The Gilded Goblin

Ancestral Recall: Casual Demand and Why it’s Important

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Jared is on vacation this week, so in the meantime enjoy this piece he originally wrote on March 3rd, 2014.

By: Jared Yost

This one goes out to you casual players. You’re the heart of the game and the reason why Wizards has continued to become more and more successful as the years go on.

Let’s face it, without casual demand like players buying individual booster packs Wizards would close their doors sooner rather than later. The demand for the game and its cards cannot be sustained by the singles market alone. Sure, more financially minded players realize that it is a losing game to keep cracking packs in the hope that you’ll score at least three Brimaz, but for many players the act of opening a pack, smelling the cards, and going through each one and even sometimes being surprised by a valuable card in the pack can’t be understated. There is a reason that Magic’s de facto comic strip is called Cardboard Crack. We can all be severely addicted to our hobbies and Magic doesn’t escape this phenomenon.

One of the ways I learned to save money playing Magic was to stop cracking packs since it is one of the most inefficient ways to acquire valuable cards for your collection. As a casual player though, finance is the last thing on your mind. One of the main reasons that you play the game is to crack packs. Cracking packs is so awesome that they created the Limited format based on around it, because even binder grinders and highly competitive players need a way to crack packs other than to just open them. Not you. You’re just fine with crackin‘ ‘em open, and the more the better. What I’m now going to tell you is that there is a way for you to still satiate your addiction while not throwing value out the window, but it isn’t for the faint of heart.

As players, we can capitalize on our own addiction by setting aside a booster box from each set we want to purchase and then later sell them down the road at a profit as sealed product. Now, I realize that the temptation of opening that booster box may be too much for some of you, yet a very clear pattern that has emerged from sealed product is that it is bound to go up in value over the years.

Getting Value from Booster Boxes

Sealed product has a proven history of going up in value and booster boxes are the prime example of this. Setting aside a booster box from each set you want to buy is a great way to pay your way forward in Magic. If you’re going to buy two booster boxes when a set comes out and maybe even get a deal then, why not set one aside in your closet and sell it a few years later when it has doubled or more in value? A lot of people even purchase cases though this is too rich for my blood. Why not set aside two booster boxes, even three booster boxes from a case?

Let’s do the math for Innistrad, which is a fairly recent set and follows this trend. These were the preorder prices for Innistrad before it came out September 30th, 2011:

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If we bought a case:

$519.95 + ~$20 shipping = $539.95 total

$539.95 / 6 boxes = $89.99 per box

If we bought two boxes (closer to an actual causal purchase):

($89.75 * 2) + ~$8 shipping = $187.5

  • This purchase is more expensive per box (~$93.75 per box) but cheaper overall.

It’s now the current day and we loved drafting Innistrad. We want to do a few triple Innistrad flashback drafts of the set. (None of that Dark Ascension nonsense, we’re pure Innistrad only!)

Now that we know how much this would have cost us when preordering, let’s find out how much it would cost us now:

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Holy moly what a difference!

Case:

$1067 per case (which is the only seller, it could easily jump up in price again.)

+ ~$20 shipping = $1,087 total

$1,087 / 6 boxes = $181.17 per box

Two Boxes:

($169.99 * 2) + ~$8 shipping = $347.98

If you could afford the initial purchase up front back in 2011 two booster boxes of Innistrad today was worth 64% of a case if preordered when the set came out! If you could restrain yourself and set aside three booster boxes, you would have recouped 94% of what you originally spent. Not too shabby for basically doing nothing and still cracking three or four booster boxes.

If you bought two booster boxes of Innistrad back in 2011 and then set one aside in a closet until now you could sell it and reclaim 91% of your initial purchase in 2011. The second booster box has practically paid for the first one.

For the more financially minded, this probably seems pretty obvious. “Duh, the set is out of print, of course I can sell boxes at a premium.” What most people don’t realize however is that this is one of the safest ways to make money from Magic. That’s right, even sealed product like booster boxes isn’t off the table when it comes to picking things that gain value. It might take you a while to find a buyer but this is probably the lowest risk call you can make as a speculator that will guarantee you a return. It’s basically the index fund of the Magic world.

Let’s look at Return to Ravnica, which I’m sure most of you are definitely familiar with and see if the trend holds for more recent sets. Here are prices from September 2012:

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Back in September 2012, you could preorder Return to Ravnica for basically the same cost as Innistrad (though cases seem to be pricier). I note this because sometimes Wizards will increase their pack price MSRP. The last increase was when packs went from $3.25 to $3.99 MSRP when Time Spiral was released in 2006. Thankfully this has not happened in quite a while, though it makes me feel like they may increase their pack price soon.

Anyways back to the math:

Case:

$535.99 per case + ~$20 shipping = $555.99 total

$555.99 / 6 boxes = $92.67 per box

Two Boxes:

($89.94 * 2) + ~$8 shipping = $187.88 ($93.94 per box)

Again, boxes are slightly more expensive when bought individually because sellers will charge more for shipping individual boxes.

These are the current prices today:

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Hmm, they haven’t gone up in value too much. If we go by the lows:

Case:

$565.00 per case + ~$20 shipping = $585.00 total

$585.00 / 6 boxes = $97.50 per box

Two Boxes:

($92.49 * 2)  + ~$8 shipping = $192.98 ($96.49 per box)

From these calculations for Return to Ravnica then and now we can see:

1. It seems like the price has remained stagnant for Return to Ravnica boxes so far since it only went up $3, unlike Innistrad which doubled.

2. Buying Return to Ravnica in case form today is noticeably more expensive than buying it per box if you were to just buy six boxes. Usually individual boxes are more expensive compared to box price per case. I’m predicting this is because the set is currently in a state of flux, where vendors may have lowered their box prices to get them out the door to make room for future product. We can see this with Cataclysm Games, where if you buy six boxes (($92.95 * 6) + ~$10 shipping = $567.7) versus a case ($569.95 + $10 shipping = $579.95) you’re actually saving $12.25.

3. If we preordered a case and saved three boxes, or preordered two boxes and saved one, we have yet to see a significant return on that investment 1 year, 5 months later. We only gained ~$5 per box if we ordered by the caseload and only ~$2.50 per box if we bought individual boxes. This leads me to believe that there is a lot of Return to Ravnica product out there.

We seem to have conflicting evidence. On the one hand Innistrad has gained significant value but on the other hand Return to Ravnica has not. Am I missing something here? Was Innistrad that much more popular than Return to Ravnica? (Well, I do think that triple Innistrad draft is still a popular format at this point and is more popular than triple Return to Ravnica draft (Pack Rat!)). Was Innistrad printed significantly less than Return to Ravnica? Is that two year birthday for a set that important? Maybe a little of all these reasons is why Return to Ravnica sealed product has stagnated.

One reason I’d venture to guess that Innistrad has climbed up in price so quickly is that it has valuable eternal staples like Liliana, Geist, and Snapcaster. Return to Ravnica currently does not contain as many valuable eternal staples.

My best guess though? Not enough time has passed. Given enough time Return to Ravnica will go up in value. If we use the index funds example, you’re looking just to outperform the market, not become the next penny stock mega winner. (That is, pick up a random $0.20 rare and hope that it spikes to $10+.) There is no doubt in my mind that Return to Ravnica is a very popular set and I am sure in time this will become evident as the price of RtR sealed product goes up. It just looks like hitting that 2nd birthday is the important defining characteristic of the price bump for booster boxes.

Getting Value from Other Casual Products

Another way you can tell that casual players are so important is because Wizards has been releasing new products on a more consistent schedule than ever before in their history. Back in the day, we were lucky to get a core set once every two years (which everyone hated because it only consisted of reprints) and the three block sets of the year (one big set in the fall, and two smaller sets spaced out through winter). This lead to a lot of stagnant Magic. It was easy to get bored. This created cycles of people leaving the game then coming back later once more unpopular sets rotated from Standard.

These days more people are coming back to the game than ever and they’re staying. Combine this with the addition of all the brand new players per year and you have a recipe for success. Let’s go over some of the ways that Wizards has catered to the casual crowd:

Commander Decks (Commander 2011, Commander 2013)

Here were the price of Commander Decks in 2011 about six months after they came out:

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Here are what they are today:

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(Heavenly Inferno is currently ending on auctions at anywhere from $90 for non-English versions to up to $200 for English versions)

Very obvious upward trend in prices. Even if you bought the unpopular commander decks at the time (that is, the decks without Legacy staples in them) you still made out like a bandit if you waited to sell. They were all selling for about MSRP even six months after their release.

This is why a lot of Magic financiers recommended for Commander 2013 to even buy the non-Mind Seize decks. Even though the rest of the decks didn’t seem to have much to offer Constructed formats, casuals don’t give two craps about constructed potential. They just want to attack you with their angels, demons, and dragons as fast as possible. I see no reason why the current batch of commander decks won’t also follow this pattern as they age.

Planechase / Archenemy / Duel Decks (essentially, all the products that MSRP’ed for $19.99)

Archenemy – June 2010 MSRP $19.99

Today’s prices:

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Planechase 2009 – MSRP $19.99

 Today’s prices:

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Planechase 2012 – MSRP $19.99

 Today’s prices:

13

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Duel Decks

Duel Deck

Current Price

Elves vs. Goblins

$200.00

Jace vs. Chandra

$130.00

Divine vs. Demonic

$170.00

Garruk vs. Liliana

$65.00

Phyrexia vs. The Coalition

$32.00

Elspeth vs. Tezzeret

$40.00

Knights vs. Dragons

$50.00

Ajani vs. Nicol Bolas

$43.00

Venser vs. Koth

$25.00

Izzet vs. Golgari

$25.00

Sorin vs. Tibalt

$19.00

Planechase / Archenemy / Duel Decks Price Analysis

Popular casual products are the single-deck sealed products which are Commander, Planechase, and Archenemy. These products offered more than just decks because Planechase and Archenemy have oversized cards (which also have value if you try to sell them individually) and Commander added brand new cards to the existing card pool. On the other hand, Duel Decks seem to be hit or miss. I think this is because they only consist of reprints and that Wizards seems to have been watering down the most recent ones by not including more powerful spells like the ones found in Divine vs. Demonic or Jace vs. Chandra.

In other words, you shouldn’t pick up extra Duel Decks unless there is something special in them (Demonic Tutor and Counterspell with Jace art are good examples). They take the longest to go up in value and the gains factored in with the time it takes are too long for the profits to matter.

If you’re interested in holding on to extra sealed product for value you want to be looking at picking up Commander, Planechase, and Archenemy (if they do Archenemy again) products. All of these products have evidence showing they go up in value over time.

Casual Players Are Important

Without casual players we would have no one to crack individual packs. Without cracking packs booster boxes would never become valuable. We would also have no one to buy other sealed products that Wizards releases because they look cool or add new aspects to the game in a non-competitive fashion. This would make buying the sealed products Wizards releases a complete waste of money if you’re trying to hold them for value. This clearly isn’t the case. We’re lucky to have such an amazing fanbase behind Magic because without them the game would surely go away. From a numbers perspective, we can see that all it takes to capitalize on Magic’s fanbase is to hold onto a few extra sealed products here or there.

Casual players, you may not realize it but buying these products is itself an investment in the game. Even if you are just buying the products to play with, with no intention of wanting to buy extra to sit on them or make money, my advice to you is to buy what you want as soon as you can afford it. Sealed products are never going to be cheaper than when they first come out, no matter if you’re eyeing something like a booster case or even just considering picking up a duel deck. If you ever have the inclination to help your hobby pay for itself, pick up a few extra sealed products and sit on them. Eventually you can cash them out to cover the costs of buying in even if that is a few years down the road. I believe the evidence that I’ve presented in this article has more than proved that in all cases.

The upcoming Conspiracy set is one of the reasons I’m writing this article. I would definitely be looking to pick up as much Conspiracy as I can and holding whatever I choose not to open. It looks like it is going to be another huge casual hit that will certainly go up in value over time.

Casual Fridays

Value of a Symbol

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By: Cliff Daigle

I have one all-foil Commander deck. It’s tribal Vampires, with Garza Zol, Plague Queen at its head. I didn’t plan to foil it out at first, it just sort of happened that almost all the creatures were foil and I kept finding good prices and trades for the lands and accessories. Eventually, I was 80% foil and took the plunge, swapping out things that could never be foil (Oh, how I miss having Shauku, Endbringer!) and trading for foil filterlands, scrylands, etc.

One thing I didn’t have until recently was a foil Reflecting Pool, because there was only one foil version from Shadowmoor. It has been super-pricey due to a printing error: all of the foils have a Plains watermark, increasing the collectibility. When Conspiracy came out, I knew this would be my chance to get a foil Pool at a reasonable price. 

Imagine my surprise, though, when I see that there’s a significant gap between the two foils, with the same text, art, and frame! There are indeed some people who feel strongly that they have to have the original (in this case, the first available foil, as the Tempest version has no foil) and are willing to pay a high price to have that. Wrong watermark or not, that’s a big jump in price due to collectors.

In honor of them, I’d like to share with you a few examples of how much value being ‘original pack foil’ can add. My goal here is just the cards that have an expansion symbol of difference, and I encourage you to add your own to this list in the comments. I’ve looked for them, but I am not perfect.

Akroma, Angel of Wrath – $20 for Timeshifted foil, $30 for Legions foil

Just $10 to get rid of the purple expansion symbol seems worth it. The Timeshifted sheet causes all sorts of collector headaches!

Eternal Witness – $25 for Fifth Dawn foil, $11 for Modern Masters foil

One of the most busted cards in Commander, the foil prices are surprising. There’s an FNM version with similar art by Terese Nielsen, but the easily-recurred way to reuse anything has massive casual appeal.

Elspeth, Knight-Errant: $89 for Shards of Alara foil, $65 for Modern Masters foil

Shards block foils have additional price pressure on them, thanks to the all-foil packs Wizards printed at the end of the block. This higher number of foils is mainly pushing prices on commons and uncommons down, and not that many people were willing to drop $15 on a single booster.

I once did a draft with these though, and it was a lot of fun to have all foils!

Blood Moon – $64 for 9th edition foil, $55 for 8th edition, $45 for Modern Masters

How I wish we had some hard sales numbers on the different sets. It’s entirely possible that there are a lot more MM foils out there, because 8th and 9th were close to the dark days of Magic. This was a surprise find, though, I thought these would be more expensive, considering how good they are in Eternal formats, and how often Legacy and Vintage like to foil out their decks.

Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker – $27 for Conflux foil, $16 for M14 foil

Another card that had extras due to the foil Shards packs, there’s also a Duel Deck foil with very different art to be had for the same price as a nonfoil.

Progenitus – $39 for Conflux foil, $28 for Modern Masters foil

The FTV foil is frankly unappealing next to the original, which had great tricks with clouds to make it clear just how huge The Soul Of The World is. If you have the extra $11 for the original, go for it.

Glen Elendra Archmage – $65 for Eventide foil, $27 for Modern Masters foil

A gap of a few dollars doesn’t surprise me too much, but this being more than double is really surprising. Looking at the price history for the Eventide foil, the price went up when Modern Masters was around. To be fair, that summer, lots of things went up as the hype to join the format was at its peak. Things have stabilized since.

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth – $53 for Planar Chaos, $19 for M15 or FTV

The FTV is the same art but it is also the same vertically shiny foiling process that turns some people off. If you wanted to skip that, I’d respect your choice. This was the only foil available for some time, which may be why the price is still so much more.

Woodfall Primus – $34 for Shadowmoor foil, $18 for Modern Masters foil

For a long while, this was a strong option for Reanimator decks, blasting lands and setting the other person back significantly. And perhaps to do it twice! Ashen Rider is just an upgrade on that process, though.

Jace Beleren – $29 for Lorwyn foil, $17 for M10, $19 for M11

Weirdly, this effect is in place for Garruk and Liliana as well, but not Ajani or Chandra. Ajani Goldmane has a Pro Tour foil that might be affecting the foil prices. Garruk and Liliana have Duel Deck promos, as well as Duels of the Planeswalker cards, but these are still showing big steps in price from set to set.

If you’re hardcore about getting the first foil, be my guest, but keep in mind that in a lot of cases, you’re paying a premium for it. That premium is on top of the premium you’re giving to have foils in the first place. I understand completely, though.

Join me next week as we explore some of the spoiled cards and see what you’ll be seeing at kitchen tables for a long time!

City of Traders

The One Where Wizards Makes Me Look Stupid

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By: Travis Allen

It’s Christmas time for us Wizards. The fall set always brings with it a crackling excitement of new spoilers each day to be dissected at FNM and on Twitter, with thousands of players trying to break the card in each available format. Many stay up until midnight eastern to see the new spoilers that hit from non-WotC sites, and those of us at work at 11am each morning are F5ing DailyMTG for the official spoilers. It’s hard not to be swept up in the collective thrill of the community.

I suppose a more appropriate metaphor would be Hanukkah, right? We don’t have a single night of hundreds of spoilers, but rather, a little bit doled out each night. We even have a Candelabra. That sounds more accurate than Christmas, really.

This weekend was Pax, and they lit a big ol’ present candle at the Magic party they have there every year. (Annual reminder: Don’t go to Pax.) A bunch of cards were spoiled, including a ridiculous Jeskai Khan, a legitimate-looking Sarkhan Planeswalker, and, the subject of today’s article, the Onslaught fetches.

Let me begin by saying I’m sorry. I’ve been spending months talking about how I didn’t think the fetches would be in Khans. If you got burned on this reprint because of my advice, I really do apologize. If it makes you feel any better I’ve got a bunch of Zendikar fetches in my possession, so I’m getting gotten by this just the same.

The decision still seems odd to me, honestly. There’s no mechanic to really support their presence. Sure they work with delve, but what doesn’t work with delve. As long as you’re playing Magic, you’re fueling delve. Morph doesn’t care about fetching. Prowess and raid and outlast don’t. They even chose what feels like the wrong fetches. This block is all about wedges – RUG, UWR, etc. With the allied fetches, for RUG we only get RG. If we got the enemy fetches we would get both UR and UG. Basically what I’m saying is that they really seem shoehorned in. I’m guessing they weren’t originally planned for the block, but Wizards made the decision sometime possibly late in design or in development that they needed to put fetches in. It was brought to my attention that apparently the fetches were the first cards in the set. This doesn’t change the fact that they feel out of place. I’m guessing they make more sense once we get to the end of Louie.

Regardless, this is the world we live in. The Onslaught allied fetches are on their way and we need to decide what this means for our existing Onslaught copies, as well as what’s going to happen with the Zendikar fetches.

Lucky for us there is some precedent for expensive old cards being reprinted in Standard. We don’t have to turn our gaze past Standard to see both Thoughtseize and the Shocklands. Let’s check out the Lorwyn printing of Thoughtseize. The red strips indicate Modern PTQ seasons.

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According to Wikipedia Modern was announced back in the spring of 2011, so our graph starts off with people knowing about Modern as a format. Thoughtseize was in the $30-$40 range at the time. At the start of the PTQ season it skyrocketed towards $60, and lived at $60-$70 until Theros released. It slowly dropped back to it’s pre-PTQ price of $30-$35, which is where it is today. The reprint clearly had an affect on the price of the card, although you’ll notice that the price today is not really much lower than the price of it before it saw a massive spike thanks to a PTQ season.

Hallowed Fountain didn’t fare quite so well.

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It was floating around $30 at the start of 2012, which is right about when we would have gotten the announcement that the fall set that year would be Return to Ravnica. Shocks would have been clearly evident at that point. You see a slow decline starting around the fall of ‘12, and they’ve since leveled off to around $15 or so.

The behavior of the rest of the shocks is mostly similar, although Hallowed Fountain and Watery Grave seem to have gotten the worst of it. The original printings of Temple Garden and Stomping Ground have lost only maybe $5, and Sacred Foundry doesn’t appear to have moved at all. It seems that the inflated blue shocks (Fountain, Grave, Breeding Pool, Steam Vents) lost the most, but the non-blue shocks didn’t see more than maybe a 40% loss.

Let’s analyze our data a bit at this point. When Thoughtseize was reprinted it was cut in half from its current value, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. With a longer timeline in view, it would be incomplete to say that it was simply a case of the card losing half it’s value. A more accurate description would be that the reprint reversed the doubling of the price the card had seen about a year earlier. I think it would be safe to say that while Thoughtseize being reprinted certainly didn’t help the price, at the end of the day it didn’t really have that much of an impact on the original copy.

Here’s another way to consider the price change. The original copy of Thoughtseize has a variety of types of demand. There’s the demand from people that want the first printing, demand from people that think the old art looked better, demand from PTQ grinders, etc. There’s a quantitative amount of demand and it can be segmented into types. When the reprint occurred all the excess PTQ grinder demand was chopped off. The card lost all that extra ‘fat’ demand it had acquired from people that just needed to cast it competitively. It still retained all of it’s other demand. The doubling from $30 to $60 was all competitive demand. The rest of the price was legitimate, sustainable desire for the Lorwyn copy.

Hallowed Fountain behaved a bit differently. The price on Dissension copies today is about twice the RTR copy, so clearly there’s still some amount of demand for the first printing. That doesn’t mean it didn’t take a beating when the reprint hit. While it was $30+ ahead of RTR, it’s now only about $15. This would be pretty damning for the Onslaught fetches as a whole if we didn’t consider the other shocks as well. The non-blue shocks lost between zero and forty percent or so, which is not too severe a loss when you consider how many extra copies hit the market in RTR.

Thoughtseize and the Shocklands indicate that Onslaught copies will take a loss, but we aren’t quite sure how much. Let’s take a look at the price graph of the most expensive of the five, Polluted Delta.

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That is some pretty wild growth. We see the price more than double from the spring of ‘12 to early this summer, and it’s still holding a solid $80 even after losing a chunk in the last two months. A growth in price like this immediately makes me think of the Thoughtseize jump at the start of the PTQ season. If you drag this graph out another year into the future, what do you think it looks like? Where do you envision it landing? Which price plateau is the “real” one?

One thing that split Thoughtseize from the shocks is playability. Of course both were extremely playable in Standard and Modern, but Thoughtseize went beyond that into Legacy and even Vintage. There is additional playability demand for Thoughtseize that didn’t exist for the shocks. That extra layer of competitive demand provided insulation for Thoughtseize’s price that the shocks didn’t get.

These new fetches will absolutely behave similarly to Thoughtseize, except even more so. Ally fetches will be required for Standard, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, EDH, and Cube. Really, who doesn’t want them? Greater demand across the board will help the old copies stand up to a brand new batch much better than if they were only a two-format card.

Here’s another factor that was in play to an extent when Thoughtseize was reprinted, but not as drastic as it will be now. Have you seen the new fetches? Like, seen what the cards look like?

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Those…do not look that hot. The Flooded Strand is sort of cute, and the Bloodstained Mire is by talented artist Daarken, but overall I would say these are not visually impressive lands. I’m not alone either. Upon reveal Twitter blew up about their inclusion in Khans, but the first things I was reading beyond “omg fetches!” was “hey these are kind of dumb looking.” Compared to the the original lands there is a stunning difference in appearance.

windsweptheath1

The aesthetic of the old cards is remarkably different from the new copies in a way that neither the shocks nor Thoughtseize experienced. With a distinction in appearance this strong, there will be a real incentive for aesthetic-oriented players to seek out original copies. A real layer of demand is going to exist from this characteristic alone. I’m partial to old borders so I’ll of course be using the original ones where I can, but even players that are unbiased may find themselves drawn to the original copies. This type of demand is something that cannot be sated by additional printings. For players such as myself, it doesn’t matter how many times Windswept Heath is printed – I only want to play with the original. We’ve seen it on Thoughtseize with the fairy art, and we’re going to see it even more here.

It’s difficult to put a number on this since Wizards doesn’t officially release any of this data, but another quick item to keep in mind is that the original Onslaught fetches were printed less than both the original shocks and the original Thoughtseize, meaning there won’t actually be that many original border copies.

Taking everything we know into consideration, what happens with all of our original Onslaught fetches? It seems clear that they’ll be dropping in price, but the question is by how much. I’d hazard a guess that we’ll see Polluted Delta and Flooded Strand land north of $40, but I’m not exactly sure where. I would expect anywhere between $30-$60 to be plausible, and $40-$50 to be a reasonable expectation. The other ones will move, but not by as much. I’d guess that Windswept Heath, Bloodstained Mire, and Wooded Foothills, all about $40 right now, don’t drop below $25 or possibly even $30. These are all educated guesses though, and I’m not promising anything. There may be factors I’m missing or unforeseen changes that will alter these trajectories in ways I can’t predict at the moment.

Foil Onslaught copies are only going to rise, not fall. Damnit.

What do we do with this? I’m personally holding onto my original copies. Playing with the old border is worth it to me. If you don’t care, I’d look to move them ASAP. Keep the prices in mind that I outlined above, and as long as your trade/sale looks good with that information, go for it. Don’t be afraid to offer a discount on the $80 retail price of Polluted Delta today if it’s going to be $50 in three weeks.

If that’s what’s in store for the original copies, how about all the new ones? Well that’s a lot easier to answer. You won’t see in-print rares from a fall set, especially a cycle of five, get too expensive. I’d guess our maximum is about $15 each. If that sounds too low, just do a little math. You average over three of each rare land in a single box. At $20 a piece, three lands would make up well more than half of the value of the box. There’s no way the box prices will support those numbers on rares. I’d say we’ll see prices hover between $7 and $15, with each taking turns at the higher end of that as they see their time to shine in Standard. Bloodstained Mire should consistently be the cheapest one, and Polluted Delta/Flooded Strand will pretty consistently be near the most expensive. The Zendikar fetches averaged maybe $10 each while they were in Standard, so that sounds like a comfortable place for these to live.

The best time to get the fetches will be a month or two after release, just like with most rares. There will be an extended period of increased demand as Modern and Legacy players seek to fill out their sets but by the time we hit Christmas that should quiet. They’ll probably be cheapest sometime next year, but nobody wants to wait that long. Feel free to start grabbing your non-foil copies around October if you’re impatient, and December if you can wait. If you’re looking to score foil copies, the best time to buy is also easy. It’s now. Take a look at the price graph for foil Breeding Pool.

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Trends for the other shocks are comparable. The foil copies tend to be lowest immediately after release and see very slow to no movement for a few months before they finally start to creep up. I’d say that grabbing foil copies ahead of Christmas would be your best bet. They’ll probably be rather expensive, but that’s the nature of a cycle like this. People will want foil copies for their Cubes, EDH, and Legacy decks.

Now that we’ve covered the Onslaught fetches pretty thoroughly, let’s turn our attention to the other five: the Zendikar fetches. What does this reprint mean for them?

Well it’s not great, that’s for sure. Currently the Zendikar fetches are as expensive as they are because not only do they have that playable demand from nearly every format, they’re also the only fetches legal in Modern, the largest format that fetches are played in. Way more players are taking one in Modern than Legacy these days and there’s currently only five ways to do it. Adding the ally fetches is going to double the number of choices for Modern players.

This is going to be what does the most damage to the Zendikar copies. Why would Johnny Random Shell out $60 apiece for Scalding Tarns when he can get Polluted Deltas and Bloodstained Mires for $10 each? Sure the Tarns are better for his deck, but are they six times as expensive better? That’s a question everyone has to answer for themselves, but I bet for a large majority of players the answer is “hell no.”

There will still be plenty of places you want the enemy fetches over the ally fetches. Any three-color deck is going to be in the market for at least a set of enemy fetches still, and possibly two sets if it’s a wedge rather than a shard. Still, no longer being the only game in town is just going to be too hard for them to weather in the near future. Consider the enemy fetches in the same way that I presented Thoughtseize earlier. There’s an existing layer of demand ‘fat’ from being the only legal fetches. While there’s still other types of demand that will help keep the price up, that entire chunk of demand is about to be excised.

One thing going for the Zen fetches is that their supply will still be limited. While the ally fetches are going to flood the market, there aren’t any more Misty Rainforests now than there were six months ago. Less people will need them, but those that do need them will still be in the market for them. While many will make do with the inexpensive ally fetches from Khans, plenty of players will continue to insist on having exactly the right ones for the deck. We may see a small surge in the number of players looking for enemy fetches as well. Up until now, people have put off Modern because the mana was too expensive and they didn’t want to deal with it. With shocks readily available and a fetch reprint only a few weeks away, the format suddenly looks wildly more accessible. Once these players start jumping into Modern they will inevitably start looking to fill out their fetch collection with the enemy copies, even if it is only just one or two for a specific deck.

The long and short of it is that even though it isn’t all doom and gloom for the Zendikar fetches, it’s still a bad time for them. If you have extra copies (like I do), I wouldn’t hesitate to move them if the prices stay somewhat stable over the next few weeks. If you can get reasonable offers for them now, take it. However if there’s a huge market crash and they lose 60% of their value, don’t sell. It’s not uncommon for the market to overreact to this type of news, and the devalued cards often quickly rebound as players start snatching up now under-valued copies. In the case of a crash, hang on and wait it out until after prices rebound a bit. Watch buylists to see how vendors are reacting; that will give you an idea of how the market is handling the news. Today, September second, Misty Rainforest is still getting $40 and Scalding Tarn $45. Those aren’t any lower than they were a week ago.

With this news, when is the next time we’ll actually see Zendikar fetches? I hear some people talking about seeing them later in the block, but that sounds rather silly to me. With their printing, the mana will be even across enemy and ally pairs. There’s all ten Scrylands, five enemy Painlands, and now five ally Fetchlands. Adding more fetches would push the balance back towards enemy pairs.

Assuming there’s a Modern Masters 2, which we are operating assuming that there is, they’re a good choice for that release now. I’ve claimed before that I didn’t think we’d see Zen fetches in MM2, but that was before the ally fetches were in Khans. With the Khans reprint, it takes a lot of pressure off Zen fetches, which means Wizards isn’t in a situation where they need to flood the market with more copies. A more limited release via MM2 would be perfectly acceptable. If we don’t see them there, then I’d say any fall set after Khans is conceivable. It’s hard to say for sure until we get closer. For right now assume an MM2 release is possible/probable, and if they’re not there, then who knows.

One more topic I’m seeing discussed a lot – what does the printing of the ally fetches do to Modern? Their appearance will likely see a surge in the overall index of the format. When format staples drop in price due to an event like this, currently under-priced cards tend to jump. Cards like Leonin Arbiter had trouble climbing in the past because the barrier to entry on mana was so high. Nobody wants to shell out for Arbiters if they spent a fortune getting the mana together. Once the mana is accessible more people start buying Arbiters, and the price begins to rise. As a result of the mana getting cheaper, the rest of the deck corrects in response.

We’re also going to see a flood of new players enter Modern now that they’ve got both cheap shocks and fetches, which is going to put a greater demand on the already constrained copies of many format staples such as Clique, Spellskite, Goyf, Celestial Colonnade, Snapcaster, etc etc. This is probably the biggest impact the fetches will have on Modern (and Legacy, to a lesser extent). Players that have been priced out of the format up until now are suddenly going to be capable of diving in. Add in that Modern will be playable at PreTQs year round and you’ve got a recipe for price jumps across the board.

Beyond that I don’t see the addition of the fetches doing much specifically. The mana in Modern is already so good I can’t imagine these suddenly opening the floodgates for decks previously unplayable. It’s not like there’s some list out there that’s just waiting to become a tier one contender that has only been held back by the lack of Wooded Foothills in the format. Some matchups will change by a few percentage points in certain situations, and Blood Moons may become marginally less effective in a few places as fetching basics gets easier, but overall I don’t see sweeping changes to the format. What’s more likely is that many tier two decks (and worse) become over-represented as people assemble affordable mana bases without actually having the rest of the deck. Sure you can build any mana you want with your RTR shocks and your KTK fetches, but you’re still going to have to cast something with them. Players that don’t feel like shelling out for Liliana of the Veil may find themselves playing all sorts of more off-the-wall brews that could put additional demand on cards currently in the fringe. Those are probably the types of cards that in terms of percentage of growth do the best as a result of all of this.

There you have it. In short, the original Onslaught fetches will drop but they won’t crater. Foils will go up. New copies won’t be more than $10-!15. Zendikar fetches will drop. Don’t expect any new Modern decks, but the general Modern index will rise.

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The Gilded Goblin

From the Vault: Annihilated

3 Comments

By: Jared Yost

Research is Important

From the Vault: Annihilation has been released to the MTG masses at large and it certainly has moved the market in one way or another. Even in ways that defy common sense.

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I crossed off the name of the vendors here so that they don’t get a lot of flack for posting Ravages of War at absurdly high prices because I believe they have a right to post the card at whatever price they feel the market will pay. We, however, do not have be idiots and actually pay this price for a card that still has a very high chance of being reprinted. Wizards has been all about the Portal Three Kingdoms (P3K) reprints ever since including some of the legendary creatures from the set in FTV: Legends. They proved that they were willing to go all out and not just include them in a FTV product when they reprinted several of them in the Commander 2013 decks. I would avoid this card entirely for the time being until the hype for not being included dies down.

Obviously Ravages of War was due for a spike because it was not included in the FTV: Annihilation. We can all agree on this point. Yet what is the true cost? Being able to have another Armageddon in all but name is great for both a player’s cubes and their Commander deck. Stores and players noticed that many copies had already been grabbed off the market and decided to make a last run to collect the remaining few and then try to sell them at a premium. Due to the low print run they could accomplish this if we are not careful. Since so few are for sale only seeing one or two prices could be very deceiving as to the true worth of the card. Cliff just wrote an article on Friday that touches on this very point and the current Ravages of War spike highlights his point perfectly. Just head over to eBay and the real story starts to reveal itself.

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Just last Thursday two non-English versions sold for less than $200. In the previous months, English versions had trouble breaking $350 per copy. Listing an English version at a price higher than $3000 is highway robbery. Do not fall into this trap, please do your research before picking up a card for your cube or Commander deck if the price seems absurd to you.

Missed Opportunities

From my perspective, not including Ravages of War in this recent FTV was a huge oversight from Wizards. Not only did they miss Ravages of War, which would have been my number two guess at the most likely to be reprinted in the set, but they also failed to reprint Damnation (my number one guess before release for inclusion) and All is Dust (my number three guess). These three cards in my opinion best represent a theme of annihilation, destruction, and devastation.

In retrospect though, I can respect Wizards’ decision. Armageddon is an iconic card that carries with it unmeasurable quantities of Magic nostalgia. Not including it would probably have been weirder than having Ravages of War (which is frankly a card that not many players have ever seen). Not every decision Wizards makes can be financially focused. This sometimes gets sacrificed for flavor and historical relevance.

Also consider that Damnation is probably going to be reprinted soon as well. With Commander 2014 on the way and the new Standard rotation coming in the future it is only a matter of time for this card as well. In addition, All is Dust already had a reprint through being a GP Promo so I think it was fair to skip out on it for the FTV.

Even though I was disappointed that not even one of my top three choices made it into the product I can’t fault Wizards too much for excluding them. This was an ambitious set to put together, and no matter what choices were made a ton of players were going to be unhappy.

Current Status

The past is the past and we can’t change that since the set is out in the world. We need to work with what we have to see if there is any opportunity. Here is what we are looking at for FTV vs non-FTV prices for the cards so far:

Card FTV Price Non-FTV Price
Rolling Earthquake $13.97 $182.49
Burning of Xinye $7.74 $149.98
Cataclysm $6.45 $10.62
Armageddon $5.90 $3.88
Smokestack $5.47 $7.99
Wrath of God $6.95 $7.44
Living Death $4.95 $2.71
Terminus $3.85 $3.40
Child of Alara $3.45 $5.34
Martial Coup $3.10 $4.39
Fracturing Gust $3.35 $5.85
Upheaval $2.35 $2.48
Virtue’s Ruin $1.85 $6.26
Firespout $1.85 $1.19
Decree of Annihilation $1.35 $1.23

 

No surprise here that the P3K reprints are the most valuable. The most surprising part of this FTV is the lack of value compared to past FTV releases.

$14 is not much value if you’re talking about the headlining card of the release. Nicol Bolas, Berserk / Sensei’s Divining Top, Ulamog, Grove of the Burnwillows, Mox Diamond / Aether Vial, Jace – see a pattern here? All these cards are worth at least $25 retail now which means they were probably worth substantially more upon their respective FTV release. Rolling Earthquake is barely even half the value of the lowest priced of these cards.

Don’t get me wrong, giving the Magic community a version of the card that isn’t $180 is great for the game. It will get more people interested in picking up copies and could spur further interest in P3K along with any reprints they want to include in the next Commander decks. The only issue is that you are stuck with buying the FTV copies because the P3K versions haven’t moved much yet and it does not look like they’ll budge due to sheer rarity.

It is funny to see here that the FTV: Annihilation reprints hardly even brought down the price of the original P3K Rolling Earthquake and Burning of Xinye. Their original English printings barely even dropped 10% upon the reprint. This could be attributed to the market catching up with the increase in supply. If not, then it would surprise me greatly to realize that just the rarity of the set alone could be the factor here. I could be severely underestimating just how rare the original print run is to find since I was expecting a much higher drop in value of the original printing. Clearly the FTV price reflects accurate market demand, since the new version of Rolling Earthquake is only $14 which is about average for cube / Commander viable cards.

A $14 headliner doesn’t bode well for the future of the FTV: Annihilation product. Especially since many vendors are only selling the set as a whole for $45-$50 total. Many of the cards weren’t even on people’s radars. Upheaval, Firespout, Virtue’s Ruin? Did anyone even think to want these in here? They could have at least given Child of Alara art that doesn’t make it seem like a giant crying baby. The only cards that I would watch out for are Smokestack and Cataclysm in addition to the P3K red spells due to new art and first time foiling. These definitely have the potential to go up in the future from eternal demand. Other than these cards I’m not really expecting the rest of the set to do too much for a while.

Based on the prices I’m seeing this looks to be the most unpopular FTV release yet, which is unfortunate since there was so much potential that could have been here. I touched upon this a little bit in the previous section so I’m not going to continue to harp on about the point. Yet based on the current prices the demand isn’t there like for other FTV’s. At least not yet. Maybe this will be a good buy for $40 looking back a few years down the road. Only time will tell. At this point, I would suggest staying away from the box set as a whole and instead pick up any singles you want. The singles are all very cheap in the set compared to past FTV releases and they have a good chance of going down even further once more of these sets are cracked.

All in all, buying a FTV: Annihilation box set is risky because it will be hard to get much value out of it in the near future. However if you want everything in here, buying the box set is great because there has never been a cheaper FTV this close to MSRP.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY