Danny Brown

Trade Better

6 Comments

Trading is one of the most fun aspects of Magic finance, but it can also be a huge pain. Between dealing with unreasonable people, trade sharks, and a constantly shifting market, actually completing a trade can be quite an undertaking.

But when we do make a good series of trades, it makes it all worth it, right? Flipping five or six uncommons you opened at the prerelease for a mid-tier rare that you trade for a spec target that doubles up and gets you a Thoughtseize or a fetch land is exactly the kind of story that makes people want to get involved in Magic finance. It makes a lot of sense that the MTG finance boom came right after Jonathan Medina’s Pack to Power series: everyone wants to be able to flip bad cards for the best cards, and Medina demonstrated to what extent it could be done.

traderoutes

Trading isn’t nearly as prevalent or popular as it once was, of course. I hardly ever find anyone at my LGS with a binder these days, and when I do, it’s virtually impossible to get any sort of fair deal. In recent experiences, I’m finding that people are either intent on sharking or so afraid of being sharked that they’re too timid to make big trades.

With this in mind, maybe it’s time to take a moment to go over some basic concepts involved in trading. For the casual traders, it will help you feel confident that you’re getting a fair deal. For the financier types, maybe it will help you realize that you don’t need to be getting twice the value as your partner in every trade. Making more trades with smaller value gains is generally more profitable than trying to rip off every person with whom you trade.

Understand Who Has the Power

It’s ten minutes before FNM starts, and you overhear an acquaintance trying to pick up his last Siege Rhino before the event. You’re tuned into MTG finance and know that Travis Allen has been touting this as a good pick-up for some time, and you happen to have a few copies in your binder. You don’t necessarily want to trade any away, but when the guy comes and asks you if you have one available, you figure it can’t hurt to take a look at what he’s offering.

“I’m not really looking to trade a Rhino away,” you say, “But if you make it worth my while, I could be convinced.”

You have the power in this situation. Your trade partner “needs” this card, and you don’t feel a particular drive to trade it away, so a “fair” trade is not to be expected here.

Many players completely fail to grasp this concept. In their minds, the only thing that matters is what the TCGplayer mid says, and if you ask for more than that, then they assume that means you’re trying to rip them off. As a result, these players enter a lot of tournaments with sub-par decks lacking many of the cards they need.

Asking for additional value to encourage you to give up a card you don’t feel particularly driven to unload is not trade sharking, unless you’re lying to your trading partner about what the cards in question are worth. If you start asking for unreasonable amounts of value, you might be approaching shark territory, but as long as your trading partner knows what’s going on, he or she can always just walk away. Then you’re not a shark—you’re just a bad trader who failed to close a deal. It’s when you misrepresent information that things get shady.

This power dynamic shifts a bit if you have cards you’re actively looking to trade away. I’m going to invoke Travis Allen again here, because he touched on this exact topic in his article earlier this week.

Basically, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a small loss on soon-to-rotate cards today if it means dodging a major loss on them tomorrow. I’ll give you a recent example. This past Friday, someone flipping through my binder expressed a passing interest in my Courser of Kruphixes and Sylvan Caryatids I hadn’t managed to get rid of just yet. My eyes lit up when he asked about them. He wasn’t exactly sure he wanted them, and was waffling a bit. Eager to make the trade, I gave him a few dollars in value on a $35 trade, and I made sure to let him know that I was doing that for him.

–Travis Allen

Travis went on to point out that if he didn’t make that trade, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have been able to trade off the cards until they were worth only $20, losing money in the long run.

So in that case, the other guy didn’t need the cards, he had a vague interest in them. That’s not the time to ask for extra value. If you think the card is going to go up or have a particular attachment to it, just don’t trade it. If you’re actively looking to get rid of it in the face of greater losses, give up value if you have to, within reason. Do you want to make the trade or not?

 Trading Horror Story #1

It’s June 1999, which would have made me 14 years old, I guess (yes, I’m an Old™). I have just opened what might be, in my young eyes, the sweetest card in Urza’s Legacy: Palinchron (aside to my aside: holy crap, I didn’t realize this had been ascending from $5 where I picked a copy a few years ago. Paying attention is important).

