Tag Archives: MTG finance

A Guide to the 2015 World Championship

Twenty-four of the best players in the world. One giant event attended by thousands, with those both deeply involved with Magic and completely unexposed to the game in attendance. Tens of thousands of dollars on the line. Plus, this little trophy and title they all want to have.

It’s the 2015 Magic World Championship.

Okay, my coverage writing may have slipped through a little bit there, but the World Championship is an important event both in the realm of the professional Magic world but also the financial side of things. There’s a lot happening at this event, so I want to walk through it today with the information you’ll need to plan your weekend around this tournament.

Coverage of the event starts at noon today (Thursday, August 27), and will continue throughout the weekend. There are a lot of events planned at PAX, and while some are more financially relevant than others, they all matter quite a bit in terms of the future of Magic.

Let’s Start with Thursday

Modern Masters 2015 draft will be fun to watch, and the hype of the event will really kick off in full force once the afternoon brings along the Modern rounds. The pros haven’t had a crack at Modern in a pro-level format since Magic Origins hit, and with the impact we’re already seeing from the set at the Grand Prix level (as well as completely shaking up Standard), it wouldn’t be a surprise to see new tech break out here. Most of the pros I talked to about the format at Worlds expect it to be very important to metagame, so we may well see something unexpected break out that the field isn’t prepared for. Reid Duke showed as much in 2012 when he showed up with Bogles and put it on the map.

There are a few things to digest financially here. First, much like the Blue-Red Ensoul Artifact deck we saw at Pro Tour Magic Origins, just because the pros choose a deck for a format doesn’t mean it’s going to have staying power. The Thopter deck broke out at one event and put up insane win percentages over the weekend, but it has failed to duplicate that same success since. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar happen at Worlds.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t make money here. Whatever the pros do end up playing will undoubtedly drive prices in the short term, since so many eyes will be trained to the event nonstop (mine included). The opportunity here will be to move early on what sees success on camera, especially if it’s unexpected, and you may be able to make some short-term gains.

Then comes the long-term aspect of it, which frankly is what I’m more interested in. I’m not necessarily looking for the success of a single deck like Bogles or Infect or Storm or whatever the field may not be prepared for. Instead, I’m looking to see what cards are played across the field or what cards from Magic Origins have staying power. We’ve seen a lot of Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy around Magic lately, but the true test will be if he sees widespread play across the field at Worlds. The same goes for Hangarback Walker, which has made waves but hasn’t been a mainstay in Modern yet.

He moonlighted as Master of Wallets in late 2013.
He moonlighted as Master of Wallets in late 2013.

Speaking of waves, I’d love to see someone sleeve up Merfolk and do well, but I’m not necessarily expecting it. The linear and draw-dependent nature of the deck isn’t something pros usually favor, especially at such a high-level event, but hey, I can hope!

Friday Standard

Like with Thursday, Friday’s exciting action doesn’t start until the afternoon. And like with Modern, Standard is all about metagaming. With just 24 players showing up to this event, it’s much more important to play something good against what you expect your opponents to play than it is to find the best deck for a Grand Prix.

Hangarback

I expect Modern to be the big driver in prices this weekend, but I do want to highlight a few things in Standard. For starters, with Standard Rotation so close on the horizon (and some more pieces of that future being revealed this weekend), I doubt we see much Standard price movement, if any at all.

But there are still a few things to watch for.

  • What decks survive the best at rotation? Look for decks that have a core made up of Magic Origins or Khans of Tarkir cards rather than the usual Courser of Kruphix/Devotion/Thoughtseize varieties. Spotting these (which I plan to elaborate on next week, with results), will tell us a lot about what the post-rotation format could look like.
  • What planeswalkers make an appearance? We’ve seen a lot of Jace in Standard, with a side helping of Nissa. Will this be the weekend another planeswalker breaks out?
  • Hangarback Walker has proven itself the terror of the format, and the next question is: is it beatable? Will players bring answers to Hangarback, or will they opt to simply play it themselves? Standard has proven itself to be quite adaptable over the last 12 months, and we’ll see if it can handle one more boogeyman before rotation.
  • If it can, the next step is to look at whether those answers survive rotation. If they do, I would say the future of Hangarback Walker is to slowly trend down in price. But if they don’t, or everyone just jams Walkers themselves, we could easily see this thing make a run to $25 or $30 immediately following Battle for Zendikar‘s release.

Sunday Standard

More Standard follows in the final rounds of the tournament, and this will be the day that we may finally see some Standard price movement, thanks to being the format the championship hangs on.

Dig

Other Stuff to Watch

PAX Prime is a crazy event, both for attendees and other games, not to mention Magic itself. The World Championship is a huge event and an important one, but that’s not all we have to watch this weekend:

  • The biggest news will drop Saturday night, at 7:30 Pacific, or 10:30 Eastern time. This is the Battle for Zendikar preview show, and we’re going to see spoilers galore at this one. This is key to watch to find out if anything spoiled creates hype and therefore movement on anything else. Obviously, the cards we see previewed here are likely to be overpriced on their spoiling, so look for how they affect other cards instead.
  • Besides the preview show, there’s also a Felicia Day/Wil Wheaton/LoadingReadyRun-filled event with lots of cards and fun. As viewers, this isn’t super relevant for us, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some more news come out of this.
  • There’s also what I consider the elephant in the room, and one that has successfully hidden so far. When first announcing the move to PAX, Director of Organized Play Helene Bergeot wrote this: “A major moment for the global Magic community is going to take place at PAX Prime, and moving the 2015 World Championship to PAX Prime is just one part of this global experience.” Considering everything we’ve talked about so far isn’t exactly new, I’m unsure if this is a harbinger of bigger news to come that is being slow-rolled, or if it’s just a general blanket statement about the event.

Either way, it’s going to be fun. And I’m looking forward to watching. We’ll have complete spoiler coverage here on MTGPrice, so make sure you keep a tab open over here while you’re watching Twitch.

 

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter


Addendum: One more thing before I go. I try not to promote myself often, but I’ve added a few things recently I want to mention. I produce a lot of articles weekly, with two regularl columns plus coverage writing, but what I haven’t done before is move much into the video realm. That changes now, and over the past few weeks I’ve gotten heavily into streaming at www.twitch.tv/chosler88, and I’m also producing at least two videos a week for my YouTube channel as well. If you’re interested in following along with either of these, feel free to follow/subscribe/share. Thanks, everyone!

Stream of Consciousness

Welcome back, DJ!

Thanks, I needed that. As you might have noticed last Thursday, my content was conspicuously absent from MTGPrice. As a resident assistant for the returning students at my school, I was extremely busy last week with preparing the building, checking new students into the residence hall, and repeating the mandatory training that is drilled into us every year. Although the job is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it to any of my fellow college students who are interested, move-in week certainly takes up a chunk of my time. To all of my fellow college-student MTG financiers, I highly recommend applying for the job at your school. It’s a great experience overall, even though it’s a pretty large time commitment.

Unfortunately, even if I did have time to write an article last week, I didn’t exactly have a specific topic ready and waiting to be scribbled down. In fact, I still don’t have a topic this week. I’m just kind of winging it right now, because I’m pretty apathetic about most of Magic right now.

Apathy

I’m not one to obsess over the angels in the new From the Vault, everyone else has already written about the fetch lands and their Battle for Zendikar predictions, and I think I’ve exhausted your patience for “articles concerning my weekly collection buying and organizational processes” in the past couple of months (seriously though, if you guys/girls want to read about more of that stuff, I can do that. I love writing about collection buying). So let’s just see where this goes, okay?

More Fetch Land Talk

Actually, you know what? I do want to talk about fetch lands, even though the spike was a billion weeks ago at this point. In recent news,  there was a fake leak of enemy Zendikar fetches being spoiled at PAX. After several diligent researchers determed that the art was cherry-picked from various other internet sources, the frenzy quieted down. If you’re one of the people who bought a huge number of fetches before the spike and had a miniature heart attack at the sight of the faked announcement due to still owning a couple thousand dollars worth of fetch lands, that was your warning shot.

Warning

I’m still advocating unloading these now instead of waiting a few months, as I think there’s a high probability of Wizards including the five lands in the second set of the block. If you wait too long into BFZ to sell them, then you won’t be able to find any buyers as everyone will be holding off until Sweat is released. Lock in the profits now and you can have cash on hand just in case someone comes up to you to sell a collection. I still have some Zendikar fetches left over that I picked up from the story I’m about to tell you, and the few seconds of jump scare made me realize I need to pick up the pace on selling them.

Sticker Time

While we’re on the subject of fetches, I’d like everyone to gather ’round for story time. We’re traveling back a billion weeks ago to the day of the “enemy fetchlands will not be in Battle for Zendikar” announcement, in a small town called Camden, New York. The closest LGS is 30 minutes away, but at least this one has a singles display case, stocked with staples. Although our weekly EDH night didn’t start until 6:00 p.m., I wanted to get there early and see if the shop had any fetches in its display case at a reasonable price. This was right in the middle of the buyout, with SCG being bought out not even an hour before.

I arrived at the store and noticed that they still had quite a few fetches in stock: Misty Rainforestfor $35, Marsh Flats for $25, Verdant Catacombs for $34, and Scalding Tarns for $54.  Excellent. There were no Arid Mesas, but you can’t have everything. I inspected the condition to make sure they were all NM and gave the employee my card to swipe. I told him that I was purchasing all of these fetch lands because I expected them to be worth a lot more by the end of the day, and I ended up being correct (for once). One of the main reasons I’ve kept coming back to this store is that it always honors the sticker price, even if the card has already jumped. I help the store out by pointing out low prices when I’m not going to buy cards, too.

Now, let’s fast forward to the next week. I wanted to buy new binders because the Monster brand ones that I’ve used for the past few years were finally at their limit. I didn’t want to wait a week for them to arrive from Amazon, so I stopped by the LGS once again. This time, I was met with an interesting change in the store: it was no longer labeling its singles with price stickers—one now had to ask an employee for the price of each individual card.

Decree of Pain

I suppose the owner was tired of having people like me buy cards after their actual retail price had already increased. The store certainly loses out on potential income when I buy $5.50  Living Ends, I’m not arguing that point. Then again, I’ve been on the other side of the fence plenty of times, considering I just sold a Cloudstone Curio out of my own display case for $6 before I had the chance to update the price. It’s an unfortunate reality of the business we’re in.

However, I can’t help but wonder if removing the stickers is the best possible move for the store, and I’d love to get your thoughts in the comments section about this. By forcing employees to check the price on every single card sold out of its case, the store loses out on a large number of impulse purchases from players who don’t play nearly as competitively as us vocal minority. I can only assume that an EDH player who is browsing the case for new additions to her decks won’t go through the trouble of asking the price on every single potential candidate—she will narrow her purchase to save on time. It’s much easier for customers to mentally visualize their own budgets and how many cards they can afford when the prices are right in front of them, and this system also removes the joy of finding a card that’s even slightly underpriced, even if it’s only finding a $7 Blood Crypt that was $8 everywhere else one looked. There’s also the employee’s time and effort to take into consideration, because he now has to double-check every single price every time someone asks about a card.

As someone who sold several Goblin Rabblemasters for $7 out of my case while they were $15 everywhere else, I held no animosity or resentment towards the players and financiers who I sold these cards to. What are your thoughts on this?

Uhh…

Alright, so now that that’s out of the way, what else is there to talk about… Hmm.

One with Nothing

End Step

Apparently Hangarback Walker is a $20 Magic: The Gathering card, which upsets me way more than $80 Scalding Tarns. If you own these, I’m still calling to sell them. I mean, I suggested you sell them at $8, then I suggested selling them at $14, so what do I know? All I know is that this card is the same price as Thoughtseize was almost two years ago, and I highly doubt that Walker has the same longevity.

Temple of Epiphany got its second wind for about a week off the back of the UR Artifacts deck, and then everyone realized: “Oh wait, this stupid thing is about to rotate.” I managed to sell off a pile into the hype, but I think that’s just about died down for now. If you want to pick up any other Temples for speculation, you can probably find the cheaper ones at near-bulk prices as everyone else abandons ship. While I’m still staying away from any and all Temples in favor of collection buying, I’ve been wrong before. A lot, actually.

Foil Hive Mind was bought out recently, but I haven’t really heard or seen anything about that. While it might be part of your daily ritual to check the daily interests on MTGStocks, remember to click that foil tab every day as well.

While we’re on the subject of foils, I fully support Travis’s call on foil Tasigur at $30 to $40. While I’m not going to drop several hundred cash dollars on it like he did, I’m going to horde the few copies I already have in my spec box, target them aggressively in trades, and keep a finger on the pulse of the card’s price moving forward.

That’s all I’ve got for this week. If you have anything in particular you’d like me to write about, hit me up. Summer is usually a pretty dull time in Magic finance anyway, until all hell breaks loose with the release of the fall set. Look forward to the next few weeks as spoiler season starts trickling in, as I’ll be helping Jason and Corbin create up-to-date spoiler coverage and tossing my hat into the ring on where I think most of the cards’ prices will end up in the future months! (Spoiler alert: I predict 90 percent of the set will be bulk rares.)

PROTRADER: Naval Academy

I recently got to thinking about tutors. Academies are all about tuition. There are a lot of useful tutors in EDH, and they’re absolutely worth talking about at some point, so I decided to make that point today. There are broad tutors, narrow tutors, and very, very narrow tutors, and I want to talk about all of them.

Does this seem out-of-flavor with this series? This series was predicated on identifying emerging cards from newly spoiled sets and seeing how their inclusions in the metagame would shake things up. As their stocks increased due to increased adoption, the surging tide would lift all boats, and buying into those other boats (cards) at their lowest price by anticipating their increased use based on spoiled cards was the name of the game. I’m talking about a broad category of cards as opposed to talking about how one particular printed card would affect prices of other cards.

They’re simple rules. I made the rules. And now I want to break them? What the hell?

What if I told you that this article was predicated not on a card that was going to get printed but rather on a card that was not going to get printed? How do we know? Well, I look at what little we know about Commander 2015 so far.

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expensive cards

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

PROTRADER: One Thousand American Dollars

By: Travis Allen

You’ve read lots and lots of articles about people’s Khans of Tarkir block picks for the upcoming rotation. Nearly everyone has written one, and when you combine everyone’s suggestions, you end up with a checklist of basically every rare and mythic from the entire block. At that point, it’s hardly useful. Sure, lots of cards are worth considering, but come on, what’s really the card people are putting their money into and banking on? What are the supposed “pros” of this domain doing?

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

To learn how ProTrader can benefit YOU, click here to watch our short video.

expensive cards

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.