Tag Archives: Modern

PROTRADER: The Meta Report: November Week One

November 3, 2015 Guo Heng Chin 2 Comments

By: Guo Heng

Welcome to another instalment of The Meta Report. The past weekend yielded a slew of major tournament results. There was Grand Prix Indianapolis which gave us some exciting new Standard results (spoiler alert: Jace is no longer king). The first Modern Grand Prix since rotation took place at Porto Alegre, and while Battle for Zendikar did not exert the level of impact Khans of Rhino and Cruise had on the format, a few new cards managed to slip into Modern. There was also the StarCityGames Modern Open at Dallas-Fort Worth.

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Unanswered Questions

October 26, 2015 Jared Yost 9 Comments

Inspired by a recent article by our very own Douglas Johnson, I thought I might also take a stab at answering some unanswered questions from Reddit that are many #mtgfinancer’s minds.

Using the Weekly Ask MTGFinance Anything thread, I am going to try and answer all of the (currently) unanswered questions that may have been asked later in the week and got buried near the bottom. No question is a stupid question, so let’s dig our way up from the bottom and see what we have this week.

Mattscriv writes:

Alright guys, I decided to drop in and ask a few questions. Just to get this out of the way: I am in possession of a BFZ land brick. Is it okay to take off the plastic and use them, or will the value decrease a lot if I try to sell them later on? Second of all, I have a list of a few cards I was lucky enough to open in packs and I want to know whether I should keep, or get rid of:

Ruinous Path Shambling Vent – Foil Sunken Hollow Canopy Vista Liliana, Heretical Healer Archangel of Tithes Bloodstained Mire Dragonlord Ojutai Fathom Feeder – Promo Greenwarden of Murasa Sarkhan, the dragonspeaker Smothering Abomination – Promo Sword of the Animist

(Side note: I know that I should try to pick up ask many KTK fetches as possible, but what other lands around $10 or less should I try to pick up too? Pain lands?)

Thanks everyone that helps me out, but be warned, I may have further questions.

Land brick response:

Crack it and sell now. The only item that will maintain significant value in the future in terms of full art lands is the sealed Zendikar fat packs. The land packs won’t be worth much more than MSRP for all lands in the pack because players can get lands in boosters. Plus we also need to consider that Oath will contain full arts in many supplemental products as well.

Keep or Sell Questions:

Sell:

Sunken Hollow, Canopy Vista, Liliana, Heretical Healer, Archangel of Tithes, Dragonlord Ojutai, Greenwarden of Murasa, Promo Sword of the Animist, Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker

These cards are all propped up by Standard currently. I recommend selling cards like Sunken Hollow, Canopy Vista, Liliana, Heretical Healer, and Greenwarden of Murasa sooner due to Pro Tour and new BFZ hype to maximize the price you sell at.

Keep:

Ruinous Path, Shambling Vent – Foil, Bloodstained Mire, Fathom Feeder, Smothering Abomination

I believe all of these cards will either maintain value or go up in time if cards like Runious Path and Smothering Abomination find a home in Standard.

Side note response:

The only other Standard lands worth picking up right now are Khans trilands, which if you can get for $0.25 to $0.40 you should stock away in bulk. These tri-ands will be in great demand in the future because of all the Wedge Commander decks that people build and they are going to want copies for fixing.

dwaynebank writes:

Do you guys believe holday giftboxes will affect the price of fatpacks? I understand they also come with land packs, but they’re packs of 20, where the fatpacks have packs of 80. The MRSP on the holday gift boxes is $24.99. Is it possible the giftboxes sell out everywhere and will sell for more than their MRSP, similar to the fatpacks?

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT – No, holiday gift boxes will not affect the price of fat packs because the holiday gift boxes contain regular art lands, not full art lands. The gift boxes should sell at past or current levels of demand.

Adelysium writes:

Hey all! After some good trading on Gameday I managed to procure a Jace. My intention was that its easier to move 1 card than the 15 I traded to get him, when I eventually know what I want and find someone with the some stuff I want. My questions pertain to him.

For maximum value should I try to move now or keep?
If we assume relatively few packs of Origins will be opened between now and when he rotates, how much is there to lose and will he rebound after a slight dip considering his playability outside of this format?