I don’t remember exactly what I was doing at the LGS that day. I was probably playing a match, and an adult guy I did not know asked to look at my binder. I let him, he asked if the Palinchron was for trade, I told him probably not but maybe, and he asked if he could take it out of my binder. Because I was a dumb kid, I said yes.

It wasn’t until later that night that I realized I’d never negotiated with him, and what do you know? The card wasn’t in my binder anymore, either. I never saw the guy again.

Lessons

  1. Don’t trade while you’re playing a match.
  2. Don’t ask to trade with someone who’s playing a match.
  3. Don’t let people steal from you, especially in such obvious and avoidable ways.
  4. Don’t steal from kids. (This one is especially important!)

Trading Up and Trading Down

“Trading up” refers to trading several cards of lower value into one or more cards of higher value. “Trading down” refers to the opposite: trading a high-value card for lots of cards of lower value.

Another concept players often fail to grasp is the idea that expensive, often out-of-print individual cards are harder to obtain and thus more desirable than an “equal value” amount of many lower-value cards.

Cards that are just above bulk, in the $0.50 to $1 range at TCGplayer mid, cannot just add up to Standard staples using the same valuation method. You may find finance-minded mages willing to trade down real cards for bulk rares, but they’re valuing them at 10 to 25 cents each depending what the card in question is.

Even something like trading actual Standard staples like Thunderbreak Regent or Elspeth, Sun’s Champion into out-of-print Modern or Legacy staples like Vendilion Clique, Tarmogoyf, and dual lands is probably going to require some sweetening by the person trading up. If you’re dealing only in trade, it’s a lot easier to pick up a pile of Abzan cards than it is to find someone in possession of and willing to trade a Volcanic Island.

Unless the person trading down is motivated for one reason or another (I’ve heard of shop owners all too excited to trade dual lands for Standard staples that people at their LGS will actually buy, for example), the person trading up should just understand they need to give up value. I recall a several-year-old Corbin Hosler article discussing trading a dual land down to a player for Standard cards (Huntmasters were involved, I’m sure of it) and Corbin explaining to the other guy that he was going to value his cards at buylist prices. The guy did not take it well, which is an example of why trading is so hard these days. Corbin was ultimately doing the guy a favor and he was not concealing information for gain, but the guy still thought it was unfair. This is why it’s so important to understand when you’re trading down or trading up.

Trading Horror Story #2

Basically by a fluke occurrence caused by the most casual of these events I have ever seen, I managed to win a Dark Ascension Game Day, including the playmat, with a non-optimized version of Illusions despite Delver being a well-established deck by that point. I just showed up because it was free to play and everybody who showed up got a Strangleroot Geist promo, which I thought was super sweet.

stranglerootgeist_MGD

I had only returned to Magic a few months earlier, at the Innistrad prerelease, so I was not very good at Magic, only vaguely aware of MTG finance (though I’ve always been value-conscious in most areas of life, so I was getting there quickly) , and not entirely comfortable in the LGS atmosphere. And get this—pretty much the only format I was playing at the time was Standard. (For real, though, I loved Scars-Innistrad Standard and would play it again if I could.)

I was playing with my sweet Gameday Champion playmat at FNM, and a guy kept asking me to trade it. I didn’t really want to, but he was persistent, so finally, I just said, “Sure, but you have to pay extra. I want thirty dollars.”

darkascensionplaymat

I had noticed that playmats generally sell for $10 to $20, so I thought I was really getting a good bargain here. Stupidly, I had failed to look on eBay and notice that these were going from $50 to $100 at the time. I traded it away for two Gravecrawlers and other junk I didn’t really want or need, basically because the guy wouldn’t leave me alone about it.

Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. A guy I was friendly with approached me later in the evening and said he was going to offer me four Seachrome Coasts (valued at $20 at the time) for it. This is when I was informed of the mat’s true value, and I was just crushed. The guy and his buddy took it upon themselves to go give $35 to $40 in value to get it back and offered to just give it back to me. Obviously, I told the guy it was his to keep, but he gave me a Seachrome Coast anyway, making it so I got a little bit more value for the mat and he got it a little cheaper than he originally intended. Horror stories suck, but this community can truly be awesome sometimes. (Sadly, neither of those guys play Magic anymore. For now.)

Lessons

  1. Don’t let yourself be bullied into a trade.
  2. Don’t trade something without knowing its value. You might regret it.
  3. Make good friends.

