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UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Player Finance – Tournament Finance 101

June 19, 2015 Ross Lennon 1 Comment

Today’s article is going to be the first in a series of semi-related subjects. The theme of the next few weeks is something that gets kind of lost in talks about Magic finance: how to weigh decisions and opportunities as a Magic player, and not just as a finance person. Today, the subject is going to be making the best financial decisions regarding tournaments.

The best example of what I mean is taken from a recent tournament experience that I had with a friend of mine. The two of us were going to attend a TCGplayer Platinum event (a Standard 1K, but it also gave out playmats and points down to top 16) that was being held in Orlando. That’s a little bit of a drive, so I got up pretty early to make sure I was packed and able to eat a decent breakfast. My buddy texted me at 8:00 a.m., half an hour before I was supposed to pick him up, to tell me that there was a Modern PPTQ being held much closer to home later that day. I’m not sure how I was able to develop my response so quickly, but it was (verbatim), “I’d rather pay $30 and win cash than pay $25 and win Dragons of Tarkir packs.”

Choose Wisely

There are a lot of Magic tournaments happening on a lot of different levels in the US right now. While central Florida has always had a strong Magic offering, even in the game’s lean years, it has never been as popular as it is today. This creates the situation of occasionally having to decide which tournament is worth attending. Even if you are not a competitive player and are only looking for trades, the following breakdown should have a lot of information to consider. The type of tournament can often tell you a lot about the other people that will be in attendance, which is a good predictor of whether or not you will find desirable trading partners.

First, what type of tournament is it? This is the most obvious question to ask, but you have to make sure that you unpack the answer fully. Obviously a Legacy and Vintage tournament is going to draw some high-rollers with big collections, but if it is scheduled against a large Standard tournament down the street, it may not even fire off.

More important than the format (because that stuff you can probably figure out on your own) is determining who is involved in running the event. Take the example I discussed up top: my choices were a Standard cash tournament (backed by TCGplayer) or a PPTQ (which is run solely by a local store with the PTQ invite coming from WOTC). In order for a store or event organizer to run a TCGplayer tournament, it has to buy a package from the company and adhere to the rules set forth (the same is true of SCG events). The TCGplayer Platinum event only had 20 players, but because TCGplayer mandates that any tournament run in its name always honor the advertised payout, the tournament organizers couldn’t flake out at the last second (although I’ve seen some try). This means that the TO is required to give out the full $1,000 plus the playmats, points, and other crap that they promised it would, or risk never being allowed to do another one again (although, with only 20 people showing up, that may not be a bad thing).

The PPTQ, on the other hand, had over 50 players, crammed into a much smaller location (needless to say, we were extremely lucky we picked the event we did). The PPTQ tournament organizer didn’t have to pay the upfront cost of a “tournament package,” nor was he beholden to any guaranteed prize support beyond the PTQ invite (which is of no cost to the TO). Both tournaments cost $30, but the winner of the 1K got a guaranteed $400, while the winner of the PPTQ got a box of Modern Masters 2015 and the chance to play in an even larger tournament to make the Pro Tour. If we can assume the price of a Modern Masters box is $200 to $225 (which is what most are clearing for on eBay), then the invitation needs to be worth roughly $200 for the tournaments to have equal payouts (the invite, to be fair, does include that Liliana promo; also, I am ignoring the potential of selling the playmat and point cards for the 1K winner). And while I don’t have written confirmation of what the prizes for second to eighth place were for the PPTQ, what I’ve heard anecdotally doesn’t stack favorably against the payout from the 1K. Also, apparently the AC broke at one point (which is not a good thing to happen to a room filled with Magic players in June in Florida).

In all honesty, I knew that the cash tournament would likely be pretty small, but I didn’t expect it to be less than half the size of the PPTQ (which I did expect to be at least somewhat larger). The cash tournament, as part of TCGplayer’s package, was advertised on the front page of TCGplayer, and got mentioned in some of the constant contact emails that TCGplayer sends to Florida subscribers. Beyond that, in order to know anything about the event, you had to follow the organizer (a small game store outside of Orlando) on Facebook. When TCGplayer offers advertising in its packages, many game stores, especially those who don’t have a large presence in the greater community, just assume that they are paying someone else to do the hard part for them. The truth is, most people don’t bother to read the constant contact emails, or they have tuned out the tournament feed on the right side of the TCGplayer website since it works as basically a cork board for the entire US.

The PPTQ system, on the other hand, is not advertised in the same way, but has the stronger backing of the Wizards website (which isn’t very good, but it has more reach). Since PPTQs are more “official,” and the PPTQ system is very important to players right now, they are more likely to seek them out. Because the current PPTQ system only offers a PTQ invite to the winner, there are a subset of competitive players who will seek out and play in every PPTQ possible, hoping to take one down. Whereas cash tournaments once supplemented a yearly schedule in between PTQs, now PPTQs are often held in competition with each other or one-of cash events.

So far, it seems as though players are valuing PPTQs extremely highly, likely due to their inherent scarcity and the idea that they have variable difficulty. A lot of people end up thinking that if a store that they’ve never heard of is holding a PPTQ, then it will be smaller and therefore easier to win—except that it appears as though they are going to draw a crowd regardless. The only PPTQ I’ve played in was a few months back, in a store with a small local crowd, and they were turning people away the day of.

This is another big factor to consider: is the tournament being held outside of the store’s physical location? PPTQs, especially those being run by stores without a lot of non-FNM tournament experience, are reaching the point where they often include a friendly visit from the fire marshal. The PPTQ the other week had 52 players in a somewhat small store, whereas the 1K was at a hotel (there was also a comic and toy convention the same weekend). The 1K, in addition to the package price that the TO paid TCGplayer, had to pay rent for the space for the day.

When tournament organizers have to pay rent, they usually let other people help, and this means that there was vendor space available! Yes, the twenty-player, cash tournament had two vendor booths (the store hosting the event plus one other). Vendor booths are a delight unto themselves, and if you know the store doing the vending, you can typically play to its strengths. I knew the alternate vendor at the event (I have a friend who works there, although he wasn’t present at the tournament), so I was able to unload a lot of Standard stuff I didn’t want into a Taiga and an Ali from Cairo¹. Most stores are not going to have the space to have a second vendor come in, even if they wanted to (and they don’t), so this cooperation is something you’ll only experience when a TO is shelling out a couple grand in rent for a day.

I’ve only played in one PPTQ so far, and my guess is that the quality trends overall with the quality of the store and its tournament history. I’ve read some horror stories about events being understaffed, although now that local stores aren’t hosting actual PTQs, those stories have seemed less severe.

A Little Self-Examination

Ultimately, you need to make the decision that best compliments your goals. If you want to play on the Pro Tour, then you need to play in a lot of PPTQs (and probably a healthy amount of Grands Prix, if we are being realistic)—there is no other way to get there.

But if you are like me, then you typically want to maximize your tournament opportunities. I don’t play in Magic tournaments every weekend, so when I get the opportunity to, I like to play in the one with the single biggest impact. Look at the value of first place compared to the value of eighth place, and then try to figure out what a top eight split would most likely be. This is the primary reason I am down on PPTQs: the most important part of the payout cannot be split eight ways.

The Star City Games IQ tournaments, by contrast, have fixed this problem by introducing a point structure into the mix. I’d like to see WOTC adopt this technology for the PPTQ system, but the company has publicly stated that it doesn’t want Pro Tours to be too big, which is a problem SCG doesn’t need to consider for its Invitationals. The IQ tournaments also have a guaranteed cash payout. Any time a tournament is giving out cash, it is nice to know that there is another name (SCG or TCGplayer) behind the TO making sure things go off without any snags.

Small Tournaments, Ranked

My personal hierarchy of (small) tournaments is as follows:

TCGplayer 5K (Diamond)
SCG Premier and Elite IQ (5k and 3k, respectively)
TCGplayer 1k (Platinum)
SCG IQ (the other tiers)
Not play Magic and have a lovely family game night
Money Draft with friends
Money Draft with enemies
PPTQ (Standard)
PPTQ (Sealed) – because nobody would show up!
PPTQ (Modern) – because everybody would show up!
Do that thing with my hand and a knife from Alien
SCG Open Trial
Grand Prix Trial
Throwing my cards into the sea while somberly reflecting on life’s pains and sorrows
SCG Game Night

Closing Thoughts

It’s quickly worth mentioning that while the SCG IQ events have a pretty high value, the Open Trials and Game Nights are basically playing slot machines that pay out in playmats or animal-themed trinkets. I never calculate the “value” of a playmat into my expectations of a tournament result, because so many of them are hard to move (this is because the tournament package mats have a higher distribution and less importance than one-off playmats, like GP mats).

TCGplayer points sell well because they can be used for byes in events, they can buy you into the big invitational that just happened, or you can get, like, Frank Lepore’s autograph. The typical value is 1.5 to twice the point value of the card, but sometimes you can negotiate for less. Then again, on the day of a 5K, I’ve seen people pay three times or higher.

Hopefully you enjoyed this first installment on tournament and player finance! And as always, if you know somebody who wants to buy a pile of ugly playmats, point them my way.

1 I blame Sigmund for making me want to buy old stuff.

Conjured Currency

Nothing is Sacred

June 18, 2015 Douglas Johnson 20 Comments

I used to be like you. No, not you. You. Over there. With the funny hat. Yes, you.

I was a player at heart, instead of a cold-hearted, finance-focused individual. The endgame of value trading was putting together my Tezzeret control deck for Standard, rather than selling cards on eBay. I didn’t even know that “Magic finance” was a thing, much less that it was possible to use it as a primary source of income. I’m sure that many of you are in the same boat: you’re players that don’t really buy or sell collections on a large scale, don’t try to make hundreds of dollars through speculating, and just want to trade cards away when they’re high and trade for them when they’re low.

So What Changed?

I don’t remember the exact card that I first bought at a buylist price when I didn’t need it for a deck, but it happened because my old LGS doesn’t buy singles for cash—it just has a trade credit list that can be used for other singles. Someone had shown up to the store looking to unload a few random cards and been disappointed to find that the owner was not willing to pay in dollars and cents. He walked into the game room and started asking if anyone was willing to buy his cards. I had a tiny bit of personal spending money from a part-time job at K-Mart, and thankfully, being a high-school student comes with having zero actual real-life bills.

For theoretical argument’s sake (since I don’t actually remember), let’s assume that it was a few copies of Mox Opal. Back in the day, Opal was a $20 card, and Modern was a format that only existed in the minds of those that worked at Wizards of the Coast.

I had my Standard deck completed, Modern didn’t exist, and I sure as hell wasn’t getting into Legacy anytime soon. At the time, I had no idea what EDH was or why I should care about it, because nobody at the store played it. I had enough store credit to keep running drafts back every week, and I knew that booster packs were a money pit. So the question was always there: what should I buy with the minimal amount of money that I had to spare?

When this person was asking around if anyone would buy his cards from him, what went through my head? Well, it’s more than likely that I considered the future possibilities of how I might use those Opals. What if I needed them for a future Standard deck? At the very least, it would be a great deal if I could get them for $10 each and then trade them out at the full retail value of $20 in the future. So, I bought them at half of the TCGplayer mid price. I wasn’t planning to resell them l online, nor was I speculating on them with intent to sell for $50 each four years later. I resolved my cognitive dissonance of, “Don’t buy cards that you don’t need,” with the argument of, “But I got a really great deal, and I might need them in the future.” I wasn’t ready to make the jump to selling cards online (though if I was offered full retail for a card I wasn’t using, I was more than happy to oblige).

Majoring in MTG Finance

As I graduated from high school and moved to a college town with a new job at a local videogame store, I started to have more and more disposable income, and was also learning about the various outlets of moving my cards for cash. I discovered individual seller TCGplayer accounts, the dozens of online buylists that weren’t Star City Games or ChannelFireball, and the Brainstorm Brewery podcast, which I started listening to religiously.

I wanted to catch the big cards before they spiked and make money speculating. After all, that’s where all the money was, right? I wanted to be the Speculator King™. Meanwhile, I started to attend the weekly Magic night at our college. I mainly just went to play EDH, test Standard, and hang out with new friends, but I also happened to be one of the only people there who brought a reasonable amount of cash. Players would stop by with their winnings from FNM, their off-color shocklands that they didn’t need, and their bulk rares. While they found plenty of trade partners, I was the only one paying with actual currency.

I started accepting pretty much anything while quoting buylist numbers that I would look up on my phone. I paid $5 on shocklands, 10 cents on bulk rares, whatever—I started to just buy everything, assuming I could afford it, and since I was at a college campus with a lot of newer players, I didn’t have to make any too backbreaking purchases. The worst-case scenario would be that I had to buylist cards back to an online store and break even, so why not? I could eventually out the bulk rares to a vendor at a GP for at least what I bought them for, and sometimes more. Throughout my freshman year, I ended up leaving my flag in the ground as “that guy who will buy your cards, no matter what they are.”

That being said, my buylist prices differed depending on how easy the card was to move and how many copies I already had, just like any other buylist. I paid less on Hallowed Fountain number 15 than I did on Fountains six, seven, and eight.

Stepping Up

Sophomore year was an even bigger step up for me, and I think of it as sort of the diverging point when I decided to give up on the competitive side of Magic in favor of buying, selling, and trading full-time. At the beginning of the school year, a long-time friend and would-be LGS owner messaged me and let me know that he would be moving across the country at the end of the year. He was getting out of Magic because he knew that taking a job offer he got in Oregon was a much better decision than trying to start an LGS from just a pile of cards and comics.

He asked me if I wanted to buy his entire inventory. I had been buying and moving a lot of stuff over the past year, but was I ready to fully commit to buying a collection like this? It would be a huge time investment to sort everything, learn how to move all of the bulk commons and uncommons, price out the higher-value stuff, synch it into my own collection, and then sell enough to make a profit.

Yes

Long story short: yes, I bought it all. And ever since that collection, I’ve been willing to buy pretty much anything, so long as I don’t dip into my personal emergency funds. I give my phone number out to every player who buys or sells cards with me, and I make myself available as quickly as possible when negotiating to buy a collection. Do you have a playset of Force of Wills that you want to sell as soon as possible so you can afford a car? I am your guy. Do you have 40,000 commons and uncommons in your basement that have been accumulating over the past five years? I’ll be glad to drive over tonight and take them off your hands. Is that a stack of 380 bulk rares? If they’re all NM and English, I’ll be glad to pay cash on them. Being open and willing to buy all types of cards at buylist instead of restricting myself to high-dollar staples or just bulk has been one of my biggest arsenals in becoming one of the most well-known buyers in my area.

(Almost) Nothing is Sacred

Allow me to present you with a scenario that you may have been a part of in the past. You’re trading, you open the other trade binder, and point to the Snapcaster Mage on the front page.

“Snapcaster?”

“Nah, man, sorry. I’ve got to hold onto it, I think it’s gonna keep going up.” You actually really need these for your Modern deck at FNM this weekend, so you decide to be a bit more aggressive.

“Would you sell it? Cheapest copy on TCGplayer at the moment is $76 plus shipping—would you sell yours for $80? I have the cash right now.”

“Hmm…. Nah, I think I’m gonna hold onto it until it hits $90. Thanks anyway, though.” You flip through the rest of the binder to find nothing, defeated. The binders close, and you walk away.

How often has a similar situation happened to you? I’ve personally been on both sides of this interaction. I used to be “that guy” who had stuff in his binder that wasn’t for trade or sale for one reason or another. I’ve also tried to buy cards at practically retail simply because I wanted to play a card in EDH and the other party couldn’t find anything in my binders. It can definitely be a frustrating situation for both traders, and I have a simple piece of advice that can help resolve the situation.

Sell it

If someone offers to buy one of your Magic: The Gathering cards at full retail, there are very few situations in which you should refuse. The only reasons I can think of are either that you need it for a deck that will play in a sanctioned event in the very near future or that you have a very good reason to believe that the card will massively spike in the next few days. Speculating is fine, and I have a spec box myself, but it’s something that I hold entirely separate from my inventory, and pretend that it doesn’t exist except for once a week or so when I skim through it to check for spikes. This is something that took me a while to learn, especially as someone who was ingrained in speculating and being afraid that all of my cards would increase in value the very next day if I were to let go of them.

If it’s in my binders or boxes that I lay out during the weekly gaming night, it’s for sale or trade, no matter what. There’s no need for the customers to ask whether or not something is for grabs—they just have to ask how much something is worth. It smooths over everything, and prevents you from being tempted to move cards that you’ve dedicated to being labeled as “holds.”

If a person wants a card from you so badly that she is willing to pay full retail, make the deal. You can almost certainly just find another copy for a few bucks cheaper on eBay or TCGplayer, ending up a few dollars ahead just for being patient and waiting for your new copy to arrive. Obviously, this goes out the window if you’re using it for an event, but even EDH singles can be proxied temporarily, and your playgroup probably won’t hate you for it.

While it isn’t going to hold true for a lot of players reading this, I treat every card I own as inventory, and I treat every card in every collection as potential inventory. Liberating myself to be a walking buylist exponentially increased the number of purchases I was able to make at low prices, as long as I had cash in hand. Freeing my collection to view the entire thing as sellable made transactions much easier, and resulted in more players willing to come up to me to buy, sell, or trade.

End Step

Is this kind of information going to help you guys make money in Magic? I tried to entwine my own personal experiences a bit deeper this time to show you guys and gals the progression of how I went from “FNM grinder looking to value trade” into “walking local buylist who’s always willing to drive to your house and buy your entire collection.”

I understand that not everyone is going to want to take this step, but hopefully I shed some light on an option you may want to pursue, should you have the right circumstances available to you.

Thanks for reading, as always, and let me know in the comments if you want to discuss this further!

Corbin Hosler, ProTrader

PROTRADER: A Million Modern Decklists

June 17, 2015 Corbin Hosler 7 Comments

I was lucky enough to be on the coverage team for Grand Prix Charlotte last weekend, and it was a hell of an event. I saw a bunch of Merfolk players in day two, I saw some really cool decks play out, and I saw a super healthy and diverse format at the biggest Modern event in four months.

There sure is a lot to take in from the event. We had seven distinct archetypes in the top eight, and even better is that several of them were absent from last weekend’s top eight at the Invitational. I know people get riled up over the Modern banlist and things like that, but it’s hard to look at Modern over the last two weeks and say it’s anything but an awesome format.

At least, that’s my take on it. So much so, in fact, that when I was typing up the decklists you can find here, I was amazed by just how deep the list went. We decided to post unique decklists going down to 64th place, and by my count, there are nearly 30 in that range. Absurd diversity.

So much so that when I submitted the piece to my partner-in-words Adam Styborski, I jokingly titled it “a million decklists.” We almost ran with that title on the coverage page, but while it didn’t quite make the cut there, it’s more than good enough as a title for today’s article.

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UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Retrospective: GP Richmo…er, Charlotte. Whatever.

June 17, 2015 Travis Allen 5 Comments

By: Travis Allen

Every week for over a month, I’ve sat down to write my article, and while I had various ideas of what to cover (read: actually no ideas), I keep coming back around to Modern, as there’s been something both timely and worth discussing every time.

First it was the Modern Masters 2015 release and all that entailed, then last week it was looking into whether the set was bottoming out, and now this week it’s important we talk about the frenzy of activity leading up to Grand Prix Charlotte, and where things will go from here. If you’re sick of Modern cards, I apologize, but that’s simply where the money is this season. Don’t worry, it won’t be long before we’re in the two-month stretch where no card sees more than a five-percent change in value and I start submitting articles that are about the type of magic that involves top hats and rabbits.

What Spiked

Grand Prix Charlotte finished up Sunday evening with a big ol’ W for Elves (and Travis Woo). While that performance has moved the needle on several cards, like the now hilariously-costed Heritage Druid, decks all across the spectrum have been forcing out-of-stocks everywhere for the last two weeks. Before we get any deeper, let’s start with a top-32 breakdown of the event for reference. (Thanks to meposu of the MTGPrice forums for collecting the data.)

Abzan Company x4*
Jund x3
Burn x3*
Naya Company x3
Affinity x2*
Grixis Twin x2
U/R Twin x2**
G/R Tron x2
Temur Twin x2 (lower than other twin lists)
Elves x1*
Ad Nauseum x1*
Goryo’s vengeance x1*
Abzan(No Company) x1
Grixis Control x1
Grixis Delver x1
Lantern Control x1
U/B Faeries x 1
Amulet Bloom x1
* indicates top 8

While it didn’t manage to top eight, Jund led the pack on price spikes. It started with Olivia Voldaren, which climbed from around $5 to a price tag of nearly $15 at time of writing. Huntmaster of the Fells was next, with similar behavior. What’s most notable about these two is that Olivia was typically a one- or two-of at most, and Huntmaster doesn’t even make it into all lists. When these spikes were just beginning and word was spreading on Twitter, I began wondering if we were entering a frenzy. When cards that see minor play in a single format are selling out, it means the market is extremely bullish. It’s happened once or twice in Modern before, most recently last year ahead of another major Modern Grand Prix: Richmond. More on that later.

Jund didn’t just affect Olivia and Huntmaster, though. We saw Blackcleave Cliffs double to $10 and Raging Ravine triple to $10. Abrupt Decay gained a few percentage points. MPR copies of Terminate have risen considerably. Inquisition of Kozilek doubled to $15. Despite a Modern Masters 2015 reprint, Fulminator Mage has stopped falling in price entirely, and is in fact climbing.

The Goryo’s Vengeance deck has been responsible for quite a few spikes itself. After making top eight, the eponymous card rapidly climbed to $25. Nourishing Shoal, an obscure Kamigawa card that is undoubtedly sitting in bulk bins everywhere, is still trying to find a steady price in the $10 region, up from pennies. As I write this, Through the Breach hasn’t sold out yet, but I can’t find a copy at a single internet dealer, and there are only a handful on TCGPlayer. If it still hasn’t spiked by the time this goes live, I’m guessing someone will buy the last ten copies on the internet.

I could list card spikes for another five or six paragraphs. Deceiver Exarch, Disrupting Shoal, Ezuri, Renegade Leader, Oblivion Stone, Kitchen Finks… frankly, I don’t want to link them all. Just go look at the largest gains over the two weeks and you’ll see everything that’s doing well. A rising tide lifts all boats, and in the world of Magic, coastal towns are building levees as fast as possible.

What May Spike

How about what hasn’t spiked? The list is a lot shorter than it was two weeks ago, that’s for sure. I mentioned before that Heritage Druid has a jaw-dropping price tag of nearly $20 right now. While this uncommon has skyrocketed, Nettle Sentinel has quietly sat by, barely budging. It’s a common, which may cause you to wonder just how high it could possibly rise, but I’m not too worried about that. If an uncommon from Morningtide can hit $20, a set almost undoubtedly opened more than Eventide, why can’t a common reach $5 or $10? Sentinel is just as important in both the Modern and Legacy Elves builds. At $1 apiece, I have a strong suspicion that this is still well undervalued. Full disclosure: I may buy some by the time this article goes live.

In the same deck, Chord of Calling still speaks to me. It’s not going to see any dramatic movements in the near future, but it’s guaranteed to be a gainer over the next year or two. I’ve got a stack of thirty or forty and I wouldn’t hesitate to add to it if the right deal shows up.

Over in the Ad Nauseam deck, I’m a big fan of Spoils of the Vault. It’s an instant-speed black tutor. Sort of. The cost is high, but in a deck that’s either invincible, has a very high life total, or is searching for a four-of, it can be just what the pilot needs. We’ve all seen what happens to rares from the Mirrodin era when the demand is on, so at a $1 buy-in, this is low risk with an extremely high reward. What’s particularly appealing is just how cheap Ad Nauseam is to build right now. The deck has basically no real value in it. There’s a few Pact of Negations, sure, but that’s about it. Several of the rares required to function were printed in the first Modern Masters run, hampering their price tags severely. Even the mana base is extremely cheap for a Modern deck. When there aren’t any expensive cards in a powerful deck, there’s typically one or two that steps up. The same thing happened with Living End, and we could see it here. I’m in for a stack.

Back on the other side of the color wheel, I’m a bit surprised Scavenging Ooze is still around $5. I think we’re getting close to the end of that. This is a card less poised for a dramatic rise rather than simply gaining five percent week after week, a sign of steady public demand. This will reach $10—it’s just a matter of how long it will take. I’m dubious it’s the best place to park your money, as I think there are faster options out there, but at the very least, it’s safe.

A UB Faeries deck showed up in the top 32, an archetype that’s been remarkably quiet since the unbanning of Bitterblossom. Of all things contained within, Mutavault is my favorite card. This crashed extremely hard after its run in Mono-Blue and Mono-Black last year, from $30 to $10 today. Mutavault remains possibly the strongest manland ever printed, and I have no doubt this will continue to rise in value over the coming months, same as Scavenging Ooze. If you want foils, now is the time to act.

What Will Happen to the Spikes

All of this discussion so far is just a review of effects without consideration of the cause. Why did the entire Modern index jump so strongly? Is it all speculator buyouts (it’s not) or is it real demand? Will prices rise through the PreTQ season? Will they drop once Battle for Zendikar rolls around?

I’ll begin with an idea from my article scratchpad. I never got around to writing this particular piece, but it’s been sitting there staring at me since last summer.

I can still explain my thought process here a year after writing it down.

It was a few months after Grand Prix Richmond had occurred. Prior to Richmond, Modern prices were in a tizzy. The war drums were beating and the market hordes were marching. Check out some of these price spikes, all happening within a few weeks of the GP.

Those are all on the same time scale, highlighting that each saw major gains at the same time. In four months, when we look back at the price graphs for Olivia, Oblivion Stone, and Deceiver Exarch, it’s going to look the same.

What we’re seeing is that a major Modern GP, heavily publicized and run by a grade-A organizer ahead of a Modern season, is a huge catalyst for price changes. In other words, GP Charlotte is GP Richmond, simply one year later. Same organizer, same marketing. Last year it was a Modern PTQ season, this time it’s a Modern PreTQ season. Card trends before, during, and after Richmond should prove to be predictive of this year’s. One of the best resources available to financiers in any market, whether Magic or Wall street, is history. Those who don’t study it are Dr. Doom. Or something.

Look back at that idea I had scribbled down. The first third of it is that single events—in this case, Richmond and Charlotte—drive prices wild. The second third is that seasons—PTQ or PreTQ—apply less pointed pressure. What do I mean by that? Well, just look at those price graphs. All of the spikes are occurring right around the GP. Once you get out into May, there’s basically none. If the green chart is distracting, check out the blue buylist line. That’s a great indicator of market demand, and there are no jumps after the spring.

I’ve got more examples too, these more stark.

Birthing Pod was the deck to beat last year. There isn’t much contest to this claim: after a summer of dominance it was banned this past January. The card Birthing Pod, the entire engine of a to-be-banned Modern deck, the best deck in the format, couldn’t hold a price tag north of $10 through the PTQ season. And Scalding Tarn, after rocketing north of $100 ahead of the GP, continued to dwindle in price. Today it is $60, half of its former glory.

Birthing Pod and Scalding Tarn were two major, major staples in Modern at the time. The Grand Prix drove their numbers up, but the PTQ season was unable to sustain those new prices. They both subsequently sunk in price over the following months. The other cards I highlighted—Cryptic Command, Splinter Twin, etc.—did not suffer so dire a fate through the summer, though their prices were also moved by a single event rather than a PTQ season.

The point I’m making right now is that while conventional wisdom seems to be that competitive seasons cause price movement, our evidence from last year doesn’t support that, and neither does the evidence this year. Last year, it seems that all of the spikes happened ahead of a GP, and then either remained stagnant or even fell after the fact. This year, we’ve seen a truckload of price spikes, probably more than last year.

What’s our takeaway, then? Well, if history is any indication, it’s that we’re sitting at the top of the market right now. Modern staples will generally remain stagnant or even decrease in the next four months.

You may find this at odds with my article from last week, the tl;dr of which was that MM2 prices have probably already hit their floor and are beginning to rebound. This claim regarding MM2 does not clash with this week’s lesson. We’re essentially looking at two different halves of the market. Last week’s half of the market is all the brand new cards that were hit by reprints. Those are basically unable to spike, burdened as they are with supply. That’s the bottom of the Modern market. Prices have gotten as low as they can, and now they’ll begin slowly growing, and will continue to do so for months and months. The other half of the market is made up of the cards not reprinted. The Eternal Witnesses and the Goryo’s Vengeances. These were the cards ready and willing to be bought out. Now that that’s happened, they will remain mostly stagnant, with only minor fluctuations in price between now and September.

We should seek practical application of this information. Given the trajectory of so many of last year’s hot Modern cards, I don’t believe we’ll see many more price spikes this year. I’d say a good 80 percent or more of them have occurred already. We may see a few here and there, possibly in part due to Origins ramifications, but for the most part, if a card was going to see a dramatic rise in price this year, it has already happened. Furthermore, don’t expect prices on cards that have changed to change much more. Goryo’s Vengeance isn’t going to end up much further than where it is today. Nor will Olivia or Oblivion Stone or Blackcleave Cliffs.

If you’ve got any of these cards that have spiked, don’t feel bad about selling them. I’ve got several sets of Raging Ravine I’ll be listing shortly. While I believe they could potentially hit $20—look at Celestial Colonnade and Creeping Tar Pit—it could be months before that happens, and if the metagame swings back towards Abzan from Jund, it may not be before a reprint. I’m happy to take my profits and move on to greener pastures. Same for any of these cards that have spiked, and really, any Modern product at all that has seen generous increases recently. Is it possible there’s still considerable growth possible on any given card? Sure, but how likely is it, how long will it take, and how valuable is the money to you right now?

Snap Decision

Where I stand most starkly in contrast to the rest of the entire analytic field is Snapcaster Mage. Every person on Twitter is talking about how safe he is, how high his price could possibly rise, and just how far out of the park they’re going to hit this home run. While I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this, I am more bearish than my contemporaries.

Those price charts on Birthing Pod and Scalding Tarn scare me. Scalding Tarn especially, because I was there. I had ten or fifteen Tarns that I didn’t sell because I was hoping to eke a few extra dollars out of them over the summer. Rather than increase through the PTQ season, they dropped, and I ultimately sold most at around $60. Considering I could have been getting $100, and I had at least ten, that’s a solid $400 in lost profit that serves as a vivid reminder not to get greedy.

When I look at Snapcaster, I see red flags. Take a look at Snapcaster’s price chart.

And now, here’s Scalding Tarn’s chart, stopping just two weeks after Richmond last year.

Those are damn similar graphs. Of course, all graphs of cards rising in price are going to be fairly similar: the line gets higher as you go right. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that Snapcaster may retract in the coming weeks or months. Plenty of people are going to tell me I’m crazy, and that there’s no reason for Snap to drop. He’s played in a bunch of formats, there’s been steady price growth, there are no immediate avenues for reprints. None of this is incorrect. Of course, the same could all have been said about Scalding Tarn last April, and look where that ended up.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with my own Snaps yet. I’m looking to have some of my peers read this article and then have a conversation. Do we sell Snap now, at $75, and walk away happy? Do we hold out for $100 or more this year? It’s very easy to say that his price isn’t done growing and that there’s more profits on the horizon. That’s what everyone wants to hear. It’s a lot harder to say that this spike is not permanent and that if you don’t sell now you’re going to lose $20 on each copy.

How about you? Are you selling your Modern spec stock? Holding? There’s a comment section below—use it.

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