Tag Archives: MTGFinance

Jeremy Aaranson

Why You Should Get a Real Job

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Editor’s Note: Hey everyone, Corbin here. Keeping up with your Magic is a serious commitment, and isn’t cheap. While this is a fun article that pokes fun at some of the “mtgfinance” stereotypes, there are a lot of useful tools and helpful authors to help keep you ahead of the game when it comes to maximizing your money in Magic. We do a lot that here on MTGPrice, but we know that taking a step back and laughing is healthy as well. With that in mind, enjoy!

 

*This is intended as satire of the current state of MTGFinance. All views expressed are 100% true. If you feel like complaining, feel free to let me block you on Twitter @xemitsellsmagic. I would also like to thank Nick Becvar and the Cartel Aristocrats for contributing to this manure masterpiece*

 

Hey Guys! I’m sure the title of this article grabbed you guys faster than an underpriced Ebay auction. I’m here today to write a piece about why you should be working for a real company instead of trying to make mtgfinance millions on cardboard crack. After a recent debate on Twitter, I decided to write a short piece about why it’s much better to be a cubicle monkey than risk it all grinding the tables of a GP or trying to hit the next big spec.

1.       401ks and Health Coverage.

Should you decide to risk your future grinding Magic, there’s a couple things about reality that are going to slap you in the face. You know that sweet 400% return you just made on Worldbreaker? Well, you’re going to need to sell a couple hundred copies to pay for that cavity you got while eating convention center food and forgetting to brush your teeth the last 300 days.

future-sight
Also, who needs a retirement fund? Well, actually everyone. You can’t guarantee that Magic will still be around in 50 years and that GPs will still exist in their current form. They might even release Version 5 of MTGO by 2065!

2.       Profit Margins

Let’s say that Otto Ogre sells $4,000 of magic cards a month with a profit margin of 20% on those cards. Congrats! You make poverty wages while the IRS thinks that you’re making quite a bit more before you show them receipts of what you spent! Oh wait, you didn’t keep your receipts? Looks like penalties and audits have Storm in the real world!

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On top of that, what if you have a bad GP experience? I don’t think the phone company accepts bulk rares, and you can’t buylist a bunch of cards to many shops in your area for real prices. Have fun waiting 10 days for Channel Fireball to process your cards and send you a check in the mail. And don’t forget what can happen if your cards aren’t Near Mint!

3.       Wages

It’s great that you traded up $750 in a weekend at a GP. However, you still need to get money for those cards, which in most cases leaves you with selling back to a vendor. Plus how many hours did you put into trading over the weekend? Forty-five hours? You could’ve saved yourself a drive and made more working for the Golden Arches instead of trading for those Golden Myrs. I enjoy counting pennies as much as the next person, but the only thing you’re going to be counting is food stamps if you choose to live life as a GP Grinder.

4.       Failed Specs

You know that one card that your buddy was testing for a Pro Tour? Well now you’re sitting on a couple hundred copies of Mana Bloom and you still need to pay rent for that place that doubles as a Magic card closet.

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Not every card can be a Sphinx’s Revelation, but you should have had a revelation by now that speculating isn’t easy money. The only thing you’ll be seeing is your profit going red with your bills blooming out of control. The next thing you know, all the “hard” work that you put in will have crumbled to dust.

5.       Social Life

You know what really impresses people? Telling them you hustle cardboard in a sweaty , crowded convention center every weekend. I hope that gets you really far in your dating life as well, because you’re going to need a really heavy Briber’s Purse to keep that relationship going with a Muggle. Your kids are going to really look up to Daddy being gone every weekend, trying to Becvalue his way to extra diapers for them.

6.       Living an independent life

It’s great that you don’t want to be Cubicle Carl for the rest of your life; I admire you for your dedication of sleeping on floors and couches every weekend. Feel free to be a sovereign citizen in the 20 hours you spend every weekend driving to a different city. You know who actually can do MTGFinance right? The people who own their own shops, and they’re not making money hand over fist either! The owner of The Card Nexus had a good point when he said that “I think way more people like the IDEA of being their own boss than the reality of what that entails.”

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But you could get lucky! If you somehow get demoted to being a buyer for a store at a GP, you could get McDoubles instead of a single cheeseburger for every meal! What a truly generous feast. In all seriousness, for all of the basement dwellers reading this article, you should go to college. .001% of all people reading this “article” on MTGPrice can actually do MTGFinance for a full-time living. Save your parents another four years of disappointment and work on a career, and not delusions of “MTGFinance job”.

Choosing MTGFinance is like selling cards at SCG Prices. It feels bad, and you look bad. Saying that you’re self-employed is almost as bad as an idea as buying 200 foil Illusionist Bracers. Work on investing in better cards, and work on investing in a better future for yourself. I hope you have enough cards to put a down payment on a house, or car. You also can have fun looking through job websites with nearly no marketable skills after your six-month stunt lands you into declaring a Chapter 11 (hint: that’s bankruptcy).

7.       Conclusion

To summarize, stop refreshing the #mtgfinance tag on Twitter and incessantly checking MTGStocks. You guys are already smarter for having read this “article.” Take a deep breath, think your options over, and stop living in Dominaria. Otherwise, you’re in for a truly Gruuling life.

Sincerely,
Jeremy

Jim Casale

Grinder Finance – A New Frontier

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Last week we looked into the year that was.  This week I want to take a look at the year that may be.  This year will be uncharted territory for the Magic community and especially for MTG Finance.  There have been golden rules related to the time of year.  There was one rotation per year in September and the summer before ushered in a huge sell off in the oldest Standard cards.  Now we have two rotations, once in September and one in April.  How will that affect the normal trends of card prices?  There is also another elephant in the room.  There isn’t significant growth in the size of the player base.  For the past year it has been pretty clear to me that Wizards is trying to sell more product to the same number of people.  This may have some impacts on otherwise “safe” picks from the past year’s standard.

 

We learned about the new rotation over a year ago.  Let’s revisit it to refresh everyone’s mind.

Source http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mm/metamorphosis
Source http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mm/metamorphosis

This is the old rotation.  Blocks were 3 sets and then a core set was released and then the following set caused a rotation.  This meant that fall sets had 2 years in standard and that amount of time decreased until the core set (which spent the least amount of time in standard).

Source http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mm/metamorphosis
Source http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mm/metamorphosis

The new Standard has a rotation every other set.  Every beginning of a block causes two sets to rotate out and one set to rotate in.  This means there will be an increased significance of the spring and summer set (as they stay in Standard just as long as the fall and winter sets).  The real question for us is when do people begin to sell off their cards?

sphinx's rev

Let’s take a look a card who’s price was entirely impacted by Standard.  If you wanted to get rid of your Revelations before they made their final descent, you needed to sell them in March of 2014.  That card did not rotate out of Standard until September, meaning people began selling off a full 6 months before rotation.

Khans of Tarkir cards rotate with the release of Shadows Over Innistrad in April.  If cards followed that same trajectory then I’d have to assume we’re already almost two months too late.

crackling doom mantis rider

I’m inclined to believe the boat is missed.  While these cards are almost bulk rares at this point,  I don’t advocate holding onto anything that has value left from Khans of Tarkir and Fate Reforged.  There is almost no upside in the release of Oath of the Gatewatch.

abrupt decay

Look at Abrupt Decay.  It rotated at around $13.  Right now you can find copies at retail for $11.50 (Strike Zone).  While there was a period in between you could have got out at a profit, it’s clear that dealer confidence is low and buylists reflect that.  There was also never a point where the best buylist was above the retail cost at rotation.  Now there is the possibility this is just part of the end of year slump and we see $20 Abrupt Decays July.

thoughtseize

This is the year of the Thoughtseize.  What happens to it?  Buy price is plummeting, now out of even double digits.  Are there just too many Thoughtseizes?  Is its rotation out of Standard actually detrimental to it’s long-term price?  It’s hard to tell but it’s something to watch.  We might see a lot more seasonal ebbs and flows with Modern legal cards printed in Return to Ravnica and newer sets.  So much sealed product of those sets was available that it’s impossible for cards to retain their pre-rotation value even if they are eternal playable if there are just too many of them.  It’s possible the card will never recover to it’s $25 height-of-Standard price tag.

Legacy

I haven’t done anything but eyeball it, but fellow MTG Finance writer Saffron Olive says Legacy staples are down (for the first time ever) 0.4% year over year (Source).  I’m not expecting that to change.  With the increase support of Modern and the decreased support of Legacy at a local and global level it’s hard for people to justify thousands of dollars in decks they can play maybe three times per year.  Wizards has only announced one Legacy GP and Star City Games has announced one Legacy open in the first third of the year.  Assuming there are two more opens in 2016, that gives North America only four major Legacy events in the year compared to six Opens and one Grand Prix last year.  This doesn’t count international Grands Prix (which were not on the same date as they are this year) and the Invitational or Player’s Championship.  I foresee drops to continue as long as support for the format drops nationally.  While it may be thriving in your local area, it is so hard to start grass roots support for such an expensive format.  I don’t really want to elaborate anymore on my feelings but I think we will see another year of Modern replacing Legacy as the non-rotating format of choice for a lot of players.

The Future of Making Money

With the print runs of recent sets, it’s hard to find a reason these days to invest in a Standard legal pack.  When you look at the difference between sealed boxes of Return to Ravnicai versus sealed boxes of Innistrad it’s easy to see where things changed.  Conventional wisdom of sitting on any kind of sealed product is no longer true.  I would by proxy say holding most singles from those sets is also a poor idea.  My interests now are in limited print run products.  Modern Masters sets, From the Vaults and promotions like Zendikar Expeditions are the safest places to hold money because we don’t know what the future will hold.  If you really want to trade Standard cards into other Standard cards I would suggest looking into foils.  Those are similar to limited print run products in terms of scope.  The buy and sell prices of Foil Thoughtseizes have been basically flat since July which is a start contrast to the rise and fall of non-foil Thoughtseizes that may just never recover.

Into the Unknown

I don’t think anyone could factually back up any claims on the future.  I am suggesting we consider our options and look to the past for some theories.  I don’t know how players will enjoy or dislike the new rotation but it will definitely be a defining part of the 2016 Magic landscape.

Sigmund Ausfresser

PROTRADER: A 2015 Year-End Review

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Many will look back at 2015 with shaded glasses, unwilling to think critically about the data that now lies behind us. Money can no longer be made in 2015, so it’s easy to strictly focus on what’s ahead, ignoring valuable lessons from behind. It is certainly easy to do so – humans are creatures of habit, and our conscious mind is inherently lazy. That’s all right, don’t feel bad, my mind is lazy too.

But this morning, as I ponder the most important trends to me throughout 2015, I force myself to think critically about where I am today and where I want to focus next year. So at the risk of giving you yet another cliché “year in review” article, I think it’s important I share some really impactful observations throughout 2015. These five trends will be based solely in data, and require heightened scrutiny next year as I continue to strive towards my MTG financial goals – a full tuition for my son’s college education.

One day at a time.

Observation # 1 – The Impact of Fetches and the Super Mythic Rare

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Sigmund Ausfresser

PROTRADER: Closing the Arbitrage Gaps

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It couldn’t have been all my doing. At least, not directly. Whether or not I sparked action is a separate matter.

Of course I’m talking about recent arbitrage opportunities. Many that I have cited in the past have dried up, especially on stuff like Alpha and Beta.

But I’m sure it didn’t take much to impact market pricing on older and more obscure cards. When a store is trying to stock up on near mint Alpha rares, it doesn’t take more than a copy or two to motivate them to drop their buy prices. Even giants like Star City Games can’t possibly want to sink more than a couple hundred dollars into stuff like Alpha Chaoslace.

Chaoslace

As a result, previous blanket statements I’ve made in the past no longer hold true. Since I wrote an article on Alpha and Beta buy lists a couple months ago I’ve noticed many price cuts at Star City Games and, more notably, Channel Fireball. When I noticed strong buy lists I made sure to cite them for our ProTraders. Now that trends reversed some, I wanted to make sure I doubled back to this topic to provide a timely update.

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expensive cards

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