 All Things Being Equal

The best and easiest trades are when you have cards your trading partner needs, she has cards that you need, and those cards’ values are close enough that trades can go straight across with maybe some random throw-ins on one side or another.

Of course, Magic financiers don’t often have needs, per se. There have been times where I was trading with no particular goals but to make value. In these situations, you’re looking to have cards that people will need, so that you can have power in trades to get a little extra value. If you’ve got a bunch of stuff that nobody wants, you’re not going to accomplish your goals.

What about trading with financiers? Is it just not worth the time? In my experience, it often isn’t, but if you feel like doing it, it really becomes a game of who is speculating on what. You’re not going to get much current value out of your trading partner, so you need to figure out what he is bullish on that you’re bearish on, and vice versa. This is a way that two financiers can walk out of a trade and both feel happy.

Finally, I recall back in my Standard days that Silverblade Paladin was going for $9 or $10 at Star City Games but had a TCGplayer mid of $12. If you know anything about SCG prices, you know that it’s very rare for SCG to have a price below TCGplayer mid. I used this knowledge to trade for Paladins with people who used SCG prices and to trade away Paladins to people using TCGplayer prices. Noting value differences like this can often make you money.

As a general rule of thumb, it favors you to trade up using SCG prices if possible, and to trade down using TCGplayer prices if possible. SCG prices on high-value cards are closer to market price than bulk rares, which all get marked up to at least $0.50.

Trading Horror Story #3

One time, I was looking through a guy’s binder and a page had a crushed cockroach on it. That’s extremely gross, but I just chose to not mention it and quickly turned the page.

Then I got to the center of the binder, where the folios fold and there’s a little space in the spine. The entire spine of the binder was filled with cockroaches. An onlooker remarked in horror about it, I sat there shocked and appalled, and my trading partner profusely apologized and said he had been dealing with a huge infestation at home.

I did not complete a trade in that instance.

Lessons

  1. Don’t live your life in such a way that this ever happens.

That’s all I’ve got for this week, kids. Until next time!

Uncategorized

Tiny Thursdays: Shu Yun’s Tempest

By Guo Heng

Welcome to the first instalment of Tiny Thursdays, a column dedicated to exploring Tiny Leaders decks, with an emphasis on the financial side of the cards used in the deck.

Tiny Leaders is a fledging format. After the Cambrian-like explosion the format experienced early this year, the hype for the Tiny Leaders simmered down. However that does not mean the format was a flash in a pan. While the incredible momentum that propelled the format during the early part of the year died down, the format is still growing.

The Tiny Leaders subreddit and Facebook group today has double the number of subscribers compared to when I first wrote about them. Tiny Leaders even have their own official forum which launched early this month, but it has yet to achieve the activity level found in the subreddit and Facebook group.

More importantly, Tiny Leaders is still driving card prices, with the latest Tiny Leaders-related increase being Blasting Station. Tiny Thursdays aims to the contribute to the growing Tiny Leaders content out there, and explore the format from a financial perspective. This column will feature a Tiny Leaders brew each week and discuss financially relevant cards in the deck.

If there are any decks you would like to see featured, feel free to leave a comment below or catch me at Twitter @theguoheng. This week, we shall start with a leader I’ve always wanted to build around: Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest.

Shu Yun Goes to Value Town

Shu Yun Tempo by Guo Heng
Decklist generated using TappedOut.net

Shu Yun is most often compared to Geist of Saint Traft, one of the undisputed top tier decks in the format, with some arguing that it would be better to just cut the red and go Geist if you are gunning for a highly competitive build. After all, Geist decks are more streamlined and the majority of their card pool overlaps with those used in Shu Yun.

There are two reasons why I gravitated to Shu Yun rather than Geist. First off, having Red gives you more options for efficient removals like Lightning Bolt, Flame Slash, Fire/Ice and Lighting Helix rather than having to lean on enchantment-based removals like Oblivion Ring and Banishing Light to bolster the number of answers in the list.

Board presence king in Tiny Leaders and Red gives you a removal suite that does compromise your tempo, on top of access to much needed sweepers in the sideboard like Anger of the Gods and Pyroclasm to shore up the matchup against swarm decks like Ezuri Elfball, and the increasingly popular Grenzo Goblins.

