Being a MTG Dad

June 19, 2015 Cliff Daigle 19 Comments

By: Cliff Daigle

First of all, Happy Father’s Day to my dad and all the MTG Dads out there!

One of the themes of this game is that it grows when we teach someone how to play it. Some people never find a teacher, they learn via Duels of the Planeswalkers and then Magic Online, but most of us learned from one person or a group of people, others who enjoyed the game and cared about it enough to spread it.

For a couple of years now, I’ve had one thought percolating in my head: How am I going to teach my two daughters how to play? When should I do it?

More recently, the thought has switched: Should I teach them?

My daughters are both under the age of three. This is not a question I have to answer soon, but I have two very conflicting views.

Personally, Magic has been amazing. I’ve met new people, I’ve had financial success with the cards, and there’s been countless hours that were just fun, because of this game.

But there’s a side that is more worrisome. Think about the last FNM you were at. Perhaps it was a Grand Prix, or an SCG Open, or a TCG Diamond event, or any Magic tournament. How many people there acted like winning at Magic was the defining quality of their worth as a person? If they won their match, the feeling was that they were the best in the world, the master of all they surveyed.

If they lost, they went on a tirade against luck, against the winner’s poor play, against the air conditioner working too well or not enough, etc. Maybe they look through the match and say “Of course they had a counter/pump spell!! How could I have missed the signals!?”

Is that the person I am? Is that the person I want my daughters to become?

How am I going to teach my daughters to play this game that I love so much?

Should I teach them? I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I should, because there is a significant number of Magic players who will look down on them for being female. I’m not trying to shame anyone, but let’s be realistic: You likely know someone who takes a loss harder from a woman than they would from a man.

My wife plays Magic, and I’ve seen the reactions of people who are seriously overreacting to losing to her. Would they be as salty if they had lost to me and not to her? Will they attribute losing to me as a lack of skill, whereas my daughter winning will be a matter of bad luck?

Let’s be honest for a moment. You probably know someone who, if they sit down to play a woman in a Magic event, they think, “I’ll beat her easily!” You might even have had this thought.

In all honesty, I have had those thoughts, to my everlasting shame.

I’ve been at enough events, large and small, to hear the talk and catch the conversations about how women there look. I’ve heard the derogatory comments and the snide remarks.

I’ve said nothing. By remaining silent, I’m contributing to the problem.

When you got ready to attend a large event, did you think about your makeup? Did you have to devote time to fixing and maintaining your hair? Were you forced to wonder how many of your opponents would be looking down your shirt?

It’s not acceptable to presume anything based on a person’s appearance. Someone at a Grand Prix wearing sweats and flip-flops isn’t automatically going to smell bad and have limited social skills.

I’ve seen women who don’t want to be involved in the game but are still present, and I wonder how many men would do the same. Which of us would go on food runs, would sit by silent but supportive, who would sacrifice what they want to do in order to be there for a game they don’t understand to be played with people who can be quite unpleasant.

I think that a lot of people, myself included, have taken the ones we care about for granted, and that’s something we should all reflect on.

I want my daughters to take as much joy in this game as I do. I’ve found some of my best friends through Magic, I’ve survived moves and other upheavals thanks to finding a new store to play at. I want them to develop a sense of confidence and insight by playing, just as I have.

But how do I do that?

For all that Magic has an awesome community, there are large and small forces at work. Body shaming is a thing, from taking pictures of buttcracks to a vicious set of Twitch comments about the winner of an SCG event. Even if those aspects are gone by the time my daughters are playing, how many gamers presume a level of inability from females?

Should I even worry about what those gamers are thinking?

At a store I used to go to, there was a man whose two children, a girl about eleven and a boy about eight (I think those were their ages, and if I’m wrong, I apologize) would be 3/8 of the draft pod. I would look at them and think of other activities I did and didn’t have with my family. How marvelously lucky he was, to not only play an awesome game, but to share that experience with those he loved most in the world.

My wife says I’m overthinking this. I want to shelter my daughters from even the spectre of negative experiences. Intellectually, I know I can’t spare them from the pain of the world, but that’s not the point.

She also points out that I wouldn’t be having the same set of worries if I had two sons instead of two daughters. She’s absolutely right. By thinking of my daughters as girls to be protected, I’m feeding into the same erroneous line of thinking. I would probably not be concerned for their mental state or their emotional health if they were boys. How ancient of me.

God help me, I’ve got enough anger issues to think about when it comes to my children. I’ve played out in my head what I’d do the first time some overbearing and belligerent jerk called out an error from my daughter and mocked her for it. Table-flipping may be an option.

What’s a father to do?

There’s always the option of letting them do the things they want to do. Ideally, I don’t even have to try to make it interesting to them. I’m a teacher; I know that trying to force interest onto a child is not going to go well. They just need to see my wife and I enjoying our games and they will follow along.

Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I just let them be who they will be. Maybe they will be control players, who when they first see Dismiss they know there’s not a better spell to cast. Maybe they will be aggro, and have a Swiftspear tattoo someplace.

Maybe I’m just scared of all the things I don’t know.

Before I met my wife, before I had two beautiful yet frustrating children, I was really good at Magic. I was drafting twice to three times a week, all in person because I swore off MTGO. (50,000 cards that I have no hope of ever using or trading!)

This was way back, during Zendikar block. ELO ratings were the norm. I made the top 8 of a Zendikar sealed PTQ by maindecking Tajuru Archer, that silly ‘deal damage to flyers’ Ally who always killed turn two Welkin Tern. My rating was hopping between 1850 and 1900, and I was proud of making the top 100 in Limited play in my region.

None of that mattered when I met my amazing wife, or when my children came along. I left that area, and a vibrant Magic scene, because my family was more important.

I constantly wonder about the home lives of pro Magic players. I know, for instance, that LSV has a wife and a day job, and that he’s able to travel to PTs and events and such with extra time for testing and planning. It’s not like the pros are all solitary hermits; they do have families.

I wouldn’t enjoy such separation, even with a top prize of $40,000 on the line. I can’t believe how much I love the stupid and silly little things about being a dad. The youngest is just starting to eat solid food, and she immediately groks how to use a spoon, causing my wife and I to grin at each other like loons.

I anticipate these little things and when they arrive, it’s like wheeling a card I wanted to first-pick..except it is far, far better. My daughter climbs up the slide, then turns around and sits down, sliding back down the way she came, and the only one happier about it than her is me!

Compared with that, hanging out in a giant hangar with 2,000 other gamers playing for a max prize of $4,000 (before taxes) isn’t that important.

I wasn’t prepared for how efficiently my brain rewired my sense of what is and isn’t important. Magic was paramount. And then, without fanfare, it wasn’t. I never had to choose between them. I wanted the time with my wife and my kids. Sure, I want to play more, but it’s the dessert now. It’s no longer all-consuming.

My wife is going to read that last sentence and laugh. I listen to podcasts, I write weekly, I trade cards online, I watch Magic matches on Twitch and Youtube whenever possible.

I might not play it as much, but Magic is still a big part of my life.

I am certain that my daughters will at least learn to play. I have a battle box in mind, a rough outline, but I won’t need to build it for a few years yet (and there are years of cards yet to be released!) so that’s not an immediate concern.

I do not believe that they, or anyone else, should have to tolerate foolish behavior from gamers of any gender, creed, or belief. It’s taking me years to clean up my language and my behavior, because they don’t yet understand how people can have different personalities depending on who they are around. You don’t need to hear specifics on how awful I can be, but I’m trying to be better.

What I am going to do, and what I’m asking you to do, is to make sure that when you play, you be competitive as the setting calls for, as serious as you want to be, without going overboard. I’m not asking you to just be nice to younger players, as that’s quite condescending. Magic’s competitive history is replete with examples of teenagers taking down big tournaments.

I’m asking you to treat your opponent, or your trading partner, or anyone, with the decency you would want given to your family, your loved ones, your children. Don’t presume anything about the other players. Don’t let your own issues override the enjoyment that someone else is seeking. It’s possible to lose and still have a good time at the event.

I am also asking you to tell people, especially your friends, when they are going too far. Call a judge when someone in a game is derisively snorting at a player’s mistakes. Tell your friend that yes, he’s being an asshole and that he needs to tone it down.

Magic is an easy game to lose at. Don’t make it a game about losing in life as well.

Accumulated Knowledge, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Player Finance – Tournament Finance 101

June 19, 2015 Ross Lennon 1 Comment

Today’s article is going to be the first in a series of semi-related subjects. The theme of the next few weeks is something that gets kind of lost in talks about Magic finance: how to weigh decisions and opportunities as a Magic player, and not just as a finance person. Today, the subject is going to be making the best financial decisions regarding tournaments.

The best example of what I mean is taken from a recent tournament experience that I had with a friend of mine. The two of us were going to attend a TCGplayer Platinum event (a Standard 1K, but it also gave out playmats and points down to top 16) that was being held in Orlando. That’s a little bit of a drive, so I got up pretty early to make sure I was packed and able to eat a decent breakfast. My buddy texted me at 8:00 a.m., half an hour before I was supposed to pick him up, to tell me that there was a Modern PPTQ being held much closer to home later that day. I’m not sure how I was able to develop my response so quickly, but it was (verbatim), “I’d rather pay $30 and win cash than pay $25 and win Dragons of Tarkir packs.”

Choose Wisely

There are a lot of Magic tournaments happening on a lot of different levels in the US right now. While central Florida has always had a strong Magic offering, even in the game’s lean years, it has never been as popular as it is today. This creates the situation of occasionally having to decide which tournament is worth attending. Even if you are not a competitive player and are only looking for trades, the following breakdown should have a lot of information to consider. The type of tournament can often tell you a lot about the other people that will be in attendance, which is a good predictor of whether or not you will find desirable trading partners.

First, what type of tournament is it? This is the most obvious question to ask, but you have to make sure that you unpack the answer fully. Obviously a Legacy and Vintage tournament is going to draw some high-rollers with big collections, but if it is scheduled against a large Standard tournament down the street, it may not even fire off.

More important than the format (because that stuff you can probably figure out on your own) is determining who is involved in running the event. Take the example I discussed up top: my choices were a Standard cash tournament (backed by TCGplayer) or a PPTQ (which is run solely by a local store with the PTQ invite coming from WOTC). In order for a store or event organizer to run a TCGplayer tournament, it has to buy a package from the company and adhere to the rules set forth (the same is true of SCG events). The TCGplayer Platinum event only had 20 players, but because TCGplayer mandates that any tournament run in its name always honor the advertised payout, the tournament organizers couldn’t flake out at the last second (although I’ve seen some try). This means that the TO is required to give out the full $1,000 plus the playmats, points, and other crap that they promised it would, or risk never being allowed to do another one again (although, with only 20 people showing up, that may not be a bad thing).

The PPTQ, on the other hand, had over 50 players, crammed into a much smaller location (needless to say, we were extremely lucky we picked the event we did). The PPTQ tournament organizer didn’t have to pay the upfront cost of a “tournament package,” nor was he beholden to any guaranteed prize support beyond the PTQ invite (which is of no cost to the TO). Both tournaments cost $30, but the winner of the 1K got a guaranteed $400, while the winner of the PPTQ got a box of Modern Masters 2015 and the chance to play in an even larger tournament to make the Pro Tour. If we can assume the price of a Modern Masters box is $200 to $225 (which is what most are clearing for on eBay), then the invitation needs to be worth roughly $200 for the tournaments to have equal payouts (the invite, to be fair, does include that Liliana promo; also, I am ignoring the potential of selling the playmat and point cards for the 1K winner). And while I don’t have written confirmation of what the prizes for second to eighth place were for the PPTQ, what I’ve heard anecdotally doesn’t stack favorably against the payout from the 1K. Also, apparently the AC broke at one point (which is not a good thing to happen to a room filled with Magic players in June in Florida).

In all honesty, I knew that the cash tournament would likely be pretty small, but I didn’t expect it to be less than half the size of the PPTQ (which I did expect to be at least somewhat larger). The cash tournament, as part of TCGplayer’s package, was advertised on the front page of TCGplayer, and got mentioned in some of the constant contact emails that TCGplayer sends to Florida subscribers. Beyond that, in order to know anything about the event, you had to follow the organizer (a small game store outside of Orlando) on Facebook. When TCGplayer offers advertising in its packages, many game stores, especially those who don’t have a large presence in the greater community, just assume that they are paying someone else to do the hard part for them. The truth is, most people don’t bother to read the constant contact emails, or they have tuned out the tournament feed on the right side of the TCGplayer website since it works as basically a cork board for the entire US.

The PPTQ system, on the other hand, is not advertised in the same way, but has the stronger backing of the Wizards website (which isn’t very good, but it has more reach). Since PPTQs are more “official,” and the PPTQ system is very important to players right now, they are more likely to seek them out. Because the current PPTQ system only offers a PTQ invite to the winner, there are a subset of competitive players who will seek out and play in every PPTQ possible, hoping to take one down. Whereas cash tournaments once supplemented a yearly schedule in between PTQs, now PPTQs are often held in competition with each other or one-of cash events.

So far, it seems as though players are valuing PPTQs extremely highly, likely due to their inherent scarcity and the idea that they have variable difficulty. A lot of people end up thinking that if a store that they’ve never heard of is holding a PPTQ, then it will be smaller and therefore easier to win—except that it appears as though they are going to draw a crowd regardless. The only PPTQ I’ve played in was a few months back, in a store with a small local crowd, and they were turning people away the day of.

This is another big factor to consider: is the tournament being held outside of the store’s physical location? PPTQs, especially those being run by stores without a lot of non-FNM tournament experience, are reaching the point where they often include a friendly visit from the fire marshal. The PPTQ the other week had 52 players in a somewhat small store, whereas the 1K was at a hotel (there was also a comic and toy convention the same weekend). The 1K, in addition to the package price that the TO paid TCGplayer, had to pay rent for the space for the day.

When tournament organizers have to pay rent, they usually let other people help, and this means that there was vendor space available! Yes, the twenty-player, cash tournament had two vendor booths (the store hosting the event plus one other). Vendor booths are a delight unto themselves, and if you know the store doing the vending, you can typically play to its strengths. I knew the alternate vendor at the event (I have a friend who works there, although he wasn’t present at the tournament), so I was able to unload a lot of Standard stuff I didn’t want into a Taiga and an Ali from Cairo¹. Most stores are not going to have the space to have a second vendor come in, even if they wanted to (and they don’t), so this cooperation is something you’ll only experience when a TO is shelling out a couple grand in rent for a day.

I’ve only played in one PPTQ so far, and my guess is that the quality trends overall with the quality of the store and its tournament history. I’ve read some horror stories about events being understaffed, although now that local stores aren’t hosting actual PTQs, those stories have seemed less severe.

A Little Self-Examination

Ultimately, you need to make the decision that best compliments your goals. If you want to play on the Pro Tour, then you need to play in a lot of PPTQs (and probably a healthy amount of Grands Prix, if we are being realistic)—there is no other way to get there.

But if you are like me, then you typically want to maximize your tournament opportunities. I don’t play in Magic tournaments every weekend, so when I get the opportunity to, I like to play in the one with the single biggest impact. Look at the value of first place compared to the value of eighth place, and then try to figure out what a top eight split would most likely be. This is the primary reason I am down on PPTQs: the most important part of the payout cannot be split eight ways.

The Star City Games IQ tournaments, by contrast, have fixed this problem by introducing a point structure into the mix. I’d like to see WOTC adopt this technology for the PPTQ system, but the company has publicly stated that it doesn’t want Pro Tours to be too big, which is a problem SCG doesn’t need to consider for its Invitationals. The IQ tournaments also have a guaranteed cash payout. Any time a tournament is giving out cash, it is nice to know that there is another name (SCG or TCGplayer) behind the TO making sure things go off without any snags.

Small Tournaments, Ranked

My personal hierarchy of (small) tournaments is as follows:

TCGplayer 5K (Diamond)
SCG Premier and Elite IQ (5k and 3k, respectively)
TCGplayer 1k (Platinum)
SCG IQ (the other tiers)
Not play Magic and have a lovely family game night
Money Draft with friends
Money Draft with enemies
PPTQ (Standard)
PPTQ (Sealed) – because nobody would show up!
PPTQ (Modern) – because everybody would show up!
Do that thing with my hand and a knife from Alien
SCG Open Trial
Grand Prix Trial
Throwing my cards into the sea while somberly reflecting on life’s pains and sorrows
SCG Game Night

Closing Thoughts

It’s quickly worth mentioning that while the SCG IQ events have a pretty high value, the Open Trials and Game Nights are basically playing slot machines that pay out in playmats or animal-themed trinkets. I never calculate the “value” of a playmat into my expectations of a tournament result, because so many of them are hard to move (this is because the tournament package mats have a higher distribution and less importance than one-off playmats, like GP mats).

TCGplayer points sell well because they can be used for byes in events, they can buy you into the big invitational that just happened, or you can get, like, Frank Lepore’s autograph. The typical value is 1.5 to twice the point value of the card, but sometimes you can negotiate for less. Then again, on the day of a 5K, I’ve seen people pay three times or higher.

Hopefully you enjoyed this first installment on tournament and player finance! And as always, if you know somebody who wants to buy a pile of ugly playmats, point them my way.

1 I blame Sigmund for making me want to buy old stuff.

Finding Value, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

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!

MTGPrice Blog