed their fates (and both pieces of alternate art are absolutely awful).

However, I had at least a little bit of faith in M15 Jace and M12 Chandra slowly making a comeback…

Don’t Call It a Comeback (It’s Probably Not)

Tibalt has a higher fair trade price than M15 Jace . And yet hell hasn’t frozen over, pigs are grounded for the moment, and the third world war hasn’t caused the end of us all. I’m not sure if we should throw a party for Tibalt or mourn the end of his legacy. When M15 first bottomed out, I took the $3 Jace as a signal. His name had E, J, C, and A all arranged in a certain spelling towards the front of the card, he was four mana, and he started with a large chunk of loyalty. Even if he was obviously inferior to his cousins, I figured I could easily pick these up in trade and then dump them out of my display case once they made their climb back to the $5 bare minimum.

Easy game, easy life, right? Those who can’t afford a Mind Sculptor go for Beleren, and those who couldn’t afford Beleren would jump on these. I made similar moves on Chandra, the Firebrand, trusting in the creep back to $5. Trade for a bunch, and then dump them in the display case. Garruks don’t last a week behind that glass, and neither do copies of Nicol Bolas. Why would these be any different? In my past experience selling ‘walkers to casuals, they didn’t have to be good to move off the shelf. A six-mana Chandra sells like wildfire, and she never saw a spark of competitive play in her life.

So how many Living Guildpacts and Firebrands have I sold out of my case ever since initating my master plan?

Zero Jaces, and one or two Firebrands.

There was actual dust on the front Jace when I went to check on my case last week, and he’s priced at $3, yet hasn’t moved in God knows how long. You would think that casual players would jump at the chance to jam a planeswalker in their decks for such a low cost, but my experience suggests anything but.

A Fading Spark

The mantra that all of us financiers and value traders has been chanting has been dead for over a year. “Trade for a planeswalker if it’s under $5,” and, “Trade for any planeswalker ever because it’s easy to sell,” are relics of a forgotten age.

I’m even wondering if my Daretti investment was a worthwhile buy, even though I managed to find some copies that I thought were underpriced at $2.70 each. I was going to rely on his rock-solid $5 price tag in order to evacuate from the spec in a pinch and settle for doubling up, but he’s already shown signs of sliding in the opposite direction.

So what went wrong? Well, planeswalkers aren’t as special anymore. Instead of having a limited number in each color to choose from, the casual players have approximately seventeen different mono-blue Jaces to choose from for their mill or control decks. Being the 57th best walker out of 59 available walkers sucks a lot more than being the 25th worst walker back when there were 27. There’s a lot less of a “uniqueness” factor, because Living Guildpact, Firebrand, or Vraska all fail to fill a niche in a deck anymore, even down to the casual level of play that those reading an article like this just don’t experience first-hand.

**Where to Go with Origins?**

As much as I loathe talking about upcoming sets and speculation, I’ll throw my hat into the ring on the Origins double-sided walkers because it’s relevant to this discussion. If you’ve dabbled in Magic finance at all, you’ve obviously been told or have been the one to tell people to drop ‘walkers early on in the opening season like hot potatoes. Sell them as soon as you crack them at the prerelease, because there will be a time several months down the road when you can reap the profits by buying or trading back for them at that sweet $5 baseline fallback plan.

Half of this will still be true. Sell whatever planeswalkers you open at your prerelease right away, but even once they “bottom out” at $5, I’m going to suggest staying away from these new flip ‘walkers entirely.

While they can be used as Commanders this time around, none of these ‘walkers have any truly unique traits compared to their predecessors. Chandra burns creatures and players? So does every other Chandra in existence. Gideon makes you attack him, and then turns into a creature to smack you right back. No surprises there. Jace mills? Someone fire up the printing press, this is breaking and unbelievable news!

While I definitely sound a bit cynical concerning their appeal, I’m not trying to suggest that they’re unplayable. All of the novelty is tied into the fact that they can flip, and I don’t expect their backsides to be overtly exciting or novel to the average casual player.

If you want to play them in EDH (I certainly don’t think they’re bad in that format), I suggest waiting until an absolute rock bottom of $3 to $5, and I wouldn’t advocate holding onto them while crossing your fingers. At least Garruk Relentless started out as a ‘walker, made an impact on the opponent’s board, flipped immediately, and presented a large number of options while in play. Unless these five find homes in Standard (which I do think is entirely possible for Gideon and maybe Liliana), I think it’s possible that we’ll see them at an extreme low, and it will end up being a speculating trap.

End Step

Am I correct about the $5 minimum on planeswalkers being gone for good? Is there a new lower boundary of $3, or is it possible for non-Tibalt walkers to sink even into the $1 bulk mythic status?

I’m certainly expecting a bit of dissenting criticism from this one. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on where the Origins walkers end up, and if being double-sided is enough of a novel appeal to the casual crowd that would sustain a price above $5 throughout their lifetimes.

As always, thanks for reading!

City of Traders, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Transaction Etiquette

June 24, 2015 Travis Allen 5 Comments

By: Travis Allen

Here’s the timeline of events from this past Thursday, June 19th.

12:57: Evan Erwin tweets the Sphinx’s Tutelage spoiler:

New #MTGOrigins spoiler “Sphinx’s Tutelage” pic.twitter.com/WcKCnOTPlG

— Evan Erwin (@misterorange) June 19, 2015

1:00: JR shares Evan’s tweet with the comment “Painter’s Servant sold out yet?” This is the first time I see the card. 1:00: I check TCGplayer for copies of Painter’s Servant. 1:04: I receive a confirmation email from TCGplayer regarding my order of 3 NM Painter’s Servants. 1:05: I check Star City Games for copies of Painter’s Servant. 1:08: I receive a confirmation email from SCG regarding my order of 25 Painter’s Servants. ~1:10 – 1:15: I look at Sphinx’s Tutelage again and see that it says “nonland.” 1:19: I call SCG to cancel my order of Painter’s Servants. 1:21: I tweet that Sphinx’s Tutelage is not Grindstone. This exchange led to Nick Becvar hassling me that my behavior was the same as stores cancelling orders. I disagreed, and declined to get into it with him on Twitter. I realized instead that this, in conjunction with another recent event, was an excellent opportunity to discuss some of the etiquette in customer/vendor transactions. I’ve talked before about how to behave when dealing directly with other players. Today, we’ll look at some scenarios that arise between players and stores, what you should expect, and what is expected of you. We’ll come back to the Painter’s Servants in a bit.

“Out of Stock”

This is hands down the most commonly heard complaint regarding players and stores. A card’s value increases dramatically in a short period of time—ban list changes are a frequent catalyst of this—and players overwhelm stores to stock up on copies. (It happened with Golgari Grave-Troll and Worldgorger Dragon. And Bitterblossom. And Land Tax.) People order ten copies of Worldgorger Dragon at $1.90 each at 11:00am EST when the B&R article goes live, and by 1:00pm, the price is $30 on TCGplayer. Then comes the email. “Sorry, we’re out of stock on Worldgorger Dragon. Your order has been cancelled. Our apologies!” The player, who was already counting the money he was going to make, is semi-justifiably upset. He might take to social media to decry these unscrupulous charlatans. I’ve done it myself on more than one occasion. Salt is added to the wound when the vendor that was “out of stock” magically has ten copies available the next day at the new ten-times-higher price. As an online vendor, it’s extremely unprofessional to cancel orders you have the stock for, lie to customers, and then relist the items for greater prices. It’s an awful business practice, and there is even an entire forum for vendor reviews here on MTGPrice in order to alert others about this behavior. If someone places an order for your posted price and the price skyrockets, it’s your duty to sell it to them for the listed price. If you’re that worried about losing a few potential bucks on cards spiking, hide your inventory ten minutes before the B&R article goes up and preemptively remove unbanned cards before people can order them. It’s absolutely not worth your time as a vendor, but if you feel compelled to not let anyone get a good deal, it’s better than cancelling on people. Having said all of this, it’s important for us as customers to remember how this works on the other side. Depending on the software a vendor is using to manage their inventory, it’s entirely possible they do oversell through no fault of their own. If a flurry of orders all come in for the same product at the same time, there is software out there that will sell 30 copies of a card when only 11 were in stock. Through no fault of their own, the vendor is now forced to tell several people they can’t fulfill that order. It comes up when product is listed in multiple locations as well. Some vendors will list on their own web page, on eBay, and on TCGplayer. This makes it extremely easy to suddenly sell three times more stock than you have available. You can debate whether or not listing product in this fashion is appropriate, but for the time being, accept that it happens, and that it’s not necessarily the store being scummy if they have to cancel orders. As a customer, it’s entirely fair to be upset when a store cancels your order on a card that just spiked in price. It sucks when perceived profits suddenly evaporate just like that. Just remember that not all stores that cancel are doing so for nefarious purposes.

“Whoops N/M”

On the other side of the order cancelling coin is when a customer changes his mind. The most egregious example of this came to me across Twitter a few banned and restricted list updates ago. (I forget who originally shared the story. If you remember—or if it was you—be sure to tell us in the comments!) This was back when everyone was expecting Bloodbraid Elf to be unbanned. Now, there wasn’t any actual evidence to support this claim, but the hive mind had collectively decided it was time. BBE’s price rose accordingly: Then 11:00 a.m. EST came, it wasn’t unbanned, and suddenly all those elves were not worth what people had started paying for them. A vendor then shared a snippet with us all. Some customer had ordered a bunch of BBEs, probably over two or three playsets at least, and now wanted to cancel his order—except that the cards were already in the mail, since he had ordered them a few days prior. The customer had ordered all of these cards, then as soon as they weren’t unbanned, cancelled his order. Was the vendor supposed to honor that? The parallels here are what made this amusing. We were all so used to stores cancelling orders on us when a card is unbanned, but what about a customer cancelling an order because a card wasn’t unbanned? I’m not sure what the outcome was. I know a lot of us were hoping the vendor would refuse to cancel the order, as some form of symbolic striking back against frustrating business practices. I’m guessing he did cancel it, though, and he probably should have. In the business-customer relationship, the burden of service is on the business. The business exists to make profit: to take money away from the customer. While a business’s identity exists only in relation to its customers, a customer is a person that exists independent of the business entity. A person is not defined by his or her capitalist relationships. Because of the nature of the interplay between the two, it’s the economic responsibility of the business to provide service to the customer in any way it can, even when the customer is at fault. If the business messes up, it owes it to the customer to make amends. If the customer messes up, the business owes it to the customer to help them clean it up. This is starting to get into philosophy of capitalism, and I don’t want to go too deep down that path lest the comments become littered with libertarians raving about how the destitute ghost of Ayn Rand compels us all to sell our cards and donate the money to R[on/and] Paul. My point, which I’ve taken my sweet time getting to, is that “the customer is always right” is not just a business strategy, but almost a moral compunction. As a customer, and subsequently a human being, you should try not to be a jerk face. Don’t do things like order cards, wait for the B&R announcement, and then cancel while they’re in the mail because the update didn’t have what you wanted to see. Don’t be extremely unpleasant for no reason. If you’re a business, forgive the customer for these things, and continue to provide him good service. Back around to the Painter’s Servant, it should be easy to see where I’m going with this. Does cancelling an order within 11 minutes make me a bad person? No, of course not. We should try not to do that, but at the same time, it’s not a particularly heinous crime. I don’t feel any guilt over it. There’s a humongous gap between what I did, vendors cancelling orders on unbanned cards, and even people waiting until cards are in the mail or the B&R updates happen to cancel orders. As someone that sells regularly on TCGplayer, I’ve had plenty of people cancel orders, and so long as they do it before I package the cards, I don’t have any real reason to care.

“That’s No Longer $5.”

This happened to me recently, and while I tried to shrug it off, it got under my skin enough that it’s half the impetus for having written this article. It was a quiet Monday evening and I was driving up to Chipotle to grab dinner and take a break from working on my thesis. There’s a card store on the way that I hadn’t visited recently, and I was in no rush to get home, so I figured I’d pop in and see what was in the case. Specifically, I was hoping to find some Alpha or Beta stuff, since that’s been getting hot online recently, and local stores and players are still likely to be totally in the dark. Looking through the case, I first saw several copies of Ezuri, Renegade Leader at $3. I asked the attendant to pull them aside and kept grazing. Then there was a copy of Through the Breach at $15, a completely fair market price at the time. I had just written that I expect this to jump in the near future, so I was happy to take it at that number. A few minutes later I found a playset of Disrupting Shoals at $5, so I asked for those as well. It’s one of the few Modern cards I don’t have a personal set of that I may actually use, so at $10 off from TCGplayer, it was a great time to pick them up. As the owner put the Shoals with the Ezuris and the Through the Breach, he informed me that, “We reserve the right to change these prices. These Ezuris are $10 now, and the Shoals…[he tapped on an iPad twice]…are $15.” I’m a bit flabbergasted, as I didn’t expect them to change the prices on me as I picked them out. I paused for a moment, rather indignantly shrugged my shoulders, said, “Fine, whatever,” and walked out the door. Later that night, I sent this tweet:

I like where I am in #MTGFinance, though it is a bummer that case prices are absolutely never honored for me — Travis Allen (@wizardbumpin) June 17, 2015

What rankles me about this is that the store is essentially trying to have their cake and eat it too. There are two methods available to a store when pricing singles.

The first method is to put no prices on any cards. When customers are interested in a card, they ask about the price, and the associate looks it up. This ensures that the store always has the most accurate prices, since they’re checking the numbers at the time of sale every single time.

There are several pitfalls with this strategy, however. Primary among them is the time it requires to do this. An inquisitive customer, especially more casually-oriented players that don’t know exactly what they want and haven’t memorized prices, may end up demanding a huge chunk of time of the employee who has to constantly look up prices on obscure cards. Another issue is that without prices listed, people may not bother to ask at all. Rather than pester the shopkeep, they assume that whatever they are looking at isn’t worth asking about and skip over it all together. A store misses a lot of incidental sales without prices on singles.

The second method is to put prices on cards. An overwhelming majority of stores do this. This way, employees don’t need to tell people the price on Flooded Strand nine times a day. Customers can process information and make purchasing decisions without bothering anyone first. People will overpay on cards that have dropped in price in the time since you initially stickered them. And the store will get sales on cards that may be a bit underpriced because someone feels like they’re getting a deal. Even though they aren’t maximizing their profit on those transactions, they’re keeping liquidity up, an important component of a successful MTG business. Losing a few potential bucks on cards that have gone up in price is well worth the amount of value the store gains by pricing the cards ahead of time.

What’s especially irritating about this event is just how easy it is to avoid the entire situation. Just assign staff to check the front page of MTGPrice each morning to check for any swings large enough to warrant price changes. The entire process would take less than five minutes each day, and there would never be a need for hurt feelings. Rather than set aside a small amount of time to for this process, though, the store has opted instead to let its customers work for free.

Further still, if a random guy off the street asks for a card in the case, they sell it to them at the posted number. However, if someone they suspect has a greater level of knowledge asks—say, a local player who happens to write for a site specializing in MTG finance—they check each and every price to make sure our handsome hypothetical never gets any good deals. Why bother to go through all the effort of updating prices every day when you can just let well-informed customers tell you exactly which cards you have marked incorrectly?

And by the way, you can bet your ass that if a card has dropped $3 since it was stickered, they aren’t passing the savings on to you. The sticker says $10 and MTGPrice says $15? It costs $15. The sticker says $10 and MTGPrice says $7? It costs $10.

As a private store, it’s the owner’s prerogative to change prices on people (well, probably. I’m not sure if it runs afoul of truth-in-advertising laws. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it doesn’t). If a store wants to update its prices whenever people ask about a card, they’re allowed to.

However, there’s a big gap between “allowed to” and “should.” You’re allowed to spew hateful, racist rhetoric, but there’s no question that you shouldn’t. Changing prices on your customers from what is posted may save you a few bucks in the short term, but you will rapidly destroy any goodwill they have towards your establishment. Is it worth burning all future sales just to ensure you don’t lose $20 on a playset of Ezuris? After all, if a store is selling them for $3, it means it probably bought them at bulk rates. The store is still making a profit even if the card is underpriced, so it’s not even like it’s losing money.

If you’re a store owner, it’s probably legal to change prices on cards in your case when people ask. Even if it isn’t, nobody is going to get you into legal trouble. However, it’s just about the scummiest thing you can do to your customers. Train employees how to keep up on prices. Ensure that they have time to keep things in the case updated. And if something slips through the cracks, honor your posted price. It’s just good business.

Jason Alt, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Gods and Generals, Part 3

June 24, 2015 Jason Alt 4 Comments

We’re at the end, readers. You made it through the first two parts, and I think some of you are pretty excited for part three. I can’t pretend I’m not excited myself—I called Purphoros as my pick of the week in the latest episode of Brainstorm Brewery, a podcast I hope you’re all listening to. You get it a day before the rest of the plebians by virtue of being a ProTrader, so that’s pretty cool. If you think my opinion is worth reading, why not give the podcast a listen?

Is that a bad endorsement? “Listen to the podcast where I mention Purphoros a week after I wrote about him!” Look, I don’t have to justify myself to you nerds. I just felt I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug the podcast where you get to hear three other finance experts agree or disagree with my called shots. I don’t imagine this is a super tough sell to a bunch of finance article readers, but what do I know? Besides what I think about the last five Theros block gods, that is.

We saved the best for last, I think, and my favorite god of the 15 is going to get a really in-depth look. I’m excited to write up this last batch, so forgive me my digressions. I’m sufficiently pumped now. Let’s do dis.

Athreos, God of Passage

$10?!

Athreos certainly got a ton of buzz from its release, and why not? The card looked and smelled an awful lot like some other cards that existed in a similar vein, only it seemed better.

Though it failed to do much financially, Immortal Servitude was the basis for a (tier, like, 10) deck that was fun to play and that’s about it. But what if your Immortal Servitude effect were on a permanent and getting enough dudes into play let that permanent attack? People had enough experience playing the gods to know that if Thassa could get there, Athreos could certainly do so too, given its low mana cost and inherent unfairness. What would we do with this? Run wraths to take us to value town? Loop Elvish Visionary for value? Whatever it was people thought they were going to do, they mostly haven’t. Athreos hasn’t made much of an impact if any on Standard, and its price has stayed within a couple bucks of $10 basically as long as it’s been a card.

Could EDH be a reason for this? Certainly it could. I think Athreos is absolutely the top choice of general for a deck with lots of Shadowborn Apostles in it. Does that make it a $10 card on its own? No. Athreos is a fine commander in other builds as well, but I think third-set stickiness is propping the price up to an extent. Can we rule that out if we see the other generals coming in cheap? We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. If EDH is really the culprit here, will we expect to see that reflected in the foil price? Yes. Yes, we will.

You’ve got to be getting pretty good at analyzing these graphs by now. What do we think? A multiplier of three on a card that already seems pretty overpriced? Is Standard doing that? Or is EDH?

Personally, I think we can see EDH’s influence here pretty significantly. The price looks so flat compared to the non-foil, which means copies aren’t moving very quickly, but quickly enough for the dealers not to change their buy prices. Honestly, $30 may be just about perfect, which for our purposes, is actually a bad thing.

We want our gods to be the wrong price or to look like they’re going to be the right price soon. Athreos seems neither. With EDH propping the price up as well as third-set scarcity, I don’t expect the foil or non-foil to drop a ton at rotation. Certainly the non-foil has room to fall, but the foil likely isn’t going anywhere, either up or down, in the near future. I am a 2/5 on this card both in foil and non-foil.

The non-foil does have some chance of getting more reasonable at rotation, but dealers are actually cutting their buy prices rather than raising them. Could that be in anticipation of the price coming way down soon or is it in anticipation of people wanting to ship a ton of these while the buy price is $5 and the dealers would end up stuck with cards they paid $5 for and can’t sell for $4? I think it could be a bit of both. What I see is low demand and a high price for this card and both those factors kind of suck.

Is Athreos good in EDH? Sure, but all 15 cards sort of are, and I’m not bullish on the ones where I don’t see room to make a profit. I could be persuaded to go in one these at like $4, which seems unlikely but not impossible. I’m certainly keeping an eye out.

Iroas, God of Victory

Remember what I said about third-set stickiness? Well, here’s a great baseline. Worth half as much as Athreos but well below half as playable, Iroas never made an impact in Standard. This card is $5 for the same reason Godsend is $5: it has a non-zero amount of casual appeal, it’s in a durdly third set with not a lot to be excited about, and it is technically not unplayable in EDH. I could see Iroas getting there as a utility-enchantment-cum-beater in a deck with a different commander, like Jor Kadeen, but I’m not jazzed about him otherwise. Neither are dealers, who are cutting buy prices significantly, probably in anticipation of rotation. While the price is relatively flat, dealers have tried to pay as little as $2 for this card. I’ve seen people no-sir offers of $4 on Godsend before so nothing surprises me a ton, but I don’t see demand for this. Heliod at $0.75 tells me gods have a long way to fall, some farther than others. I’m a 1/5 at $5 and a 4/5 at $0.75. I imagine you will be able to get them for somewhere in the middle, but unless it’s closer to $1, I don’t know that you want to.

A multiplier of three, as well. That’s very interesting. It kind of puts the multiplier on Athreos into perspective, doesn’t it? When I said, “This price is likely due to EDH,” above, I think what I meant was, “This price isn’t not EDH,” but judging by Iroas, a mostly-ignored card, the multiplier appears to be some sort of weird standard.

Quck aside: Isn’t it fascinating that the gods seem to get their cues vis-a-vis their prices from their expansion set rather than their playability? It’s a good thing I grouped these by set or I may never have noticed these trends. I literally almost did all 15 gods alphabetically the first week. It’s a good thing I write too much or this could have been a mess and we would have learned way less. Should we predict the same multiplier for Kruphix or Keranos? Absolutely not, but nothing would surprise me. However, if we do see that for Pharika, I think we can pretty safely conclude the multiplier is a supply issue. I’m interested to see what we come up with when we get there.

As for Iroas, I feel the same as the dealers who have been slashing their buy prices. I’m like a 1/5 at its current foil price. You’d have to make these pretty cheap to make me get into the 3/5 or 4/5 range. Like, if current buy price became the new retail price, I’m probably a 3/5 at the price dealers are paying then. Maybe even not that. Iroas seems like this set’s Heliod or Ephara.

Keranos, God of Storms

I have been quoted numerous times saying, “If it weren’t for EDH, only about 100 Magic cards would be worth more than $1.” While I think that’s true and smile whenever I hear someone repeat it, we can acknowledge that Modern has been a real bro and made some cardboard worth some moolah. Thanks, Modern!

Keranos was touted as a Modern option, and while that hype appears to have trailed off, dumping Keranos nearly back where it was before all the hype, I expect its EDH playability to have a real effect on the foil. I understand why Keranos was $20 for a while—what I can’t figure out is why it’s the same as Athreos.

EDH clearly can’t pull the non-foils above $10 unless the card is played a ton (like I imagine we’ll see for Kruphix) and the dive back to $10 seems to indicate that Modern demand has all but evaporated. Keranos was never more than a one- or two-of in Modern anyhow, and that can mimic EDH demand in some ways. I expect expensive foils if only because we won’t see the race to the bottom the way we did with the non-foils.

Keranos may not be played in Modern as much anymore, but the fact that it’s an option can work both for and against us. Price memory is going to make the price stickier come rotation, which makes me pretty bearish on the card unless it comes down more than it probably will.

While the buy price for most of the rest of the gods is tailing off, Keranos is actually increasing. Dealers are going to buy super aggressively if the spread is low at rotation, making it harder to get your hands on Keranos and limiting the chance the price falls below where the buy price is now. Do I like these at $6? Not a ton, no. They’ve demonstrated an ability to be $20, but you’d have to think that will happen again to pay $6. Should these miraculously fall to $3 or $4, I’ll change my attitude significantly, but this still won’t make it past a 3/5 in my excitement. My money is better-invested elsewhere, in my opinion.

Yuck. You see the price spike as a result of Modern, but the price has not come down the way the non-foil has. I don’t think EDH is the culprit for the price staying up as much as scarcity is. See those “mini” fluctuations? Those point to a very, very low supply. If one or two purchases can upset the price balance, you’ll see little jumps like that when the stock is completely bought out by virtue of buying a small number of copies.

So the demand is non-zero, but if buying a few copies can make the price “twitch” like that, steady demand would completely wreck the price and we haven’t seen that. I’m not super bullish on the foils here, honestly. EDH demand isn’t going to put much upward pressure on the price and buy prices aren’t really moving despite the retail price coming down a smidge. This graph is ugly, folks. I’m like a 1/5 for foils and I don’t get to a 2/5 until the price gets somewhere the price won’t get.

I have a good feeling about this next one, though.

Kruphix, God of Horizons

Get. Hype.

This is what opportunity looks like. Cheaper than Iroas, steadier than Keranos, more playable in EDH than Athreos—this card has it all. The spread is currently pretty wide, so even dealers aren’t really on this guy. However, Kruphix is the most EDH-playable out of the crop it’s in and its price is not reflecting that fact.

I’m a 3/5 on this card at its current price, and if it gets really cheap, I’m even deeper. This is never going to get the boost Keranos gets from Modern, Athreos gets from casual, or Iroas gets from the people who have made Godsend $5, but it does get help from being very good.

Don’t let the low price fool you, as it’s a good thing. This card is unplayable in Standard and that has made its price plummet, but it has a ton of upside and I’m deep on these if I can pay what dealers are paying now. I want a big old pile of these. This is Purphoros-tier as far as I am concerned: useful in decks but best as a commander. Let’s see if the foil agrees with us.

Here’s a nice gut-check. The prices are very low for the foil and the non-foil. Did we misevaluate something? Is Iroas more playable than we think? Is Kruphix worse than we think? Did I overreact to the cheap price because I don’t understand that it’s cheap for a good reason?

Let’s check our multiplier, shall we? What’s that? It’s five? Not only that, it’s been five forever? I think that tells us that we’re onto something. Not only that, it tells us we have real upside on the foils. If the non-foil is $4, then that multiplier gives us $20 foils. If the non-foil hits $10, we’re looking at $50 foils, provided the multiplier holds.

And why shouldn’t it? This is a real EDH card. If I can pay what dealers are paying now for foils, I’m a 5/5. I don’t expect that to happen and I am still a 2/5 at its current price. If it doesn’t fall at all, I may buy a bit down the road if I start to see any upward movement at all. Kruphix is money, and I am glad there is actual opportunity here.

Pharika, God of Affliction

This was pretty heavily touted early by the likes of Conley Woods, but it never made the impact on Standard anticipated. EDH isn’t propping this up more than it’s propping up Kruphix and the few times it’s flirted with $6 are confusing and an insult to the god of horizons, frankly.

We can really see the relative difference in distributions between sets here: both the distribution of the cost of a redemption set over the total cards in Journey into Nyx and the distribution of Theros relative to Journey. We have $1 Heliod and that’s a damn sight more playable than Pharika, even though Pharika is a general people are going to try and try to build around.

I’m losing steam, folks. I saved a card I don’t care about for last.

Dealers are not thrilled about this card, so why should I be? At the $1.50 dealers are paying, I think this is okay, since in a few years, even bad gods strike me as $5ish cards (I’m basing this off of what we saw with planeswalkers when there were relatively few of them), but I’m not going to throw cash at Pharika at basically any price. This is played a bit in EDH and that could indicate upside if we’re buying very cheap. The foil can tell us how much EDH play there is.

Care to try and guess the multiplier for the foil?

Did you guess a multiplier of six? I will admit I did not. Not only is it six, it has been for a while and dealers don’t appear to disagree! That’s wacky.

Is EDH propping this up? It must be that, which makes the non-foils a bit more attractive but leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The plateau indicates there isn’t a ton of sales-action happening, but a race to the bottom would throw the price into at least a bit of disarray. This is honestly just mostly puzzling. Still, if the price is this flat and irrespective of Standard play, there is little potential movement in the price at rotation. I’m not bullish on these at the current price. If I could buy at buylist, sure, fine, but I don’t see this being as good a pickup as Kruphix, although that could be pure bias.

Objectively, this card looks strong, but subjectively, I’m not jazzed. With Kruphix seeming like a better pickup, why would I hedge my bets anyhow? Still, if you clicked the link and looked at how many Pharika decks there are (gorgon tribal could be a thing, I imagine, but Damia or Sidisi seem better for that), you might feel differently than I do. I’m leaving these alone, so more for you, I guess.

Something Something Omega

That concludes my series on gods. I’m a little saddened by this realization, because I enjoyed writing this series and how much good feedback I got from all of you about it.

I’ll be back next week with something different, so stay tuned for that. You won’t want to miss the next series I potentially start because I can’t keep it under 10,000 words. Leave your questions and comments in the section below and let’s make some money.

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