The other impetus to run tricolor Shu Yun over bicolor Geist of Saint Traft is Dack Fayden. Dack Fayden is probably the best planeswalker you can run in Tiny Leaders due to the ubiquity of Swords in the format.  An unanswered Sword steals games and nothing turns the tide like stealing an opponent’s Sword and bashing him or her with it. From the playtesting I did with Shu Yun, I don’t think I have lost a game in which I stole opposing Swords.

Dack’s +1 was surprisingly useful even though it does not generates card advantage. Dack’s Faithless Looting filters away those late game Mana Leak and unwanted lands. Dack’s only downside is that he is already $27, and I could not list him as one of the pick-up targets in the next segment.

This Shu Yun list was designed based on the same philosophy Modern Jeskai ascribes to, that is to out-tempo and out-value your opponent. The deck switches gears at ease, depending on the matchup and draw and utilizes a suite of cheap, efficient removals to allow you to mount your offensive and control the board at the same time.

Young Pyromancer and Monastery Mentor fortify your board position while you cast answers to control the board, pulling you ahead both in the tempo and card advantage race. Stoneforge Mystic digs you the Sword for the occasion. Mantis Rider is a good tempo creature that plays the role of attacker and defender.

The removal suite consists of the usual Jeskai fare, a.k.a. the best one mana removals in the format. I’ve added a Condemn as an extra one mana answer because I realised that one mana removals were something I always love drawing while I was playtesting the deck. They always trade up and as a tempo deck, it’s exactly what I want. The more expensive removals, Fire/Ice and Electrolyze usually net card advantage. Detention Sphere and Council’s Judgment are necessary evils to answer opposing Swords.

Feel free to trade one-for-one in the early game. We have the ability to refuel with Ancestral Vision and to some extent, Dack Fayden. This build guns for the midrange game, which is why I’ve included Ancestral Visions in the list.

Now that let’s take a look at the cards in the deck that are financially relevant.

The Boss Himself

Shu Yun Price

The graph above depicts Shu Yun’s foil price. I’ve always preferred to invest in foils for cards that are used as commanders or leaders. They tend to generate a larger return and more importantly, buffer better against reprints.

Shu Yun foils at $7.64 denotes a 13.6x multiplier on non-foil copies, which are going for a paltry $0.46, signifying his popularity both as a commander and leader. Shu Yun has been getting a lot of attention as a commander since he was spoiled, and rightfully so. Shu Yun is one of the most fun to build around commanders to come out from recent sets. There are multiple ways to build Shu Yun: you can either go voltron, or thread down the combo route. And Shu Yun is allegedly quite sick in 1v1.

Shu Yun is the only Jeskai leader in Tiny Leaders, which explains his tremendous popularity in the format. Jeskai has always been a competitive color combination in eternal formats and prior to the printing of Shu Yun, Tiny Leaders players have to resort to a generic 2/2 ‘legendary creature with a UWR casting cost’ to play Jeskai.

Does Shu Yun’s popularity in Commander and Tiny Leaders make foil copies a good pick-up? Certainly. Just not right now. For two reasons. First off there is something peculiar going on with Shu Yun’s price.  Shu Yun’s foil buylist price dropped 24% from $3.12 to $2.51 two weeks back. However, two days ago Shu Yun saw his foil price hike as one major vendor increased their price for foil Shu Yun.

Whatever happens, it would be safer to wait until Fate Reforged hits peak supply at the end of May when DTK-DTK-FRF drafts are displaced by Modern Masters 2015.

The Loothouse

Desolate Lightouse Price

Desolate Lighthouse, which also sees play in Modern Scapeshift and Modern Splinter Twin, besides being a good utility land in Commander and Tiny Leaders, is just a $0.54 card. And Desolate Lighthouse would not be reprinted in Modern Masters 2015.

I think non-foil Desolate Lighthouse is a great pick-up at its current price. Foils are at $6.08, which is a whooping 11.2x multiplier from the non-foils. Either the foil is overpriced, or the non-foil is underpriced, and with the Modern and Commander play it is seeing, I am compelled to think that it is the non-foil that is underpriced.

The Catchall

Detention Sphere Price

Detention Sphere is another card in the Shu Yun list above which I think is underpriced. Detention Sphere is also a mainstay in Geist of Saint Traft Tiny Leaders and is a strict upgrade to Oblivion Ring as it catches those pesky tokens on top of everything else. Token strategies are not insignificant in the format. There are spirit tokens from Teysa and Lingering Souls, Grenzo’s goblin tokens, Thopter Foundry tokens, Bitterblossom tokens and the list goes on.

Detention Sphere is a decent buy in at under $1, but I would not go in too deep. It is a popular enchantment in Commander and could well be reprinted in the next Commander set.

That is all for this week’s Tiny Leaders segment. If there are any decks you would like to see featured, let me know in the comments below or beam me at Twitter @theguoheng.

 

Accumulated Knowledge

New World Offers

19 Comments

Magic, ultimately, is a game of leveraging imperfect information. You know what cards are in your hand and deck, you know what cards are in play, but the rest is a slowly revealed logical puzzle. You know nothing about your opponent’s deck when you sit down to play1, and your most immediate goal is to deduce his or her strategy in order to best counter it. Failing to use every shred of information to your advantage, while concealing as much of your own as possible, is only making your goal—winning—more difficult. Should trading be the same way?

For much of Magic‘s life, trading was also a game of imperfect information. For the first few years, Wizards kept a staggering amount of set information private. The company didn’t disclose the rarity of cards, nor print public set lists.

BRIEF ANECDOTAL ASIDE: Did you know there was a basic Island on the rare sheet for Alpha and Beta? Wizards didn’t want people to “figure out” what the rare card in the pack was, so they made one of the rares an Island. Awesome. Thanks, gang.

It was up to players and collectors (remember, prior to Chronicles, there were a lot of purely dedicated collectors) to know what cards were rarer than others, which ones were valuable, and what they could afford to trade away. You’ll often hear stories of people trading away dual lands for Shivan Dragons, or people giving up commons for rares—even Mark Rosewater himself traded his Fungusaur for his father’s Mox Emerald (both of those cards are rare, but which one would you rather have?). The resources available were woefully inadequate, and most traders determined value based on gut instinct. The internet, the great equalizer in information access, merely congealed this confluence of guesswork. It also looked like a hot mess.

portfolio_aol_main

Over the next couple of years, Magic trading developed some rudimentary tools, none more important at the time than pricing magazines. Players would carry around their copy of Scrye, Inquest, or Beckett, and those prices were gospel—at least until the next month’s issue arrived. It is staggering to think about now, but for the majority of players, prices were only updated about once a month, and that was on whatever schedule fit the publisher. Imagine if we only got “prices” once a month today: if prices were published based on pre-Pro Tour numbers, people would be trading Dragonlord Atarka at $7 for a month, only to see it bumped up to $20 a few weeks later.

The good news is that we no longer live in a world of imperfect information with regards to Magic pricing and finance. In fact, the access to up-to-the-minute information is so ubiquitous, that it may be hurting trading. Try to remember the last time you made a trade where both parties didn’t have their smart phone out looking up prices. It’s been a while, right? True or false: “How to Save a Life” by The Fray was playing in the background. …I knew it.

Recently, and this is a sentiment I’ve heard expressed by multiple others, it seems as though casual trading on the whole is down. My personal take on this is that people have become so concerned about trading away value to “sharks” that they are afraid to trade away something with potential value. I know that, based on my own experience (Yes, Reddit, I am using personal experience as the basis for my opinion), I have traded face to face only twice since GP New Jersey, and one was with a close, personal friend (I took a bit of a loss just to help him get a Modern deck put together)2. Trades at my LGS seem to be rarer than trades in the NFL3, and I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even carry a trade binder most of the time. When I do take a binder to an event, it is with the understanding that most of it will get buylisted to vendors.

BRIEF FOURTH-WALL BREAKING ASIDE: I typically save this kind of stuff until the end, but I’m not sure how many people actually make it that far. If you have any experiences with trading recently, good or bad, I’d love to hear them. Have you noticed a decline in face-to-face trading opportunities? Are people more reluctant? Now, get ready for one hell of a segue…

Despite the (possible) downswing of face-to-face trading, there is another way, and it seems to be doing better than ever. PucaTrade is about to see its millionth trade (any time now!), and after its successful Indiegogo campaign, there are a lot of new features coming down the pipeline.