The fact is, I have the standard deck I want and am happy with, sideboard and all. As far as immediate gratification, I’m fine without trying to move him. However, if he won’t be this high within a year of rotating I might as well move now. I don’t have the intention to acquire more of him, that’s for sure.

Thanks for the help guys!

Move the Jace. It is at peak price right now due to a confluence of factors, which is explained in great detail by my fellow write Corbin in this neat little video he made on the topic.

There is quite a bit to lose in terms of Jace’s price if you do not move him soon – Snapcaster was only around $30 at the time of his rotation from Standard, and I expect Jace to be at that price point or less by the time he rotates from Standard next year. My more precise prediction is that Jace lands between $20 to $25 at Origins rotation. If he still proves as popular in eternal format then as now, rotation would be the perfect time to pickup copies for future growth since double-faced walkers are going to be tough to print in the future. Otherwise, if you have extra copies around that you aren’t using than I recommend selling ASAP.

kogikogikogi writes:

Is it possible to link friends directly to my mtgprice.com collection? I’ve googled around and searched their site but I can’t find it at all. If not I’ll just use export and use deckbox but having a direct link on mtgprice would be super helpful.

No, unfortunately we don’t have that feature of our collection manager just yet. For the current iteration of the website you will need to export and then send the file. However, we’ve been working very diligently on a mobile application for the website that should have many features that will make collection sharing better – trading with nearby users and remote trading should alleviate parts of the collection list sharing process. Though, having a button/permalink to your collection is also a nice feature. We’ll have to add it to our feature queue in the future.

DatsRadMan writes:

I have a foil promo Zada, Hedron Grinder (TCG: $6.65) and a foil promo Beastcaller Savant (TCG: $5.49) that I’d like to know what to do with – should I sell/trade them now or sit on them?

What are these card’s potential long-term? I have heard Zada is useful EDH card and Beastcaller has potential in Modern Elves (whether that’s true or not)…what do you guys think these cards will be at post-Standard rotation?

Thanks!

Zada and Beastcaller have gotten plenty of attention, Zada from the Commander crowd and Beastcaller from the constructed crowd. Personally, I believe that you should keep the promo Zada because even if he drops I don’t see it dropping too significantly over time. Foils in Commnader will always maintain value, and if he turns out to be a popular card in the format than the promo should also maintain value in the future.

Beastcaller I’m not so sure about. I would sell now while BFZ demand is still high and supply hasn’t crashed the prices. It doesn’t seem like a Commander auto-include and I don’t think it quite gets there in constructed.

G_Admiral writes

I have a bunch of sealed booster boxes from the Return to Ravnica block (mostly RTR and thankfully only a couple DM) and several boxes of Conspiracy. It seems like the price hasn’t moved since I bought any of them. Any thoughts on when it will move or if there’s an opportunity to open them and trade/sell singles?

Now this is an interesting question, where an entire article (or even series of articles) could be written about MTG sealed boxes and when is the best time to buy and sell sealed boxes .

First, let’s take a look at what I and others have said on this topic in the past. Sig and I have briefly discussed boxes as article subtopics, however James has focused two well written free articles on the value of sealed product and how booster boxes play a role in that.

Me:

https://blog.mtgprice.com/2014/09/08/ancestral-recall-casual-demand-and-why-its-important/

Sig:

Protrader – https://blog.mtgprice.com/2015/04/13/on-pro-tours-and-booster-boxes/

James:

https://blog.mtgprice.com/2015/09/25/is-magic-origins-the-next-innistrad/

https://blog.mtgprice.com/2015/05/21/best-bet-booster-packs-vs-fat-packs/

Now, the summary of all this information is that booster boxes will go up in value due to inflationary costs of packs at a normal rate except if they are extremely popular draft sets like Innistrad, which will go up even more over time. However, even if they are extremely popular to draft and have other in-demand eternal cards in the set, it will still take quite a while for you to get a turnaround on those boxes where it worth selling (factoring in shipping, fees, etc.). Sealed booster boxes are hard to move, and they don’t go up that much in value over the years especially if the set is post-Innistrad.

My advice to those who are packing away extra booster boxes of sets is not to crack them, not to sell them off en-masse now, but to play the waiting game. Eventually, these boxes will go up at some point, for one reason or another, if they contain eternal playable cards like shock lands or the new baby Jace. However, sets like Dragon’s Maze are a lost cause, similar to Saviors of Kamigawa. How old Saviors is compared to the price of those boxes is abysmal when considering the age. Unpopular sets will still be that the in future, and it’s the nature of the beast that some sets will be stinkers throughout Magic’s history.

