In the field of MTG finance (a name I find myself disliking more with each passing day) we focus on finding the cards before they get big. Scour MTGO dailies for growing trends, identify EDH cards before they blow up, pinpoint combo pieces that will get broken, recognize when a card is at the bottom of a valley. All of these, done well, will put you in a position to be profitable. Cards will be obtained for some number of dollars, and a few weeks or months later, they’ll be worth double, triple, or even ten times what you originally paid. Pop the champagne.
We as a community tend to focus very hard on this part of the process – figuring out what cards are going to rise in value, so that we may obtain them before they do. Understandably so, of course. It’s the most difficult part of the entire profit cycle, which means it deserves attention, and it’s also the sexiest.
The latter half of the process is getting rid of cards after they’ve risen in value. I discussed this topic to some extent awhile ago when I had jumped in on Ghaves a week before he quadrupled in value. In short, it’s a lot tougher for this to be profitable than it may seem at first blush.
It is with this postulate that I today encourage anyone that is reasonably involved with buying and selling cards to consider a TCGPlayer seller account. Creating an account is simple, using the website isn’t too painful, effort required of you is no more than PucaTrade or Deckbox, and most of all, it provides a convenient avenue for outing your specs.
I’ll tell you right off the bat: there are better solutions out there. Members of the community that have made a full-time job of trafficking in Magic have no hesitation speaking ill of TCG from a seller’s perspective. I will not discount these concerns. Like eBay, TCG bends over backwards to protect the buyer. It is far easier to find people willing to use your system to make money rather than spend it, so their incentive is to keep the buyers happy, not the sellers. It’s not that they don’t care about vendors, but we are undeniably second to the people actually spending money. This leads to buyers usually receiving the benefit of the doubt in nearly all situations. There’s a ten day wait on receiving funds as well. If you’ve got a bankroll this isn’t much of an issue, but not everyone has that luxury. The UI is a bit clunky, with it taking far more clicks than it seems should be necessary to view and close orders, an issue compounded by the fact that their servers seem to take at least five seconds to respond to any request, made even more dumbfounding by the fact that I live within two hours of their offices. They take north of 11% of each sale you make, depending on how much the sale is for. (My own history shows an order total of $5.98 paying a 19% fee, and a $294 order paying an 11% fee.) This isn’t a totally unreasonable amount, as you’ll pay 10% at eBay plus PayPal fees, but it’s hardly any better.
So why, if there are so many complaints regarding TCG, do I recommend anyone that buys more than one or two cards each month with the intent of flipping them open a seller’s account? The easiest answer is that you get to sell for TCG prices.
When I discussed flipping Ghave, one of the limiting factors was the buylist values. $5 was the highest offering, which barely covered my investment. Meanwhile, over on TCG he was in the $10 range. At the time that wasn’t an option to me so I was stuck facing buylists, eBay, or finding private sales. With a TCG account, I’d get to tap into that $10 retail price tag. Suddenly my spec would have been far more profitable. Even if I wasn’t greedy and listed at $8 or $9 instead of the $10 to $11 others had him at, the margin would have been large enough for a healthy profit.
It’s frequently discussed in regards to specs that you never get to sell them for retail. You buy in at retail, and then after the card spikes, you have to sell at buylist or below retail. But with a TCG account, this is no longer the case. You buy in at TCG low, and when you decide it’s time to move your cards, you get to sell at TCG low. Selling via TCG doesn’t get rid of all the fees or inconveniences of other methods, but rather, it raises the price you get to sell your product for. This is why, for the average person looking to move a few playsets of Ghostway, it’s a preferable venue.
The volume of cards I’ve sold after adopting the use of TCG have increased dramatically. eBay is really your only other open market option, and the demand of shipping every single card with tracking information drastically cuts into your profit margins. Selling expensive cards on eBay is mostly fine, but Ghaves or Skullbriars or Past in Flames sucks out loud. Moving my operation to TCG I’m now able to list cards under $10, something I wasn’t comfortable doing with eBay. People are much less scammy on TCG, meaning you get to use plain white envelopes for smaller sales. This opened the door to putting far more cards from my binder up for sale. That Rafiq or promo Honor of the Pure been gathering dust in your binder, and you want the space? Pick up a Soulfire Grand Master last night and you want to ship it before it falls further? Onto TCG it goes.
What really drove me to discuss this today was a feature recently added. Foreign cards can now be listed, a major boon to both customers and vendors. When I returned from Japan I brought back thirty-eight Japanese Black Markets. Up until now I’ve had no reasonable way to sell them. With foreign support having been added, I can now list my Black Markets, and all the other Japanese product I brought back. It’s great for people that end up with foreign product in their possession, and it’s great for people that wanted foreign product in their possession, a challenging goal if SCG didn’t have what you were looking for.
It’s important for people buying and selling to know what’s available to them on both sides of the process. Knowing how to move your cards is just as valuable, or perhaps more, than knowing which ones to pick up. I’m not shilling for TCG, I didn’t get paid by them, and I have no vested interest in their company. They provide a service that is quite valuable to people that do this type of thing frequently, and it’s helpful to be aware of it as an option. It isn’t flawless, and there are options with better returns, but those options usually involve running a store, or at least a case in a brick and mortar, which aren’t reasonable for people that don’t want this to be a full-time job. If you’re a mid-level actor in this market, TCG provides you an acceptable venue to sell at retail or near-retail prices.
Four weeks ago I wrote an article about Tiny Leaders potentially being the next big thing in Magic. What I did not expect was Tiny Leaders to undergo a sort of Cambrian explosion within just a couple of weeks.
In Malaysia, we had our first Tiny Leaders tournament at the end of January, with a whooping 15 players in attendance.
For the past few weeks, whenever I popped by a local game store, I would overhear players discussing Tiny Leaders or witness Tiny Leaders games taking place. And I have visited at least three different stores catering to starkly different player bases.
It was a pleasant surprise to see some of the local PPTQ grinders getting into Tiny Leaders too. The format’s appeal to the casuals and spikes alike is important for the Tiny Leaders to be considered sufficiently differentiated from existing formats so as to warrant a niche of its own. Without a defined niche, Wizards would have little reason to adopt Tiny Leaders as an official format, together with annual product releases.
Elsewhere around the world, the enthusiasm for Tiny Leaders hit fever pitch. The first streamed Tiny Leaders league began three weeks ago, organised by /u/SaintOmerville and his playgroup at Maryland (Check them out at /r/TinyLeaders, they stream weekly).
Dark Sphere, the awesome LGS I used to frequent when I lived in London ran their first Tiny Leaders FNM a few days ago, to a pretty good turnout of 14 players. Kyle Lopez, the guest on last week’s Brainstorm Brewery pointed out that the Tiny Leaders craze hit his local game store as well.
Those were just drop in the wave of Tiny Leaders hype that swept through the Magic community in the past month and I am sure there are plenty of other Tiny Leaders stories elsewhere.
However, nothing could be a better testament of Tiny Leaders’ growing popularity than a feature article dedicated to the format on the Mothership by the inimitable Gavin Verhey.
Last weekend, I participated in my second Tiny Leaders tournament. It was an eight-person tournament, featuring a diverse field comprising of the following leaders:
I went 2-0, beating Ezuri and Grenzo and splitting with Alesha in the finals to ensure that we both secure a 5x multiplier for our entry fee in store credit as prize. Anafenza turned out to be an unintentionally good meta call as two out of the three decks I faced (Grenzo and Alesha) relied on graveyard mechanics and Anafenza’s second, less conspicuous ability swung a wrecking ball to their game plan.
I’ve used the store credit to buy myself a playmat tube for the Ugin Game Day playmat I won last weekend and two Tiny Leaders foils which I would discuss in a bit.
A few thoughts about the format after two tournaments (hooray):
Removals are efficient but sparse in Tiny Leaders due to the singleton restriction. In most of the games I’ve played, my Dark Confidant stuck around longer than he would have in other formats. His value in the format was comparatively higher than in say, Modern, due to his reduced fragility. I suspect there are quite a number of other cards which could be evaluated differently for the same reason.
He’s more confident in Tiny Leaders.
The limited removals mean that creature-based combos are easier to pull off. I shall get to this in a bit.
The second observation was that the threat of Geist of Saint Traft and Ezuri, Renegade Leader was overblown. Well, at least from the small sample size of matches I have played against them.
Geist lacks removals and the deck struggle with board control. I’ve found it relatively easy to brute force your way through their counterspells and removals and develop a board position that makes it difficult for Geist to attack or race them. Tempo is the key to beat Geist.
Not as pesky as I thought.
Ezuri Elfball is explosive but well-timed removal of their key components is a big set back for their game plan. Ezuri’s ability to regenerate another elven brethren was not as incessant as I thought it to be, but that could be attributed to the fact that Abzan removals – Swords to Plowshares, Smother and Dismember from the mainboard; Zealous Persecution, Drown in Sorrow and Golgari Charm from the sideboard – leave no room for regeneration shenanigans.
The health of the format is a controversial topic. There are segments of players complaining about the lack of diversity among tier one leaders and the repetitiveness of the format.
From my very statistically significant sample size of 7 matches across two tournaments, I’ve found the diversity to be pretty good. As the optimal build for the majority of the leaders have yet to be discovered, perhaps it is too early to claim that there are too few tier one decks. I suspect there are plenty of yet-to-be-recognised tier one decks out there, and the current playes
Yes, Tiny Leaders feels repetitive if you compare it to Commander, but it is no more repetitive than Modern in my opinion. Which is a good thing as Tiny Leaders was designed to be a duel format. I would consider Tiny Leaders to be less repetitive compared with Standard, offering a similar level of game play diversity as Modern (I have not played enough Legacy to compare Tiny Leaders with it).
This Week’s Tiny Pick Ups
Initially my plan for the Tiny Leaders finance series was to make my way down the color pie with every installment of the series à la the undervalued Commander foils series I embarked on a while back.
That schedule may work for undervalued Commander foils as cards in the format have largely settled in price with Commander being a relatively mature format. Tiny Leaders is a young format and as such brewers and players are still in the process of exploring new deckbuilding spaces and discovering new interactions.
Doing a series of article about undervalued Tiny Leaders cards by color would probably miss the boat on a lot of…well, undervalued cards which I imagine would spike once word about a new tech gets out.
So I am going to give this series a bit of a shake-up; I will be looking a few cards in each installment, but they would be in no particular order. I will write about undervalued cards as I encounter them; it would do you readers no justice if I were to hold back on discussing a card I think is sorely undervalued just to follow a self-imposed order. We’re going to introduce a little bit of anarchy.
The first two cards we are looking at today are the two foils I’ve bought with the store credit I won at last weekend’s Tiny Leaders tournament. They are two cheap foils (the playmat tube took up the bulk of the store credit) with plenty of room to grow.
She was part of the cartel driving up the price of Orzhov staples.
I am convinced that Cartel Aristocrat foils at $2 are good pick ups. She functions as an engine in a couple of Tiny Leaders archetypes: she is a powerful gear in the Athreos, God of Passage machine and is a token factory in Teysa, Orzhov Scion decks.
Cartel Aristocrat is also one of the best engine for the Melira combo, which was by far the most impressive aspect of my Anafenza deck and is a combo that I am confident should be a mainstay in the format.
I threw in the Melira combo when I was constructing my Anafenza list as a plan B to give the deck an extra angle of attack (decks that attack on multiple axes are good, said a certain Gerry Thompson). It was supposed to be the gear I shift to after I’ve exhausted my opponent’s removals, or when my opponent inadvertently taps out.
Turns out not only did I leaned on the combo more than I had imagined, I won half my games with it. While Anafenza has access to some of the best removals in the format, those removals are often 1-for-1 removals and the struggles if an opponent gets too far ahead in tempo or overwhelms the board with cheap minions. Anafenza is a fair deck after all.
The Melira combo stole me countless games where I was not supposed to win. It won me a game when I was staring down an unblockable Geist of Saint Traft with lethal the next turn. It won me a couple of game ones against Ezuri when I do not have access to board wipes. Gaining infinite life was the only way I can snatch the upper hand against Alesha’s recurring horde.
I eschewed Blood Artist as an enabler to close the game once I’ve achieved the infinite loop as he is a bad card outside the combo. Plus, with a Green Sun’s Zenith in my deck, I would not deck out.
In the end, Anafenza – my list at least – played out like Patrick Dickmann’s Tempo Twin. Neither plan of efficient beatdown or Melira combo is the main plan; it depends on the matchup and my opening hand. Although when I find myself losing grip of the board, I often switch to defensive mode and attempt to stall the game until I rip the combo pieces. With three tutors, it was relatively easy to assemble the pieces.
Another reason the Melira plan worked better than I had envisioned during deckbuilding was the fact that removals are limited in Tiny Leaders, as I’ve mentioned.
The combo complements Anafenza strategies because every creature in the deck demands an answer or it would out-card advantage the opponent out of the game, grow out of proportion with Anafenza’s ability and Gavony Township, or even by itself as Scavenging Ooze scavenges, Knight of the Reliquary with every fetchland and Varolz, the Scar-Striped… well scavenges. Even a lowly 1/1 spirit token could evolve into a formidable threat if left untouched.
My opponents’ removals were often spread thin and it was relatively easy to execute the Melira combo.
That was a bit of a detour. Back to Cartel Aristocrat. She is a perfect fit in Anafenza decks sporting the Melira combo because she is both hard to remove and useful regardless of the combo. The deck has so many ways to plop on +1/+1 counters on Cartel Aristocrat she often becomes a formidable threat by herself.
Besides Varolz and noncreature options like Recurring Nightmare, Viscera Seer is the only other free-to-activate sac outlet in Abzan colors but Seer is a waste of space without the combo as we already have access to plenty of library manipulation.
To sum it up, Cartel Aristocrat has the potential to be a staple in three Tiny Leaders archetypes, two of which are tier one archetypes. Foils at $2 are enticing, especially when the card is in no risk of reprint within the next few years.
Anax and Cymede is (or are? Grammar gets complicated when there are more than one person in a card but the creature type denotes a singular entity. I shall resort to ‘is’ here and consider Anax and Cymede so inseparable they form a single entity) reputedly a tier one leader and more importantly, looks to be a budget tier one leader. Foil copies could be found for a mere $1.50 and really only have room to grow as Theros supply dries up and Tiny Leaders demand kicks in.
While the majority of the elves in Ezuri Elfball are cheap, an optimal build requires Gaea’s Cradle and Glimpse of Nature and both will set you back by $200.
On the other hand, an optimal Anax and Cymede list could be assembled on a budget and there are multiple build options to choose from; either the hyper-aggressive swarm build, or the good stuffs build as the color grants access to some of the best removals and board wipes in the format and Blood Moon.
Speaking of board wipes, the next card we are going to look at is a Modern staple with Tiny Leaders application and foils are cheap right now.
Where is your god now.
Anger of the Gods was a Modern sideboard staple when Birthing Pod was legal, but has dipped in popularity since. Which is a good thing financially as it means that foil Anger of the Gods would not spike yet. The Modern meta is cyclical and there would be a time again when Anger of the Gods will once again be a sideboard staple.
In the mean time, Anger of the Gods is one of the best board wipes in Tiny Leaders. Its exile clause hoses popular graveyard-abusing leaders like Alesha and Varolz, while serving as an efficient answer to swarm decks (Anger of the Gods deals the most damage at three mana compared with other sweepers in the format).
Ironically, red is the control color in Tiny Leaders courtesy of the number of board wipes under four casting cost in the color (red has access to a plethora of X-casting cost board wipes). At $8, Anger of the Gods foils look like a surefire pick up.
#MtgoTinyLeaders
Though more shops are jumping on the Tiny Leaders bandwagon (at least in Kuala Lumpur and London), one of the major drawbacks of Tiny Leaders is that the format can’t be enjoyed on Magic Online.
Which is a shame because Tiny Leader also appeals to the demographic of players that would play Magic Online on a regular basis.
Plus Tiny Leaders is well-suited for Magic Online play, unlike Commander where playing online strips off the social camaraderie aspect of it (and Commander is a social game, isn’t it). Players would not lose any of the fun, nor have to suffer a compromised user interface playing Tiny Leaders online.
Thanks to Modern Masters and Vintage Masters, a lot of Tiny Leaders staples are much cheaper on Magic Online compared with their physical counterparts. Which makes it even more of a shame that we are not able to jam Tiny Leaders on Magic Online!
It is true that Commander was only made available on Magic Online after the release of the first official Commander products. That does not mean we have to wait until the format is officially picked up by Wizards before we can sling Tiny Leaders online.
The infrastructure is already present. All it requires is a the removal of Commander damage, reduction of the number of cards required in the mainboard to 49, decreasing the starting life to 25, adding a sideboard and tweaking the ban list a little. Having little technical knowledge, I would not claim to be privy the difficulty of implementing those changes, but one could reasonably assume that it would be less difficult than enabling Commander on Magic Online. The addition of a ten-card sideboard may be a complication as I believe your Commander resides in your sideboard in the current implementation of Commander on Magic Online.
Getting Magic Online to support Tiny Leaders would allow more players to get into the format, and enable competitive players to practice online. Magic Online support would be a huge driver for the growth of the format.
Wizards has a history of being responsive to the Magic community’s wishes, an extremely rare trait in a large corporation, and is one of the main reason why Magic is flourishing at the heights it is at today.
If you would like to see Tiny Leaders on Magic Online, do make your desire known to the various powers above at Wizards through social media. Most of the management at Wizards are highly engaged with the Magic community, especially on Twitter and anyone with a Twitter account could get in touch with them there.
Those I would recommend are Magic Online’s official account: @MagicOnline; Magic Online’s Director of Products, Worth Wolpert’s account: @mtgworth and possibly some the other directors that deal with paper Magic like Helene Bergeot, the Director of Global Organized Play: @HeleneBergeot and Aaron Forsythe, the Director of R & D: @mtgaaron to let them know that there are a lot of enthusiasm for Tiny Leaders.
Let’s start a little social media campaign. Use the hashtag #MtgoTinyLeaders so we all have one cohesive platform to push for Tiny Leaders on Magic Online.
Leave your comments below, or find me on Twitter @theguoheng.
I was browsing MTGTop8 results and noticed that there were three major events that took place in Japan over the recent weeks – there were two Standard PTQ’s along with a large Legacy event that had almost 300 players. Let’s see what types of results have come from these events since they could be adopted by other regions for metagames.
Soulfire Grand Master – This card showed up as a playset in the second place deck. This makes me wonder if this was a metagame call or if the Grand Master has the potential of being a main staple of Jeskai decks in the new Fate Reforged Standard. The current price trajectory of Soulfire Grand Master over the last month:
The cheapest current price is $12, a lofty fall from its preorder price of $25 and higher. Many have thought that the Grand Master was nothing more than a cute, gain-more card that was destined to fall pretty hard. While this is true, it has also proven that it can be a powerful card in Standard. Its inclusion in the second place deck along with another appearance in the Boros Aggro deck that made the Top 8 (with two copies appearing the deck) is making me seriously consider this card’s playability in future Standard events.
Cheap casting cost mythic rares can be hit or miss. However, I really think this card has struck a chord with spikes and has incredible casual appeal. Remember that time in your Magic playing career that you loved gaining life? This card takes that desire to a completely different galaxy of possibilities for the casual players among us.
While I believe that the Grand Master has some room to drop as Fate Reforged continues to be opened, if it starts going into the single digit ranges I’m going to be watching it very closely as a potential pickup. It has current and future Standard value as well as casual appeal. To me, these are all signs of an undervaluation if the Grand Master continues its price descent.
Soldier of the Pantheon – This card also made an appearance, in both Jeskai Midrange and one of the Abzan Midrange decks. Soldier currently sits at around $0.83 retail, with many copies listed at $0.75 or less. There could be potential for a spike in the short run if Soldier turns out to be good in the new metagame, and if that happens it will be the time to get rid of any copies of Soldier that you have. I don’t expect it to become a Modern or eternal mainstay so the last chance to get value out of Soldier will be in the coming months.
Wedge Tap Lands – Wedge tap lands are seeing play in nearly every deck due to the three color nature of the format. The time to get in on wedge tap lands en mass is coming soon. Even Sandsteppe Citadel, arguably the most widely played wedge land, is only around $0.50 retail. If you can pick up these lands for $0.40 or less it will be a great addition to a long term spec box.
Rakshasha Deathdealer – Another card that appeared in several decks, the power of Deathdealer in the new format cannot be underestimated. It is one of the best shades that Wizards has printed and it could really shine in Standard at some point. At $1 it seems like a very good pickup for future gains.
Archfiend of Depravity – Three copies of this card showed up in an Abzan Midrange list, which is surprising since I didn’t figure that that this card had constructed potential. Due to the inclusion it makes me want to watch the card closely over the next few months in case it pops up anywhere else.
Kolaghan, the Storm’s Fury – The dragon appeared in the sideboard of the Mardu Control list. In addition to constructed playability, Kolaghan will also be popular with the casual crowd. This will enable it to retain a fairly decent price even if it doesn’t see much Standard play. I like foils here if you can get them on the cheap.
Citadel and Outpost Siege – Many players are hyping the red siege (Outpost) since it brings Chandra, Pyromaster’s best ability out as an enchantment, which is generally harder to remove. However, Citadel Siege should not be overlooked. In aggro decks this card really shines as both modes can be useful to you throughout the game. I’ll be keeping a close eye on Citadel Siege as Fate Reforged results continue to roll in.
Soulfire Grand Master was seen at the top tables at this tournament too, being featured in Boros Aggro as a playset. This furthers the idea that it could have Standard possibilities.
Monastery Mentor only showed up in Jeskai Tokens, which means that he is not quite as popular as Goblin Rabblemaster in the current Standard. This leads me to believe that his price will come down a bit more over the coming months. I would watch out for any good deals through the summer because even though Mentor isn’t a powerhouse in Standard now we all know that he will be quite good in the future once Rabblemaster rotates.
Death and Taxes took down the event. Thalia has been slowly rising to close to $5 retail and I expect this upward trend to continue. She is not going to get a reprint in Modern Masters 2 while still being a widely played Modern and Legacy staple.
Mother of Runes was just announced as reprint in the upcoming Elspeth vs. Kiora duel decks, so I expect her to trend downward in price in the coming weeks based on the announcement. Leonin Arbiter is a hard call – at $1.50 retail it is very cheap for a card that occasionally sees Legacy play and definitely sees Modern play. However, I think many vendors and players are speculating its inclusion in Modern Masters 2 which has kept the price suppressed. Just last December the card was at $4 and seemed to be gaining in price. Then all of a sudden it dropped back down to $1.50 and seems to keep lowering.
So what happened? Its hard for me to put an exact reason for Arbiter’s price history, but it feels to me that his price reflects the wax and wane of the Hate Bears deck in Modern. Once Treasure Cruise was banned and the format shifted towards BGw Midrange Decks, Arbiter again found himself on the sidelines.
Historically, his drop in the middle of last year was leading up to Treasure Cruise and the general lack of large Modern events, and once the Hate Bears deck started doing well against the Treasure Cruise format he then shot back up to the $4 range. Of course, this is all just a theory – it could very well be the case that vendors just kept getting bought out at particular times which explains the temporary price spike of the card.
All in all, this tells me that Leonin Arbiter is a card that should be watched very closely for future gains or losses. Its volatile past tells me that the card could swing easily one way or the other depending on the direction that Modern or Legacy take.
Other notables from the tournament include a second place Merfolk list and Grixis Control placing in the Top 8 along with changes to Delver archetypes.
Delver decks now are splashing black for cards like Deathrite Shaman, Tombstalker, Cabal Therapy, and Tasigur. One version did strictly stay UR and opted to play three Dig Through Time over two or fewer to get the maximum effect out of the Delve keyword alongside cards like Gitaxian Probe and other cheap spells. Delver is still alive and well as one of the top decks of Legacy.
Results Are In
Its interesting to analyze different metagames in order to expand your knowledge of what possibilities for deckbuilding are out there. Even though non-Japanese metagames may not mirror the results that appeared across the three tournaments I covered, there are still some interesting trends that should be noted so that they don’t surprise you later down the road. If you’re interested in any of the decks or strategies that did well in Japan then you will want to get in on cards that are cheap now and look for good deals on cards that are currently overpriced.
One of the most common misconceptions about folks involved in MTGFinance is that we are constantly manipulating the market and feeding players misinformation to help fuel achievement of our personal goals.
It recently occurred to us here that though we dole out a good deal of advice, most of you ultimately have very little insight into when we actually put our money where our collective mouths are pointing. As such we’ve decided to run a weekly series simply breaking down what we’ve been buying this week and why. These lists are meant to be both complete and transparent, leaving off only cards we bought without hope of profit, where appropriate. We’ll also try to provide some insight into our thinking behind the specs, and whether we are aiming for a short (<1 month), mid (1-12 month), or long (1 year+) term flip. Here we go!
While most of us are just talking about buying cards, guys like “Davis” (not his real name) are out there hustling for paper in both directions. I first came across Davis when preparing for GP NJ last fall, when he lent me some much needed Legacy cards without the slightest demand for compensation, having never met me before. Intrigued by his trust, we chatted on social media, and it quickly became apparent to me that he was one of the sharpest minds in MTGFinance. Davis has a keen eye for a deal, and he’s willing to travel to get things done. When others are scared, he’s stockpiling, and recently we’ve been chatting about how the swings in exchange up here (the Canadian dollar has moved from $1.05 against the USD last summer to $1.28 now) have made acquiring Legacy and Vintage staples in Canada a serious bargain.
Here’s what Davis has been up to this week:
6x Alt Art Ugin, the Spirit Dragon: $60 per
Swords to Plowshares (FNM Foil): $95
Lightning Bolt (Judge Foil): $115
Counterbalance (Foil NM): $65
Thoughtseize (Foil NM Lorwyn): $175
Foil Gaea’s Cradle $195
12x Polluted Delta (KTK) $10
12x Flooded Strand (KTK) $10
12x Windswept heath (KTK) $8
12x Wooded Foothills (KTK) $8
12x Bloodstained Mire (KTK) $7
“Here in Canada, we don’t have our outlets like TCGPlayer to sell our cards [as easily as in the US], and for most players, buying via TCG is such a hassle, due to shipping costs (if the seller will even ship internationally to begin with) and border fees, so the local players tend to ignore TCG, and most deals are based on StarCityGames prices. SCG is known to be terrible for pricing, but when you take the recent changes in the value of our dollar, you start to realize how cheap our cards actually are. “
“What once was TCGPlayer’s low prices against the highest buylist, I now look at the difference in foreign currencies, and see where SCG prices in Canadian dollars relates to US buylists. For example, a near-mint Underground Sea is being sold by our local stores for $300 Canadian, and Æther Games was buying them at $230 US Dollars at GP San Jose. Now when you put both into a common currency, $300 Canadian is only $239 US. You can currently buy cards in Canada for nearly buylist prices from our retail stores! As of today, the current TCG low on Flooded Strand is $12.83 USD, meanwhile our stores are essentially selling them for 11.56 USD. And many players will sell their cards for even less than that of the local stores.”
Long: 10x Mind Control (NM – Alt Art Foil Promo): $.020 per
Long: 10x Kiora’s Follower (NM – Alt Art Promo): $.020 per
Long: 10x Vault Skirge (NM – Alt Art Foil Promo): $.020 per
Long: 10x Hall of Triumph (NM – Alt Art Foil Promo): $.020 per
Long: 10x Dictate of the Twin Gods (NM – Alt Art Foil Promo): $.020 per
Long: 10x Magister of Worth (NM – Alt Art Foil Promo): $.020 per
Long: 10x Megantic Sliver (NM – Alt Art Foil Promo): $.020 per
This week was a bit quiet on my side of things, as I spent more spare time playing Magic than buying cards. Standard is just in such a great spot right now, so I’m all in with no less than 5 decks on hand.
The Russian Thoughtseize is a pretty rare specialty item given that’s a Lorwyn edition, so I snapped it up for personal play use, with the potential for upside should the more common versions start pushing the price higher next year.
I continue to acquire Abrupt Decay, having start in on the card at $6 last year, and up to about 40 copies at this point. I see this powerful multi-format all-star hitting $20 within the year, as it should be free of reprint risk for the next year or two, and is one of the most powerful removal spells in both Modern and Legacy, as well as being excellent in the emerging Tiny Leaders format. It could also stall out in the mid teens, but it’s almost impossible for the card to reverse course, and that makes it a great place to store some value at the outside worst.
Temur Battle Rage first popped on my radar when I saw LSV steal a few games with it on camera in limited. The ability to deal immense amounts of damage in a hurry is much more powerful than most people realize, as both double strike and trample can easily wreck plans. Then I started seeing the card show up all over the place on MTGO, in bizarre hyper aggro builds leveraging cards like Steppe Lynx, Death’s Shadow and Wild Nacatl. It’s only a common, but it’s from a set that won’t be opened for very long on it’s own, and I can easily see these foils hitting $3-5 at some point down the road when aggro regains prominence in Modern. This is a perfect example of the kind of long shot specs you should stay away from if your funds are limited, especially if you don’t already have your allotment of cards like Abrupt Decay or Eidolon of the Great Revel.
Speaking of long shots, I picked up another 12 copies of Soulflayer around $1, because I’m convinced that this card has a future home in Modern and/or Legacy. Oddly many of my peers disagree and see this card as pure bulk. To my eyes, it’s basically Tasigur without Legendary limitations and much more upside in aggro/combo builds. Sure Tasigur only requires a single black mana vs. double black, and he has that sweet recursive ability in long games, but if Tasigur is an 8/10 on power level, I think Soulflayer is at least a 6 or 7, especially when you’re set to give him Hexproof. Travis Woo even through together a Soulflayer brew this week for Modern that looked predictably loose, yet still very powerful in the games on camera. In the hands of a more devoted brewer, and with the high potential of future synergistic cards adding to it’s power, I’m happy to be holding 20+ of this card.
Re: all the promos, they aren’t the kind of cards I tend to target, especially if they don’t represent top of mind demand, but a local LGS had them on special as 10 for $2.00 packs, unplayed, so I snapped them up to add to my trade fodder, with a few held aside for Cube and Commander decks. Given that most of these cards are already worth $1-3, that’s a pretty great deal.
Note: Guo Heng Chin buys from Malyasia, so his costs will tend to be different than for those of us based in the west.
Long: 4 x foil Kemba, Kha Regent (NM): $3.99 per.
Guo says:
“In my article last week, I mentioned that Kemba, Kha Regent is a good pick up at under $5 and what better way to back my argument than moving in on a few myself. Kemba is a rare combination of a solid leader in Tiny Leaders who at the same time oozes casual appeal. She is also a good addition to equipment-centric Nahiri decks.
Just four copies as I am not interested in ‘buying out’ the market (nor do I have the resources to do so). Any less than four makes the $7 recorded shipping to Malaysia unjustifiable.”
Jared Yost
1x Thassa, God of the Sea (NM Foil): $15
1x Sygg, River Guide (NM Foil): $11
1x Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest (NM Promo Foil): $6
1x Selvala, Explorer Returned (NM Foil): $9
1x Rayne, Academy Chancellor (NM Foil): $10
1x Isamaru, Hound of Konda (NM Foil): $20
Jared says:
“This is all Tiny Leaders speculation. I’m targeting foil Commanders since they are the centerpiece of their respective decks. I will continue to look for more opportunities in Tiny Leaders as the format evolves.”
Cliff Daigle & Travis Allen
Nothing to report this week.
So there you have it. Now what were you guys buying this week and why?
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
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