Even though I have not been face-to-face trading nearly as much lately, my Puca game has been strong. One is not a total replacement for the other, however, and I want to talk about my personal use of the service, and how to fit it into the larger framework of a trading system.

The most immediate difference between PucaTrade and face-to-face trading is the costs of shipping, both monetary and temporal. The latter is roughly the same as ordering a card from an online store: it will arrive within a week, and there is a very small chance your card(s) will get lost or ruined in the mail4. Do not expect a card that is confirmed sent to you on Wednesday to arrive in time for Friday Night Magic.

The cost of time is a cost you pay on cards coming in, the monetary cost of shipping (stamps and other supplies) is one that you pay on cards going out. If you are primarily sending cards within the United States5, the cost is going to consist of a 49-cent stamp plus an envelope, toploader, sleeve, and some tape—maybe 65 to 75 cents, total. With PucaTrade, there are some additional features built into that cost that few people acknowledge: you are also “paying” for the site’s infrastructure and exposure (also, you’re helping the USPS, if that’s something you’re into). I have had a small amount of issues with trades on Puca, all of which were resolved swiftly and fairly by the support team. It is also a great feeling when you are able to unload something that has been rotting away in a binder for months to someone who genuinely wants it, and will give you the full amount in trade for it. However, since you want to get the absolute most for your money, I suggest not mailing out any cards that are less than the price of postage (I personally don’t often send out anything less than around 300 points), and when possible, bundle trades so that you can put multiple cards in the same envelope. Every time I commit to a trade, I click on my partner’s page to see what else I can send to him or her.

Another great thing about PucaTrade is that the infrastructure I mentioned encourages more people to trade. Because you know you are protected, more people who wouldn’t trade in person are encouraged to send their cards out. They also don’t feel pressured by the person sitting across from them, and are more willing to send away something for it’s fair price today than fretting about its potential price tomorrow. I suspect that, psychologically, there is something at play in the sense that when you see cards coming to you, you want to send more out to guarantee more coming in. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, I just play one on television.

PucaTrade is not for everyone, however. If you are someone who is established on eBay or the Magic Online Trading League (MOTL), it is probably more worthwhile for you to get a percentage of the card’s value in cash versus 100 percent in eventual trade.

Also, while PucaTrade offers a wide range of exposure, it is a different type than we typically expect. Rather than broadcasting what you have to everyone (like on eBay), it is really everyone else broadcasting what they want. Nobody will trade for your crimped foil Russian Godsire unless you write it in your profile and they happen to read it and they happen to want it. Those are the kinds of cards that you want cash for, and that’s the type of thing you are better off advertising on eBay, MOTL, etc.

Personally, I use PucaTrade as a way of filtering in and out specs and cards I don’t have long-term faith in. I’ve opened up about nine copies of Dromoka’s Command, and it currently has a best buylist price (so easy to find thanks to MTGPrice!) of $5.12. Considering that I would have to pay the same shipping costs to send it to either StrikeZone (in this case) or a PucaTrader, it is in my best interest to get 937 points in trade. Assuming I sent out a playset this way (let’s call the shipping cost an even buck, since we don’t need four stamps), I can expect to get $19.48 in cash or $37.47 in trade—almost double! I don’t expect non-foil copies of any of the commands to be higher than $5 to $7 in a couple of months, so either option is likely a smart move, but that trade credit can be turned into things that I do have long-term faith in (or foils for my derpy Modern deck). By sprinkling your want list with cheap spec targets, you can get into a card at its floor in trade, which can allow you to sit on copies longer. You can also just ramp into Power, apparently (congrats, Chris!).

So that’s all I have to say about PucaTrade. I tried not to repeat the “Puca is so great!” articles that have been thrown out ad nauseam over the last couple years, but I do genuinely like the service and use it daily.

As always, I’d love to hear what y’all think, and I’ll see you next week!

Best,

Ross

1 Most of the time, unless you’re in the Top 8 of a Pro Tour, playing a friend, or a sneaky sneak. Many bothans died to secure this decklist.

Mon_Mothma

2 The other trade was with a guy at my LGS who absolutely needed a card that we were out of stock on. That’s what it takes these days, apparently.

3 Philip Rivers will go to the Titans, and that team will still be terrible.

4 I always tell people to write “NON-MACHINABLE, DO NOT BEND” on their envelopes, but the US postal service is starting to charge more postage for non-machinable mail.

5 Sorry, friends in other parts of the world—I’m not familiar with how your national postal system works.

Corbin Hosler

Supply, Demand, and Dragons

3 Comments

By: Corbin Hosler

The following is a common conversation you hear, sometimes even from me, in regards to Abrupt Decay:

“This card is so good. It’s the next major eternal player, and you’re finding it all over. It even pops up in Tiny Leaders! You’re crazy to not hoard these.”

And it’s true. The do-it-all rare from Return to Ravnica forms the backbone of many a Modern and Legacy deck. It’s an all-star and hasn’t been reprinted yet, and it has no obvious reprinting on the horizon. People hoard like mad because they expect it to be the next Snapcaster Mage (or whatever other staple you prefer) in terms of growth, moving well past $20.

Abrupt Decay is $12 according to TCGplayer mid and MTGPrice’s Fair Trade Price algorithm. You know what else is $12 today? Thunderbreak Regent. Both rares from large sets; both sitting at the same price point. One is an eternal powerhouse and one is a powerful Standard card and sure-to-be a casual favorite for years to come, but there’s also a (sweet) promo printing of this one, as well.

thunderbreakregent

What can we learn from this?

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

If you had a copy of the dragon, would you trade it straight across for an Abrupt Decay? I sure would. After all, Thunderbreak Regent may be a good long-term hold, but it’s going to get much cheaper before it gets more expensive. Decay, on the other hand, has been a staple at its current price for a while, and the overall growth trend has been nothing but up over the last year.

This tells me one of two things: either Decays are massively underpriced right now or Thunderbreak is overpriced. While there’s some argument for both sides, I’m going to go with the latter.

Standard is a great driver of prices, but in Magic finance, we’re concerned not as much with what offers us the best chance to win in Standard right now, but what offers us the most upside financially. And as I look over Dragons of Tarkir, it’s hard to find many cards that fit that bill.

The reason? That topic you always hear bandied about but rarely examined in action in Magic: supply and demand.

Back to School

I don’t have a business degree (though I did get a few years into the program before ultimately being forced to choose between business and writing when I learned I would be unable to complete both). I’ll assume most of you don’t have a business degree, either.

1dondraper

Luckily, what we’re talking about today is taught in Econ 101 classes across the world, though it’s often ignored when it comes to MTG finance.

According to Wikipedia, there are four basic tenets of supply and demand:

  1. If demand increases and supply remains unchanged, a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price.
  2. If demand decreases and supply remains unchanged, a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price.
  3. If demand remains unchanged and supply increases, a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price.
  4. If demand remains unchanged and supply decreases, a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price.

Supply and demand is what is truly at the heart of the price of every card in Magic. It’s why Liliana of the Veil is now pushing $100 and a former all-star like Terravore is riding an extreme sled downhill financially.

goblinrocksled

So now that we are internet experts in supply and demand, let’s apply these principles to the two cards we’re comparing today.

First up, Abrupt Decay. Demand is fairly constant at this point, and so is supply. We haven’t had a huge push for Modern since Decay rose to its current price almost a year ago. People who play the decks it goes in mostly already play them, and everyone else is being held back not by Decays, but by stuff like Tarmogoyf. That creates a ceiling on demand for the time being.

Now let’s look at the Regent. Demand is huge right now. The card is great in Standard, and there’s dragon EDH and kitchen-table dragons and all other manner of dragon tribal to give this thing some love.

But the discrepancy comes on the supply side. Here, we see a card that is still being drafted and will be for another month or so. Magic Online redemption will also be impacting Dragons prices soon. Both of these things will continue to increase supply for the next month or two before reaching a point like Abrupt Decay, where supply becomes more or less constant.

Broken down like this, it’s clear that we have a case of the third tenet of supply and demand above, where demand will remain unchanged and supply will increase. And because Wikipedia never lies, I guess we have to believe that a surplus will occur and a lower equilibrium price will be reached.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the cards don’t matter. It could be the dawn of Magic or the next Pro Tour, but what the card reads doesn’t matter at all. The only thing that matters in regards to price is supply and demand, and that’s one of the most important Magic finance lessons you can learn.

