Hype Train Standard

August 18, 2014 Jared Yost 2 Comments

Xenagos, the Reveler

By the time this article is published, I predict that it will be hard to find Xenagos, the Reveler for less than $15. I commented on this version of Xengos in my Theros review back in September last year as a passive pickup, which meant that I recognized his power level but realized that it would take a paradigm shift in Standard in order for his abilities to really shine. When I identify passive pickups in my set reviews, I recommend that you pick them up when you have extra cards to trade or when the price becomes low enough that even if they don’t pan out in Standard they will still stabilize in price to due to casual or other demand. Xenagos was close to $7-$8 for a long time in Standard – for the past six months you could have gotten your copies fairly cheap if you picked them up slowly over time.

Usually, when a Standard card is bought out at this particular time in the season there is a good reason. Master of Waves and Thassa, God of the Sea were bought out last year during Pro Tour Theros due to the breakout of the Mono-Blue Devotion deck. Yes, you could have made money on them if you had prestocked your cart on TCGPlayer and then executed the purchase as soon as they saw decent screen time from the live coverage. However, in the long run their prices dropped considerably because more Theros was opened and people were able to pick them up much easier once more copies were in the market. Mono-Blue Devotion turned out to be one of the most dominating decks and yet the prices still went since that time last year.

The hype from Pro Tour Theros was mainly driven by a lack of supply. This is not the case for Xenagos, the Reveler because we’ve been opening Theros for an entire year. The majority of the copies that will exist for the next Standard are already out there. Based on Twitter postings from Friday, there was a rumor that the buyout was coordinated.

Then we had a first hand account of Nick Becvar stating that he decided to buy in on as many Xenagos as he could at GenCon.

Nick is a well respected member of the MTG finance community so when a card catches his eye I tend to pay close attention. By the time of his Twitter post, all of the cheap copies of Xenagos were gone on TCGPlayer and the mid price was about $16. However, I was able to snag a few foil copies that were still lingering around $19 that weren’t updated to reflect the non-foil price. Goes to show that even if you think you may have missed an opportunity, always make sure to check for other versions of the card including foil versions. The window is small but there are sometimes opportunities to get these deals.

The the reason why Xenagos spiked was the coverage he received during Pro Tour M15. He was in two Jund decks that placed in the Top 8 of the tournament, which was the most anticipated tournament of the summer. He received plenty of coverage from live streaming two weeks ago and players have been picking up their copies since then. Once vendors started running low and realized that people weren’t trading the ones they had back in, they readjusted the prices to reflect this demand.

What Else Besides Xenagos Should You Be Watching?

In terms of Standard I would focus on lands and current non-rotating staples. The scrylands are all great options, since the block supplementing Theros standard is a Wedge set. There is plenty of opportunity for any of the lands to be featured in a breakout deck so I wouldn’t focus heavily on any particular land barring Mana Confluence. Mana Confluence is a nice role filler for multicolored aggro decks, so I can see it becoming important in Mardu (RWB) builds in addition to any other Wedge or two color aggro build that pops up and does well during the fall. It is also from Journey Into Nyx, so the 6:2:1 ratio will also have an effect on the price after rotation.

Speaking of aggro, Soldier of the Pantheon is another of my top targets. Ever since the fall set was announced to be Wedge based I started picking up this card en masse. This is a short term play – if the card goes up substantially in price during the fall I will also be looking to get out then. It will have a tougher time sustaining a high price once the control decks become more established.

You should also be stocking up on any extra copies of Thoughtseize and Hero’s Downfall that you can find. These have the highest chance of being the premium black cards of Standard in the fall. I would focus more on Thoughtseize than Downfall, even though it has a higher buy in price. Thoughtseize is an eternal playable that might have a higher chance of the elusive double spike once the newly announced Modern Pro Tour taking place in February 2015 occurs. Downfall is riskier because a better removal spell could be reprinted in Khans.

Elspeth, Sun’s Champion is the strongest white card right now in sheer power. Her nemesis is Scuttling Doom Engine, which Wizards created to help stave off any potential Elspeth domination of Standard. I’m still not sure which card will see more play. I tend to think Scuttling Doom Engine (SCD) since it is both colorless and a rare, which means that it can fit into multiple archetypes that can support it and it will be cheaper for players to acquire initially so more are apt to brew with SCD.

On the other hand, Elspeth is just so strong especially in control builds. Of course, my line of thinking could be completely changed once Khans comes out but for now I tend to favor SCD as the card that will see the biggest gains percentage wise.I feel like Elspeth has peaked somewhat. She costs six mana, which means that players have fewer copies of her in decks, and she is already at around $20. I can’t see her going up much more from there based on an average two copies per deck. I doubt that SCD will reach Thragtusk level of dominance but there always seems to be a rare from a core set that reaches a really high price…

Lastly, I want to mention slivers. Here my advice is to wait until rotation and pick up any foil copies of M14/M15 slivers that seem to be popular. I think this is the best call for the short and long term. Even if there is a breakout sliver deck it will only be around for about another month. I’m going to bide my time, wait for rotation, and then a few months afterwards try to scoop up any popular M14/M15 slivers for value in the long run.

Casual Fridays

My Long Term Binder

August 15, 2014 Cliff Daigle 2 Comments

By: Cliff Daigle

I would love to tell you that I am a true financier when it comes to Magic. I wish I could say that I buy hundreds of a card on speculation that it will rise, and cash out handsomely when it does.

If you follow individual writers on Twitter, you’ll see that some of us do indeed carry out this large-scale investing. I admit, I’m jealous sometimes when I see that Travis bought 50 of something or Jim has picked up a stack of sweet Japanese foils.

I’ve got two kids under the age of two, so I simply don’t have the funds for large speculations. If I have gone deep on a card, I’ve traded, laboriously, for every copy of that card. I make it to FNM as often as I can, but I also do a lot of online trading.

For example: when Jace, Architect of Thought was $8, I traded for four. When it spiked last winter, I turned those into four Cavern of Souls and three Abrupt Decay. I’ve traded those Decays for six Hero’s Downfall plus a little, and two Caverns for five Thassa, God of the Sea. When those go up, I’ll trade for things I want for EDH decks, or more value in the future.

Today, I want to walk you through my long-term binder, and hopefully you get a sense of how to grow your collection’s value over time.

If you’re a regular reader of mine, some of these will sound familiar. I practice what I preach.

36 Prophet of Kruphix
Acquired at: $2
Target price: $5
Expected timeframe: One year or more

Yavimaya Coast being in Magic 2015 and Khans being about enemy wedges means that blue-green is a viable choice for colors this fall. If Riku or Animar are reprinted, expect Prophet to take off with either of those cards. Prophet is redundant in multiples, but this is one of the best things you could be doing in EDH, until it gets banned. It hasn’t yet, so I’m optimistic.

27 Thespian’s Stage
Acquired at: sub-$1
Target price: $3 or more
Expected timeframe: Years

This went up to $2 when the combo with Dark Depths was revealed, but it remains one of the best things you can be doing in Commander games. This is a cheap pickup and has good potential, as long as I can be patient.

8 Soldier of the Pantheon
Acquired at: $1.50
Target price: $3
Expected timeframe: less than a year

I think this would have a higher price if Selesnya Charm could target it. There will always be a white aggro deck, and this is two power for one mana with upside. I’m not expecting this to go crazy, just enough to make it worth trading away. It’s so low-risk anyway, even a modest gain will pay off nicely.

10 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
Acquired at: $5-$10
Target price:$10-$15
Expected timeframe: winter

This is a card I’m expecting to trade away at the height and then trade for a few at rotation in a year. I really like the long-term prospects on this, considering how good is is in casual formats. If devotion is a thing, it’ll need several of these and I’ll be happy to trade these away at an increased price.

8 Aurelia, the Warleader
Acquired at: $4
Target price:$8-$10
Expected timeframe:a year or more

I traded for these before we knew what Iroas, God of Victory did. Her price went up just a little, but she’s a mythic angel that does ridiculous things in the two most aggressive colors. I don’t see this sinking much when she rotates in October, and going on a slow upward climb. If you haven’t seen this used as a Commander, you haven’t lived!

7 Rise of the Dark Realms
Acquired at: $2
Target price: $5+
Expected timeframe: years

There’s not a lot else you want to do with nine mana. This being a mythic means that there’s a lot less as compared to In Garruk’s Wake, which is only a rare. I’m sitting on these for a long time. There’s a combo currently legal in Standard, this and the Wake. Kill them all, and then take it all.

8 Thassa, God of the Sea
Acquired at: $6
Target price: $10-$20
Expected timeframe: winter

This is a card I’ve been going for as a short-term target. It hasn’t showed up in Modern much, but it’s really powerful in heavy-blue decks. It sees some play now but that was when this was in print, and it will only take one strong finish for these to go through the roof.

10 Hero’s Downfall
Acquired at: $5
Target price: $10
Expected timeframe: winter

Another short-term target, this has got some great potential as this is an answer to lots of problems. It’s been $10 before as a card that was still being opened, and it won’t take much to get back to where is was, or higher

4 Foil Boros Charm
Acquired at: $8
Target price: $20
Expected timeframe: whenever Boros Burn wins a Pro Tour

I am sitting on a playset of these, because the foil price is so much higher. The charm is a great EDH and Cube card, and is a key Burn card. I’ve got a playset and a couple more in Commander decks, and I have no trouble seeing this get to a high price when something happens and it blows up. The nonfoil has already had an extra printing in an Event deck, so I’ve focused on foils.

That’s my Hold binder. Are there things I should add to it? What and for how long?

City of Traders

Common Cents

August 13, 2014 Travis Allen 5 Comments

By: Travis Allen

Money for Nothing

If you’re anything like me, you are constantly on the lookout for collections to gobble up. Your ears perk up when people talk about getting out of the game, you browse Craigslist for people offloading their kid’s old box of cards, and upon hearing someone comment that they used to play you immediately begin an inquisition into the whereabouts and age range of their cards. The end result of this is that you end up purchasing collection after collection. You strip it for the rares and foils then shove the boxes into a corner. Pretty soon, you have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lands/commons/uncommons with which you don’t know what to do.

The last time this happened to me I listed the entire pile on Craigslist as a great casual starter kit. I was up front about it not containing any duals or money cards, and that there were probably close to no rares. What WAS in the collection was commons and uncommons that spanned the entire range of Magic’s history, from a few odd Beta cards right up through Theros. I listed it for around $400, and someone picked it up because he and a buddy had been playing again and wanted fodder for decks. They certainly got their fodder. (As an added bonus it was a birthday present, and the guy buying it planned to stack all 100,000+ cards up in his friend’s bedroom.)

Before I listed it I did one final pass. I wasn’t looking for rares though; rather, I was looking for commons and uncommons. You see, the first time(s) through I was mainly looking for rares and money uncommons such as Lightning Helix or Kitchen Finks. The Zendikar box that had Explores, Expedition Maps, and Goblin Bushwhackers? I had skipped all that stuff. I left in the 30 or 40 Lightning Bolts and the multitude of Brainstorms that had accumulated through various eras. This time I pulled out any common or uncommon that looked remotely playable.

By the time I got all the way back through I must have pulled a solid 5,000 cards out, completely and utterly unsorted. I began plugging cards into MTGPrice to check their buylist value. Anything worth $.10 or more was kept, and the rest tossed back into the box. The work wasn’t all that bad really. I put on some ST:TNG and plowed through. Once I knew that the uncommon shard lands from SOA were worth more than ten cents, I didn’t have to look them up every time. Same with all the rest of the cards that kept repeating. After the first 1,000 cards or so, there weren’t too many repeats.

At the end of this process I had somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 commons that were all worth at least $.10, and much of it worth more. The problem at this point was that it was still totally and completely unsorted, as there were easily over 100 unique cards in the stack. Furthermore, even if I did sort it, buylisting a pile of that size is sort of a nightmare. Sure HotSauce gives $.45 on Crumbling Necropolis, but what if they don’t want twenty of them? What if they only want twelve? Well now I have to see who pays the next highest amount and sell some to them. What if they don’t want all the ones I have left either? Onto a third store. You can see how this could get tedious, especially taking into consideration that unless I did every order in a single day, the buylist requirements could change as I worked through the pile. Then I’d have to ship everything, make sure they gave me how much they were supposed to, and so on and so on. On top of that, had I gone through all of this, I surely would have ended up with some amount of cards left for various reasons.

So I procrastinated. I let the cards sit there in my room for a few months. Eventually an SCG open rolled through town and I figured I’d bring them with me to see what I could get for them. I wasn’t holding my breath but I thought it was at least worth my time to find out. After taking my third loss in Standard on Saturday, I grabbed the boxes from my car and plopped them on the buyer’s mat. I was expecting him to groan and slowly begin ctrl+f’ing the SCG buylist, sorting the cards into various $.10 and $.50 piles.

He opened one of the boxes, flipped through a bit, and told me he didn’t feel like looking all of it up. After a quick scan of the other two 1,000 count boxes he made me a simple offer: $.25 per card. At the end, I pocketed $650 cash for a few thousand commons and uncommons in the span of fifteen minutes.

I’m well aware that I probably could have eeked out a bit more money had I buylisted the entire pile myself, submitting five or ten buylist orders to various websites. Maybe I could have even got an extra $100 out of it. But think about it like this – all of that would have taken time and effort. A considerable amount of it, in fact. I’d wager that I would have spent at least four hours organizing all of those buylists, if not more. If you consider that I lost $100 shipping the entire pile at $.25/ea instead of buylisting it individually, and it would have taken at least four hours to do, I paid myself at most $25 an hour. I am completely happy to make that exchange.

The reason I present all of this to you is to illustrate two things. The first is that all those decent commons and uncommons that aren’t quite worth lugging around in your trade binder are still completely worth pulling out of collections. The only thing you should be leaving behind are the bulkiest bulk C/UCs. (Of which, to be fair, will comprise a majority of the collection). Make sure you’re still pulling each and every rare too! This same weekend a pair of friends had accumulated bulk rares over the last few months from buying binders from people, and ended up getting a crispy mint pair of Revised Underground Seas for them. (I personally have been keeping all my bulk rares. They’re never going to be worth less than $.10, so I’m not losing money holding onto them, and every now and then when a card spikes to $5-$15 I get to dig through the box and pull a few copies out. Disrupting Shoal, Fist of Suns, Genesis Wave, etc).

Perhaps more importantly, it’s worth it to appropriately value your time. The amount of effort it would have taken to wring a few extra bucks out of all of that would have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled the amount of time I had put into it. Screw that. Recognize that your time has value and that it’s perfectly acceptable to forfeit some amount of capital in exchange for your entire Saturday back. Whenever you’re thinking about investing a large amount of time into an activity whose sole purpose is to make you money, consider how much you’re making per hour. When it comes to things like sorting bulk commons, chances are it would be more lucrative to simply work a side job on the weekend.

Current Events

I’ve started trading my extra Liliana of the Veils. Her price has been fairly stable since early this year so I’m not expecting any big movements out of her in the near future. She may gain $10, but I don’t think we’ll see her climb above $80 or $90 TCG anytime soon. There are two reasons I’m looking to trade her right now. The first is that there were comments that she was initially in the file for M15. She was pulled for power level reasons (duh) but it shows that Wizards is looking to get her back into our hands. I don’t think we’ll see a reprint in Khans, but with MM2 looking so likely, and that being a perfect place for her, I’ve decided to start shopping her around. I’m not advocating any fire sales, but I’m happy to take Theros staples for her right now that are guaranteed gainers in the next few months.

People continue to clamor about fetches in Khans. Real quick, what I feel is one of the best reasons we won’t see them: Fetches came around last time with landfall. Both were wildly popular. Wizards wants to bring back both. Because of the five-tribe nature of Khans it can’t support landfall as a major mechanic. Since landfall wouldn’t fit well in Khans, they’ll hold it (and fetches) for a set that will better support both.

Buy Temples.

No, buy more.

Eidolon of the Great Revel wrecked my face in Legacy this weekend. Burn decks have always been tier 1.5 to tier 3 budget decks in Modern and Legacy. Eidolon is a big bump in power for them in both formats. Foils are around $20-$25 right now. At those numbers I’m happy to trade for them. I could see them at $30-$40 within a year.

Nissa, Worldwaker is the truth. She’s hanging strong at $30+. I expect she’ll dip, but I also think it’s unlikely we see her below $20 before the end of the calendar year. If you want a set, go ahead and trade for her. I will be.

Finally, this isn’t necessarily finance related, but I have a platform so I’m going to use it dangit. Wouldn’t Leyline of Anticipation be great in those Modern discard-heavy decks people are always trying to make? Think 4x Thoughtseize 4x Inquisition type decks. They can frequently tear the game apart in the first three turns but often lose to a Tarmogoyf or Bob off the top of the deck while some one-mana discard spell rots in their hand. With Leyline in play, you can cast those discard spells at the end of their draw step just like you would Clique. Leyline turns all those awful late-game Thoughtseizes into much more potent spells, as you can actually nab anything they draw before they cast it. Those decks often run Liliana or Smallpox or something similar, and are constantly discarding their own stuff, so pitching redundant Leylines would be fine. Drawing a late Leyline when you already have one in play is obviously bad, but now instead of having eight to twelve dead top decks in the form of Thoughtseize and Duress, those are all live and only the three other Leylines are dead. That seems like a solid trade. I doubt this makes those decks tier 1 contenders or anything, but it just struck me as an unusual card choice that could actually do a lot to shore up the problems those types of lists tend to have.

The Gilded Goblin

Ancestral Recall: The Wild West

August 11, 2014 Jared Yost

Jared is on vacation this week, so enjoy this article that originally aired December 23, 2013.

By: Jared Yost

Sometimes it feels like we are in the wild west of Magic: the Gathering when it comes to sudden price spikes and card buyouts that seem to affect the market on a weekly basis. It feels like every week I am hearing that this card or that card was bought out and the price has gone up 200%-400%. Just like a shootout, it seems as if the first person to draw their gun (or in this case, their wallet) and fire (click “add to cart”) is the winner. And it only seems to get worse as time goes on.

Let’s ponder for a quick minute – who the heck is actually pulling the trigger on these calls like Disrupting Shoal and Phyrexian Obliterator (which even seemed to spike twice?) Is it individuals that have amassed enough ammunition (money) and have good enough aim (experience) to hit every single target faster than the rest of us? Are they the Billie the Kids and Jesse James of the Magic market? Is there a domino effect of casual speculators with more money than sense?

The answer is probably yes to both. As the popularity of Magic increases, it looks like the sky’s the limit for the prices on some of these cards when someone discovers that they are undercosted and acts quickly to drain the market. If you are one of these individuals, my hat is off to you. Congratulations. You have done your homework, discovered an undervalued asset, and have capitalized on that asset. I’m not sure if there is any advice I can give you except to avoid the trap of getting in on a card too late, which you’ve probably avoided in 95% of the cases (there is always the potential for the double spike, though it doesn’t happen often – Jace, the Mind Sculptor did it in Standard). Just remember to strike while the iron is hot: those Disrupting Shoals aren’t going to sell themselves.

But It’s not even Modern cards that are experiencing these price hikes. What about cards like Wheel and Deal and Forced Fruition? Nekusar hasn’t been out for long and isn’t even the flagship commander of the Mind Seize deck, so why did these random cards that only fit into a narrow strategy in a specific causal format go up in value? I might have an idea.

Those holding the bag of cards that spike and then quickly plummet are similar to the penny stock investor, who decided “investing” in penny stock assets would result in a great return. However, the asset in this case is not a random number on a roulette wheel or any single name in a list of penny stocks – the asset is actually something that all of us are emotionally invested in. The first reason that these spikes happen is because players and speculators are both emotionally invested in the game of Magic.

Everyone that plays Magic is emotionally invested in the game to some degree. Otherwise, why play the game? There are literally thousands of other games that could be played instead, so what makes it so special? The answer is that playing the game is fun, the wonderful community is welcoming and friendly, the feeling of opening packs and sorting a collection can’t be beat, the feeling of chasing a collection and acquiring all of the particular cards you desire is amazing, the great feeling of putting a deck together and calling it your own is the best, and the support by the company that produces the game is fantastic. Without all of these factors, Magic would falter and slowly go away. It is stronger than ever now because all Magic players are able to get emotionally invested through all of these other aspects besides playing the game. There are hundreds of websites dedicated to Magic out there, whether they sell art related to the game (card alters), offer game accessories (dice, tokens, deckboxes, playmats, etc.), or are just reflecting on the community (Cardboard Crack). All of these factors help to cement good feelings in players’ minds about how sweet Magic is.

Right, so what does emotional investment have to do with price spikes? Well, when you get pretty emotional about something, it’s much harder for logic to factor into the equation. Do you want to buy those Disrupting Shoals at $10 because you think they’re cool and there is no way they could go down due to their awesomeness? If this is your train of thought, speculating might not be for you. Speculating requires a certain amount of cold logic and forethought that a lot players don’t want to apply to their favorite past time, which is supposed to be about fun.

Besides emotional investing, I believe another reason that these price spikes are happening is due to the rarity of the older cards compared to the newer ones (Wheel of Fortune anyone?). Back when Magic first came out, they had no idea how popular the game would be. They created the reserve list out of a fear of killing the game via reprints, and it seemed to work for a time. Because these cards can’t be reprinted, when a new card is released that synergizes or combos well with an old Reserve List card, that card can wind up spiking in value very fast. Even a rules change or unbanning could do this – Gaea’s Cradle and Time Spiral are examples of these cases respectively. With the Modern format Wizards can better control prices of newer cards, but older cards that are in Legacy and EDH are anyone’s guess.

In addition to Reserved List cards that are never getting reprinted, cards that could also receive a reprint but have not gotten one yet are also targets for spikes. Specifically, cards in sets that are post-reserved but pre-Modern, like Masque’s (Rishadan Port), Invasion, Odyssey, and Onslaught – these blocks were printed in a time where the Magic community was only a fraction of what it is today. If a card from one of these sets is discovered to be very synergistic with a new card it, it will spike out of nowhere because the amount of copies that exist are marginal compared to the demand it will see from interacting well with a newer card. It is very hard to keep on top of all the potential combinations that exist without a good grasp on the community resources available to discover these interactions. So I will state that card rarity is always a factor in a spike, because even uncommons (Remand) can become grossly expensive without a reprint.

Just because because a card is rare or hard to find does not mean that its spike is warranted. Aluren would be a good example of this – it’s a card that has a legacy deck to its name and is a casual favorite that a lot of players remember having tons of fun with. It never sustained its price, though, because the deck failed to put up enough results compared to other currently existing legacy decks. Due to the lack of demand, it then dropped down close to the original price from which it spiked. In order to avoid buying high into potential scenarios like Aluren, you want to make sure you pick up the card before it has seen a massive increase in price, you want to make sure that it can fit into a deck that has proven results backing it up, you want to make sure that even if it isn’t tournament playable that it can be popular with casual and EDH players, and you finally want to make sure that it is from a set that had a relatively small print run compared to current sets (like the post-reserve list sets I mentioned above).

So in summary, the combination of emotional investing and card rarity are a recipe for a card spike. Whether the spike is real or whether it will ultimately become a bust can be hard to spot without extensive knowledge of the current tournament scene and correctly identifying the casual appeal of a card. With time comes experience, and I’m sure we’ve all made mistakes in the past in regard to cards and spikes – I certainly have. All we can do is to keep working at it and make sure that the characteristics of a card match up well with the reasons a card could spike. It can sure feel like the wild west at times with all of these card spikes, but realize that many of them can’t sustain those prices for very long and are mainly driven emotional investing and card rarity.

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