CaptainKnusper writes:

What is your opinion on the filterlands (Twilight Mire etc.) ? Would you hold or sell them ?

Filter lands are extremely risky to hold onto long term at this point. Any reprint is going to cause the current prices of these lands to crash significantly. At least if they’re reprinted in a Standard set, they only drop by half initially since the reprint hype will be in full swing. But once the market is saturated? You can bet they’ll all be in the single digits (barring the more popular ones, of course).

However, for the short term the price should hold unless a surprise reprint happens in Commander 2015 which would be pretty unexpected. They will probably spike during the next Modern season next year, which will be the best time to get out. In summary, my advice is to hold until the next Modern spike next year and sell during the hype of the season.

VolcanicVaranus writes:

Does anyone think the Theros block temples will swing up in price eventually? I know that most stuff hits an all-time low at rotation, and many of the temples are sitting under $1. I know they likely won’t see much (if any) use in constructed formats, but do you think they’ll end up higher than they are now?

Yes, Theros temples will start going back up in price eventually, but it won’t be a swing but a slow crawl as the years go on. They have a high chance of being reprinted as well due to Scry now being an evergreen ability. So, they should go up slowly over time until the reprint. Many of them should go up past $1 (until the reprint) since they are all used in Commander in one way or another as budget lands but not enough that I would suggest picking them up en-masse.

DarthAbel writes:

You can get “Kiora, Master of the Depths” for $7 or less (TCGPlayer), is this a good time to pick a couple of Kioras or will she keep falling? Usually the floor for “meh” planeswalkers is around $5 but I am surprised about Kiora been close to the bottom so fast.

No, I don’t think now is the time to pickup Kioras. It was a no-show at the Pro Tour, so she should only go down in price more from here on out, especially if she makes another reappearance in the next duel deck product. If you want BFZ Kiora, I would suggest waiting until around December, when we start hitting peak BFZ supply.

Biohunter405 writes:

Hello everybody! My friend and I recently traded for a Mox, but due to inexperience and not understanding everything being said, we ended up with a “border inked” Unlimited Mox Sapphire. Now the border inking is not something we had taken into consideration, so we were wondering if getting it entirely altered through something like Klug alters would be a worthwhile endeavor? We’re just a little lost and would like some advice from some people with more knowledge than us. Thanks!

Very interesting question! I’m sure an article (or even series of articles) could be written on the value of alterations and what the market for alterations would look like. A great topic for this series would be your situation, where we have an HP/MP card that can be touched up and what the price of it would be after the alter.

I’m glad that this question was asked, because I have a friend that went ahead and did this for a foil Worldwake Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Here is the Klug posting for the story behind it and what it looks like after Klug touched it up. Now, this was a restoration-to-alteration rather than an alteration but I’m sure that this situation will be very close to what you want for the Mox. I’m sure if my friend tried to sell he would get a price very close to the current foil WWK Jace for the work that Klug did to the card.

Basically, the answer to your question is yes – I highly recommend that you get your card altered by Klug because it will look great and add value to the card. The waiting list is pretty long though, so be prepared to wait in the backlog for some time.

TheHat2 writes:

Knight of the Reliquary had a nice spike after BFZ was released, and has pretty well kept that high price in the weeks since. Where do you see this card going in the next six months?

I don’t see Knight of the Reliquary dropping until its next reprint. Retreat to Coralhelm is an awesome card with Knight that has spawned a new Modern deck, one that I don’t see being replaced anytime soon. I would say hold, and if you’re looking to get out of Knights to wait until peak Modern season next year. That way, if the deck does well at a huge event you can sell into the spike that Knight is sure to experience.

SOHC4 writes:

What’s Dragonlord Ojutai looking like? In the last week or so, I’ve seen it drop about $3. Doesn’t seem like Jeskai lists are running it anymore. Should I dump them now?

Yes, get rid of Dragonlord Ojutai if you’re not using him for Standard. He might experience another spike when Khans / Fate Reforged rotates from Standard but ultimately he will drop like a rock once Dragons rotates from Standard.

So there we are, as of Sunday night I’ve answered all of the unanswered questions for this week’s Ask MTGFinance Anything. I hope these answers provide some insight to everyone for my current thinking on several topics, and that they also continue to provide discussion on the future trends of topics in #mtgfinance. As always, thanks for reading.

Uncategorized

Snapcaster RPTQ Promo: A Win for All

October 23, 2015 Guo Heng Chin 14 Comments

By: Guo Heng

If you haven’t heard of it, the inimitable cross-format all-star blue two-drop, Snapcaster Mage, was unveiled as next year’s RPTQ promo in an announcement during the Pro Tour last Sunday. You can read about the details here.

Snapcaster Mage was the biggest winner during this year’s Modern season over the summer. Despite being the third most-played card in Modern and the most-popular creature in the format, Tiago Chan’s invitational card languished at $25 to $35 for the majority of its existence. Spring this year finally saw Snapcaster move up to $60, and July, at the height of the Modern fever, Snapcaster breached $100.

$100 is an extraordinary price tag for a rare from the modern-era print run, but considering Snapcaster’s ubiquity in the format, it is not preposterous.

Snapcaster third most-played — Most-played cards in Modern in 2015, from mtgtop8.com.

According to statistics from mtgtop8.com Snapcaster Mage was found in nearly one-third of all Modern decks, and decks that run Snapcaster ran three to four copies of it. Nearly all tier one decks running blue require Snapcasters, in similar veins to green-based decks requiring Tarmogoyfs. The goyf may reign supreme as the most expensive card in the format, but lacking a playset of Snapcaster would cut you off from a larger number of tier one Modern decks compared with not owning Tarmogoyfs.

Snapcaster Mage is the definitive creature of the Modern format, and one of the biggest mtgfinance long-term holds over the past few years (give yourself a pat on the back if you’ve bought Snaps at $25- $35). While players rejoice at reprints, financiers holding copies of the affected card rue the same event for the fact that reprints quite often spell a death knell for the price of affected long-term holds.

Even though I have a tiny number of long-hold Snapcasters, I am actually happy with the announcement as I shall elaborate in this article.

The Next Most Likely Mass Reprint of Snapcaster Mage

Before I go on to discuss the reasons Snapcaster being next year’s RPTQ promo is good for long-term holders of the card and players alike, I would like to explain an assumption which I think most of us could agree on:

Assuming that the next Modern Masters is coming out in 2017 based on the two-year cycle between the past two Modern Masters,
Assuming that the next Modern Masters will include Innistrad, seeing that the recent Modern Masters 2015 went all the way to New Phyrexia,

The next most likely mass reprint event for Snapcaster Mage would be in the summer of 2017, in Modern Masters 2017.

RPTQ Promo Reprint Means No Grand Prix Promo Reprint

After Innistrad dodged reprint in Modern Masters 2015, the biggest medium-term risk to the price of Snapcaster Mage is being selected as next year’s Grand Prix promo. Even though Grand Prix promos are foil versions featuring a new art, the sheer number of Grand Prix promos given out asserts a depressing impact on the long-term price of a card. The Grand Prix promo reprint of Modern-and-Legacy mainstay Griselbrand pretty much smashed his price to smithereens. Batterskull remained high for a few months in 2014, when it was the Grand Prix promo for the year, but it eventually dropped and is now having a hard time growing despite being a mainboard card in Legacy Stoneblade and Death and Taxes and a spattering of Modern play, mainly in the sideboard.

Let’s do a little back of the napkin calculation. There are 54 Grand Prix in 2015. Assuming an average attendance of 1,000 players per Grand Prix (most North American and European Grand Prix tend to attract a much larger crowd), by the end of 2015 there would at least 54, 000 copies of a card being introduced into the market and that is a very conservative number as it does not take into account outliers like the Modern Masters 2015 weekend which saw nearly 10,000 players receive the Griselbrand promo.

Comparatively, there are only four RPTQs per year. The sole RPTQ attendance figures released by Wizards so far revealed an attendance of 1,923 for the Pro Tour Battle for Zendikar RPTQs (the article cites ‘around 1,800’, but tallying up the figures from the table in the article gives 1,923). Rounding the figure up to 2,000, we can assume that the number of promo Snapcaster Mage that would be handed out next year to be around 8,000 at most, and that is a mere 1/7 of the conservative estimate of Grand Prix promos given out.

The main takeaway is that Snapcaster dodged the most damaging event to his price in the short-term when he dodged the Grand Prix promo bullet. We could be very certain about that once we know that he is next year’s RPTQ promo.

Predicted Impact of the RPTQ Promo on Snapcaster’s Price

Data on the the impact of an RPTQ promo reprint on the price of an eternal staple is scarce as the program has been going on for less than a year but we can glean a bit of information from the impact of being this year’s RPTQ promo on the price of Liliana of the Veil:

The announcement that Liliana will be the promo card for this year’s RPTQs came on October 11 last year, during Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir coverage. Lilliana’s price tanked by about 25% from $80 to $60 at the beginning of November, presumably in anticipation of the upcoming influx in supply. However, at mid-February this year, Liliana experienced a spike which saw her price shoot up to a record high of $90, and a year after the announcement of the Liliana RPTQ promo, Liliana is perched at $110, the highest she has ever been since her release in 2011.

Lilliana’s price trend was not surprising given that Liliana is a three-to-four-of staple in two popular Modern archetypes, Jund and Junk. Plus, every Modern PPTQ season sees our favorite necromancer growing one year older. Unless Jund and Junk were to fall out of favor (unlikely, given their track record of being a safe choice in whatever environment of the Modern metagame), Liliana’s price is not to go down until a mass reprint, which is also most likely in the next instalment of Modern Masters.

While Liliana of the Veil is one rarity tier higher than Snapcaster Mage, the amount of play Snapcaster sees in Modern is double than that of Liliana.

Liliana play — Most-played cards in Modern in 2015, from mtgtop8.com.

For comparison, while both Liliana and Snapcaster were present in an average of 3.3 copies in decks that run them, Liliana was only found in 12.7% of deck but Snapcaster was in a 27.7%. For every deck that ran Liliana of the Veil, there were slightly more than two decks running Snapcaster Mage. The same applies for Legacy, where Snapcaster Mage is found in slightly twice the number of decks compared with Liliana.

Liliana Legacy — Most-played cards in Legacy in 2015, from mtgtop8.com.

On the other hand, being a mythic rare theoretically renders Liliana eight times rarer than Snapcaster in terms of supply. I am not sure how much does that offset against Snapcaster seeing twice the amount of play in both Modern and Legacy. Correction: Eric Duerr on Twitter shared a photograph of an uncut foil Innistrad sheet showing that the ratio of Snapcaster:Liliana is actually 2:1. Thanks Eric!

@theguoheng @mtgprice https://t.co/CNP9dnmeFX Snap left edge row 4, right edge row 8, Lili second from right row 3 (TY @ahalavais for pic)

— Eric Duerr (@NLSeeker) October 24, 2015

It is hard to quantify demand by archetypes in the each format. For all we know, Snapcaster decks could be more popular than Liliana decks in either format or vice versa. There are also a portion of eternal format players who seek to buy into the format rather than single decks.

I would argue that the demand-to-supply ratio of Snapcaster Mage is similar to that of Liliana. Which means the impact of the RPTQ reprint on Snapcaster’s price is going to be trifle and temporary, as with Liliana’s RPTQ reprint. Adding around 8,000 copies of the most ubiquitous creature in Modern is scarcely going to have a deep impact on the medium-term price of the card.

An RPTQ promo reprint is probably one of the reprint events that injects the lowest amount of supply into the market. I don’t have the figures for judge foil reprints, but I would rank judge foil reprints and RPTQ promo reprints to be of the same rarity in terms of new copies introduced into the market.

Snapcaster Mage’s price has been on a slow decline since peaking at $100 this summer and his buylist price has been on a steady slope downwards. Snapcaster lost $5 since the announcement, dropping from $69 to $64 but we have yet to see any dip in his buylist price. It’s interesting to note that Snapcaster’s buylist price dropped $10 within the first week of October. Were sellers anticipating a Snapcaster RPTQ promo announcement during the Pro Tour?

Unless the market reacts cautiously this time around, Snapcaster’s price is likely going to remain on a downtrend for the next few months mimicking Liliana’s trend after the announcement of her RPTQ promo. Regardless of the actual supply introduced by the reprint, there is a stigma attached to reprint victims. Either by early next year, spurred by a brief increase in Modern interest triggered by the Modern Pro Tour in February, or when the Modern PPTQ season swings around the corner come summer, Snapcaster’s price is going to trend up again.

Snap the Moment

Opportunities are abound for all parties when a quintessential Modern staple like Snapcaster Mage dips in price.

For the player:

If you are planning to compete in next year’s Modern PPTQ season, or if you are looking to complete your playset of Snapcaster, go get Snapcaster in a few weeks’ time. $64 is already a good price for Snapcaster, but it couldn’t hurt to wait and see if his price tanks any further. The next few weeks, or month or two, are likely to be the last Snapcaster price bottom until the summer of 2017, the most probable release period for the next instalment of Modern Masters. If you do not mind not having access to Snapcaster decks for the next year-and-a-half, you could always wait for Modern Masters 2017, but I am not sure that wait would be worth it. The first reprinting of previous Modern chase cards like Vendilion Clique and Cryptic Command in the summer of 2013 only depressed their price by $10 to $15 and by early 2014 their price hit a new high, regardless of the rarity in which they were reprinted in.

For the Financier:

First off, there’s the relief of knowing with a high degree of certainty that Snapcaster Mage is a safe hold until the next Modern season in summer 2016. We would likely see Snapcaster Mage hit extraordinary price again during that time. I don’t think it is far-fetched to expect Snapcaster to hit $100 one more time, especially during this weekend in May 2016:

With two of the largest retailers and tournament organisers running concurrent Modern Grand Prix in a single weekend, can you imagine the price of a Snapcaster Mage during that week? Mid-May 2016 would be the best time to reap the return on your Snapcaster Mage investment.

Another reason why I like the Snapcaster reprinted as an RPTQ promo is the fact that it further depresses the price of Snapcaster from the $69 he was at before, making Snapcaster an even more lucrative mid-term spec target. We can be certain that Snapcaster’s current price is lower than it should be, as with the majority of Modern staples in the fall when the limelight is shining on cards from the new block and the post-rotation Standard metagame.

If you have the funds, going in on Snapcaster at his current price of $64 is not too shabby, but I would definitely recommend waiting for a few weeks to see if his price tanks any further. But don’t wait for too long, the window might close soon if the market catches on the trend with Liliana’s price after her RPTQ promo reprint.

Besides the relative security of not seeing a short-term reprint, one of the appeal of this spec is the presence of a set date where you could liquidate your spec and reap your profit, an aspect most mid-term specs lack. I wouldn’t go in too deep though. While Snapcaster hit $100 briefly, the highest his buylist price went to was $60.

His brief stint at the triple-digit club was spurred by the one-month period this summer where there were three consecutive Modern Grand Prix, and the retailers knew that Snapcaster would unlikely sustain his price tag.

If you are buying into Snapcaster within this month or two to sell next May, your best bet on reaping optimal profit is liquidating your spec to players rather than buylisting them, which is why I wouldn’t recommend going in too deep.

TL;DR

Contrary to the usual impression of reprint events, the Snapcaster RPTQ promo reprint is likely to be a net positive for both players (duh) and financiers as it creates an opportunity for players and financiers to pick up Snapcasters at what is probably his final price bottom in the next year-and-a-half. Players lacking Snapcasters could assemble their playset in time for the next Modern season or next year’s Modern Grand Prix at a slightly cheaper price than without a RPTQ promo reprint. Financiers could rest well knowing that we are highly unlikely to see a mass Snapcaster Mage reprint until the next Modern Masters, which is likely to be in 2017, making it a safe bet to wait for the Modern PPTQ season next year to liquidate Snapcasters. Financiers interested in getting in on Snapcaster or bolstering their Snapcaster holdings for next summer could do so without the fear of being blinded sided by a surprise mass reprint.

This article turned out to be longer than expected, so thank you for sticking through to the end. Do share your thoughts in the comments section below, or catch me on Twitter at @theguoheng.

Accumulated Knowledge, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Modern Flaws

September 11, 2015 Ross Lennon 14 Comments

Sometimes things just line up perfectly. If you read my article last week (of course you did, you never skip an installment!), then you may have picked up on some anti-Modern sentiment (or, at least, pro-Extended). We are going to get into some of the nuts and bolts stuff further along, but the gist of the argument is this: Modern is not necessarily the miraculous catch-all that Wizards imagined when the format was created.

Even from a purely financial perspective, there are a lot of things to not like about it. We got a great example of why last weekend when Collected Slivers made a surprise top eight appearance in SCG’s Modern Open. You know what? Let’s just get started, and you’ll figure it out as we go (or just smile and nod every now and then, and maybe say something like, “Hmm, interesting,” or, “That’s one interpretation.” This approach will also get you through any art gallery showing or non-French wine tasting^¹).

Wizards and Fan Engagement

One of the reasons why Magic is such an enjoyable hobby is because the producers of the game are so actively involved with the consumers. While social media has now made direct fan engagement easier for any companies to do (even though so many of them are bad at it), Wizards has consistently valued fan reactions, responses, and requests.

Heck, the fact that we are getting foil full-art(ish) fetch lands and shock lands in Standard-legal boosters seems to suggest that Wizards has gotten pretty good at parsing through our feedback, even though I would have never in a million years expected the company to do something like this. Yet another way that Wizards engages the community has been by hiring professional Magic players (and some contest winners) into its ranks.

I say all of this to make the point that when Modern was announced as a format, it was to strong fan applause—the demand for it had begun months earlier, and all players were waiting for was WOTC’s blessing. Wizards knew what the fans wanted and gave it to them, but that doesn’t mean what the fans wanted was what was best for them.

Modern Background

Modern came largely out of the smoldering ashes of Extended, a format that had neither stability nor a large fan base. Extended was, for most of its life, “the last seven years,” meaning that it was much deeper than Standard, but still rotated annually. The last year or so of Extended events reduced the format to the last four years’ worth of sets, which gave the format notably less depth, and at a time when depth was needed the most.

Extended was also considered a “PTQ format” in the sense that people would only play it when they were “required to,” which was only during Extended PTQ season (January to April). In fact, the appeal of Extended was so low that most players would sell off their decks when the PTQ season ended, just because they knew the cards would be worthless for the next eight months. I personally liked seven-year Extended, and I even tried out (the current) four-year Extended back in January. I really liked it!

If Modern was just a response to the complaints about Extended, things would probably be a little better—but there is more. Modern was created in 2011, which coincided with the surge in popularity of Legacy. Legacy, prior to the Zendikar Boom^², wasn’t even a PTQ format like Extended. It was closer to how Vintage is regarded today, in that it got a few weekends a year where people outside of the format’s hotspots watched and said, “That’s kind of neat!” and then forgot about it a week later.

The crucial reason why Modern doesn’t rotate is because it took the role of spiritual successor to Legacy, removing the prohibitive barrier of card scarcity (hahahahahahahahaha) but keeping cards in the format indefinitely (besides stuff like banning, which is fair). Unlike Extended in any of its forms, if you love Affinity or Tron, you can play it in Modern ostensibly forever, even though Urza’s Tower hasn’t been reprinted in (just) over a decade, and Magic‘s development team was literally too scared to bring Affinity back in Scars.

Modern Supply Issues

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following point will be illustrated using MS Paint. I am not an artist. Okay, now pretend I’m saying the next part in a cool Neil DeGrasse-Tyson voice. *clears throat*.

If we look at the first highly scientific graph that I have provided, you will see the growth of Magic represented as a cone. As it moves forward in time (up), the supply expands to meet growing demand (width). Although in actuality Magic‘s past growth would not be a perfect cone (growth expanded more rapidly in some years than others), the nature of the game’s expansion can still be represented this way.

In Legacy, the floor of the format is the game’s literal starting point in 1993; in Modern, it’s the purple line representing 2003. The reason why many Legacy staples are so expensive is that as you get closer to the bottom of the cone, the supply is constricting, which forces the price to rise as compensation.

Modern, in attempting to be the “new Legacy,” is raising that bottom to a wider point in the cone, but it is still significantly narrower than the top (which is going to happen at any point, unless the player population takes a significant and sustained downturn to the point of throttling print-runs).

Rotating formats like Standard and Extended have a floor, but it moves as the graph grows. Something more like this:

One of the important factors that gets overlooked for Modern is that it doesn’t filter out outdated design philosophies. Part of the reason why I mentioned Affinity and Urzatron lands earlier are because neither currently fit development’s standards for Magic design. In any iteration of Extended, Urza’s Tower would be nothing more than an antiquity. In Modern, the cycle is a pillar of the environment. This is great if you are a dedicated Tron player, but boxes out room for other archetypes featuring newer cards because they can’t compete. This is a form of stagnation that prevents other decks from competing because they are primarily “worse” versions of cards deemed too good for current design philosophies^³.

Modern Fears

The fear with Modern, unlike Legacy, is that any card can be reprinted at any time (assuming the reprint fits the development philosophy of the product its going in). This means that as cards drift closer to the floor of the format, and their price begins to rise, they can immediately get wiped out.

For example, the price on Smash to Smithereens got smashed (to smithereens!) when it was reprinted twice this calendar year, and it will take years for it to recover, if it ever does. More frequently, you will see cards that exist solely near the floor of the format that don’t fit current development standards spike because of their use in one narrow archetype. The most recent example is Sedge Sliver, a card that only exists because Magic was so briefly unpopular that design wanted to make a card that riffed on a rare from Alpha that most people don’t even remember^⁴. It is highly unlikely that we see a Sedge Sliver reprint any time soon, which means that the new price ($10!) is likely going to take a while to go down, but how much actual demand now exists for the card?

While a static floor allows these “opportunities” to occur, they highlight a larger flaw with the format: in order for players to be competitive, they have to have access to cards at various points in the cone. As the cone continues to ascend and widen, that narrower bottom becomes more inaccessible, and can actively hurt demand for newer cards. If you tell newer players that they can play in a deeper, more enriched format with their existing cards, that is exciting—and probably helps drive interest in selling/trading older cards. But if their current cards can’t compete in the larger format, what then?

Let’s look at it this way: I would feel comfortable playing my current Abzan Aggro list in a field that includes some Standard lists from the past couple of years. At the very least, my losses would probably feel close enough that I would want to buy some new cards and try again. If I played Abzan Aggro in a format that includes things like Tron and Affinity, I’d be more likely to just ignore that format and keep playing Standard. This is the reason why it is so difficult to cultivate a Modern community if you don’t live in one already, and especially if you don’t have a majority of players with collections going back several years.

The Modern Point

The point of the article is this: I don’t feel comfortable being a “Modern” guy anymore, at least in terms of keeping staples in stock. The format is continuing to grow in the sense that it is popular online amongst the very vocal, very visible minority of Magic players, but it is an unstable place to park Magic capital long-term.

It’s also not very fun to play, largely for the reasons I spelled out above. I think a lot of players love the idea of the Modern format more than they love it in practice, and I think that there are some serious developmental issues that need to be addressed. The problem there is that because cards in the format don’t naturally expire, the only solution here is banning (which has an associated public relations cost that WOTC does not like).

It isn’t impossible to imagine a future format that serves as bridge between Standard and Modern (there is, after all, more time between now and Mirrodin than between Mirrodin and Alpha). While that format would be more prone to becoming “just” a PTQ Format the way old Extended did, it would also provide a real opportunity for cards with larger print runs to service the growing Magic population better than Modern does. If the format was successful as a year-long player, it would mean less of a hit in prices at rotation, and longer sustained prices. It would also be easier to bridge Standard players into the new format, since the older cards in the format would be more liquid and available.

I am not holding out hope for a radical format change, or trying to advocate that people should stop playing Modern if it is something they enjoy. I just want to articulate some of the very real issues with the format, and caution people who think that it is a safe place to “invest.” And again, it’s not fun.

That’s all for this week, although I really want to encourage you to leave your feedback this week. I think this is another one of those articles where a discussion is going to lead to more analysis than I could provide on my own, and it helps prevent me from being the only voice on this topic. I hope that you feel interested enough to leave your thoughts below, and I will check in over the course of the week.

…Except when the Jags are on. BECAUSE FOOTBALL IS BACK!!!!

Best,

Ross

1 See, only my premium readers get this quality life advice!

2 You’ve heard my spiel on this already, but thanks for clicking on the footnote! If you aren’t familiar with the Zendikar Boom, read my first article here on MTGPrice (linked above in the article).

3 It’s important to remember that this is why they originally banned Wild Nacatl.

4 I’ve always loved Sedge Troll. And the crazy thing is, Sedge Sliver wasn’t the only tribute to it in this block!

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