This isn’t rocket science to anyone following the financial side of Magic. But it is worth articulating as we move into what is going to be a very busy few months for Magic. Modern Masters 2015 is just over the horizon, and Origins waits beyond that. If we want to talk about Dragons, we’re quickly running out of time.

There’s another important tenet of supply and demand when it comes to Magic: peak supply. It’s that point where there will realistically not be much more of a particular set opened, but it’s still new enough that copies are abundant. Khans of Theros is at peak supply right now; Fate Reforged and Dragons of Tarkir are soon to follow.

But we’re not there yet. And that means all those juicy spec targets in Dragons of Tarkir are not yet ripe for the picking. Some of them, like Thunderbreak Regent, are a long way from it. Haven of the Spirit Dragon is another card I’m super excited about in the long-term, but the price is way too high right now.

Typically, hitting peak supply is enough to push these cards down low enough to pick up for the long-term, and that’s a strategy that’s worked very well in the past. But I think this is a unique circumstance where that may not actually be the case.

The Factors

  • Because of Modern Masters 2015, Dragons will be quickly forgotten and unloved, meaning many fewer packs opened than we might otherwise expect.
  • Many of the long-term “casual” targets are actually seeing play in Standard. That means peak supply may not actually represent the lowest price.
  • Because of these two factors, we may not see Dragons of Tarkir cards bottom out as hard as their counterparts from Khans of Tarkir.

So what does this mean for the two cards we introduced in the opener? Modern Masters 2015 is going to push more ‘Goyfs into the hands of players and drive up interest in Modern overall, and I expect Abrupt Decay will be seeing upward growth this summer.

Thunderbreak Regent, which will stay relatively high compared to other Standard cards, is on a completely different trajectory than Abrupt Decay right now. And that goes for basically everything in Dragons of Tarkir. Have some sweet Dragonlords? Trade them away while you can. With peak supply not here yet, they’re going to be cheaper before they’re more expensive.

I hope I’ve illustrated why I believe moving out of Dragons cards is a good idea right now, no matter how much they’re tearing up tournaments. But I do want to talk about the long-term outlook of the set before I go.

Looking Ahead

Remember when the set came out and everyone was jokingly calling it “Dragons Maze of Tarkir”? Okay, maybe that was just me applying (what I considered) a witty name to a set that many were underwhelmed by. The expected value of a box before the release was a pitiful $80 or $90, and people were panning the set.

Yeah, they were wrong. The EV is up to $130 and the set has been a hit in Standard.

hitrun

Frankly, I never cared about what it did in Standard. For me, this set is all about the long-term.

I’m not seeing anything like Liliana or Snapcaster Mage—cards that will define eternal formats—in the set, but I am seeing something similar to Rise of the Eldrazi. That is, a set filled to the brim with casual and Commander goodies. The Dragonlords are the best examples, but Thunderbreak is great, as is Haven of the Spirit Dragon and Sidisi, Undead Vizier and even something innocuous like Dragon Tempest (remember that Crucible of Fire was a $5 card before the reprinting).

And I was excited when everything was cheap. All these cards I loved as long-term specs were going to be pennies and we could all load up! Alas, it hasn’t worked out that way, and that means I’ve had to adjust my outlook accordingly.

While I believe it’s correct right now to get out of Dragons of Tarkir cards, I plan to keep a close eye on when that changes. If rotation comes along in a few months and everyone is so enthralled with Modern or Battle for Zendikar that they’re happy to move suddenly cheap Dragons cards, I will be happily snapping them up. With this set lasting through two rotations, that won’t be a shock to see happen at some point.

But even if that doesn’t happen and prices stay high, as they well could, I’m willing to be patient. This set will be a gold mine in three to five years. I know not many people look that far ahead, and certainly not many writers make that a basis of their writing, but the long term has always been my preferred outlook. If we have to wait for final rotation to lower the prices on these cards, I’m willing to wait. But rest assured, when the time comes, I’ll be picking these up in force, because dragons are second only to angels in casual appeal.

sexappeal

Of course, we have plenty of time to see these things come to pass. But they will, so file this one in the back of your mind and be ready to pull it out again here in six months or a year.

In the meantime, prepare yourself for the upcoming Modern Masters 2015 spoilers we’ll soon be receiving. It’s going to be a wild ride.

 

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY