Tag Archives: Reprints

Reprint Awareness

May 12, 2016 Cliff Daigle 2 Comments

In case you’re not aware, the next six months are going to give us a lot of ways to experience Magic that are not Standard-legal booster packs.

June 10, 2016: Eternal Masters

August 19, 2016: From the Vault: Lore

August 27, 2016: Conspiracy: Take the Crown

November 2016 (exact date not yet released, likely the first week or two): Commander 2016

Yes, that’s only one week between an FtV and the new Conspiracy set. My wallet already hurts.

Notably, this list leaves out Eldritch Moon (July 16) and the next large set (codename is Lock, due to land in September 2016) but those are less likely to have reprints in them.

FtV: Lore is something I don’t want to speculate on. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from Wizards’ decision to put Iona, Shield of Emeria in Modern Masters 2015 and then immediately again in FtV: Angels. I know there’s some logic, some rationale, but I’m done trying to predict what they will and won’t do.

Instead, I want to think about what’s safe, as I attempt to weather the storm ahead. I also want to consider the three reprint-focused sets (Conspiracy and Commander are mostly reprints) and what I have that’s exposed from a financial standpoint.

One of the things that I have learned is to trust the high-end market. The things that there will not be any more of, that’s only going to go up. There are blessed few examples of a three-figure card crashing down to earth, and those usually involve multiple bannings.

With the best of the best, a reprint doesn’t often hurt a card. Let’s looks at the poster child for ‘careful what you wish for’ reprints: Thoughtseize. Here’s the graph for the foil:

Theros came out in fall 2013, and you can see the dip down to about $100. If you got in at that point, congratulations. I love it when any card triples in value, but climbing $200 or so is truly awesome. In retrospect, we should have seen it coming. We should have known that this card is good. Incredibly so. Format-warpingly amazing. It’s a mainstay in Modern and Legacy and while lots of people were telling you to pick up $20 copies at the end of Theros, I don’t remember many voices chiming in about Lorwyn foils.

Original set foils are resistant in the long term, often carrying more value than newer versions that seem exactly the same. Woodfall Primus, a fun reanimation target but not a Constructed card currently, has a $6 gap between the Shadowmoor foil and the Modern Masters 2013 foil.

It takes a lot to dent the prime cards and Onslaught fetches are one of them. Those cards have seen Judge printings, Khans of Tarkir reprints, and now Zendikar Expeditions. Even with all of that, the lesser lands have stayed about where they were. Here’s Windswept Heath:

While it’s seen some ups and downs, it’s been mostly at home in the $150 range. This is true for the other four, and now my secret: GET THESE NOW.

No matter which version you want, supply is at a peak. If you ever wanted these for a Commander deck, or your Cube, or whichever, now is the time. People have gotten theirs and they are coming out of circulation and there’s nowhere to go but up. I like the set foils and the Expedition versions to grow the most in the next two to three years, but these will, at the worst, keep their price.

On a related note, I really, really like getting into foil Zendikar fetches. These might not get the Standard treatment as the Onslaught ones did, but the trajectory is there. Buylist on a foil Scalding Tarn has already gotten back to where it was before the Expeditions landed, and I think that all the foils are going to tick steadily upward. At worst, they stay safe, and I’ll be insulated against all the reprints that are coming.

Watchlist

Now, let’s talk about some unsafe cards.

Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx ($8): This worries me, and I have about 20 that I picked up for $4. It’s too easy. This shines in a set that focuses on individual colors, or hybrids. I’ve seen some chatter that an Elf theme is quite possible in EMA, and this fits in very well as a “Oh, you’ve done a bunch of stuff? Have a boatload of mana!” card that Gaea’s Cradle is ideal in.

Thespian’s Stage ($3/$14): The foil multiplier is due to the Dark Depths combo and the awesomeness in Commander. I banged the drum on this card for years as a dollar pickup and here we are, a triple up…and I’m frightened. There’s a lot of people on PucaTrade who want this, and in the interest of disclosure, I sent out half my copies this week. A reprint, in any set, will send this back to fifty cents or lower, and it fits literally anywhere.

Stony Silence ($11): Cheap, easy, and a great answer to a lot of problems. I’ll be surprised if this hasn’t had a new printing by the end of this year.

Innistrad enemy check lands (Sulfur Falls, Woodland Cemetery, etc.): These have had one printing and it was five years ago. It’s time and the values will drop by at least half. Lots of spare copies have been soaked up by the casual market, and they are a great add for easing mana fixing.

Craterhoof Behemoth ($26): A great finisher for swarm decks, this might be too obvious if there is an Elf theme in one of the reprint sets. I don’t think they want to take an Elf deck and reprint it as-is, but as I said, I’ve been horrifically wrong about what Wizards will and won’t do.

Rise of the Dark Realms ($7): Big, expensive, splashy, and usually game-ending. Sounds like the definition of a card in Commander 2016.

Primeval Bounty ($6): Whatever you do after casting this, it gets significantly better. But it does nothing at six mana, yet it’s got this price. Ripe for reprinting!

Omniscience ($16): Another excellent candidate for a Commander reprint, it’s just silly, especially if the Reserve List gets bent and best buddy Academy Rector gets a reprint along the way too.

Gilded Lotus ($9): Don’t sleep on how good this card is, because it’s been in two large sets and as an FtV and yet it’s still here at $9. It’s a first-pick card in Cube too.

There’s a lot more things that I don’t want to have spares of, and I’ll try to wrap up the list next week. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments or the forums!

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Wherewolves and Whywolves

February 25, 2016 Douglas Johnson 2 Comments

I Have Returned

So, I’m back. It’s been a while since I’ve actually had the chance to sit down and write, so let me explain. If you don’t give a crap about my personal life and explorations, I don’t hold a grudge against you for skipping ahead to the bold heading a few paragraphs below that reads “Finance Starts Here”. I promise there’ll be an entire article’s worth of content down there. I’ll start by saying I’ve had an interesting couple of weeks, and we have a hell of a lot of content to talk about. WordPress decided to mutiny and failed to publish my article (the one that was published last Thursday) on time, and Corbin wasn’t able to catch it because of a battle with the flu. Therefore, the article that went up last week was supposed to go up the week before that on the 11th, and I didn’t catch it because I was on a 15 hour drive. Mistakes were made by multiple people on the team, and we apologize.

Okay, so remember that trip to Georgia I was talking about a few weeks ago? Remember how I said I was going to shopcrawl? Well, I didn’t get the chance to. I had a bunch of stores picked out, and our plan to leave at 3AM from upstate NY was in place weeks in advance. While Oswego is normally known for its’ incredible levels of snowfall and cold weather, the weeks leading up to our trip had left us with zero snow whatsoever.

Unfortunately, the powers that be were saving up all of the snow over the past month, and felt the need to dump it all on us on the evening before our trip was scheduled to begin. When we braved the storm outside into the campus parking lot, we learned that we were completely trapped until the snowplow came through so that we could shovel ourselves out.

Except that it never happened. It wasn’t until 9AM that we managed to give up on the plow coming through, and tried to dig ourselves out and use tracks that someone else had made, so we were six hours late on the start of our journey. No shopcrawling, as we needed to actually make it to the hotel in time. Alright, fine. I’ll just shopcrawl on the way b–

Nope. A deadly combination of a personal emergency on Sunday night combined with another ridiculous snowstorm up north meant that we had to put the bulk buys on hold as we rushed back to NY on Monday. One small vehicle collision on I-81 at 12:30AM later, and my fiancee’ and I were stranded at a motel for another day in Pennsylvania while we waited for information on a rental car from the insurance. Thankfully we’re both okay, but it was certainly a stressful event overall.

Finance Starts Here

Remember that trip to Georgia I was talking about a few weeks ago? Contrary to what you may have thought, I didn’t drive all the way down there to unload pricey staples, post-spike Modern cards, or anything like that. The real treasure here was the fact that Card Advantage’s buylist is one of the deepest in the entire country. In the pictures below, ignore the first three categories. Then, convert the numbers into cents.

These are the real treasures of #mtgfinance, because it’s impossible to lose while buying bulk. While we spent almost an entire day pricing out everything and settling the final cash number, it was made much easier by the fact that everything was alphabetized beforehand. I’m sure some people reading this will take this photo as a humble brag, but it just goes to show that with a good network and the willingness to pick the dimes and quarters, you can walk away with a lot of cash that nobody else will even care to sneeze at.

The Next Spawnsire?

So for the past two weeks or so, I was planning to write about how Mayor of Avabruck was a darn fine spec target at his current $2. I had this whole repeat Spawnsire argument planned, and how werewolves are a slam-dunk casual tribe that were going to receive new support in Shadows over Innistrad. I was going to advise you to buy into the puppy lord so that we can all revel in his future $5 price tag together. Part of my argument included the SOI checklist card that was leaked a few weeks ago, and how Mayor was obviously not going to be included.

That argument fell apart about ten minutes ago, when I actually put a little bit more thought into the comparisons between Spawnsire of Ulamog and Mayor. As you can see in the linked picture above, Lars on Twitter said that the possibility of receiving a Legendary werewolf this time is 99%. I thought so too, until I actually read all of the names on that checklist card. Tell me, out of all the double-sided cards that are in this set, how many of those feels like a name they would use for a legendary werewolf?

None of them. We don’t even have a character name on the sheet. Unless this is only one checklist card of two in the set (You’ll notice that we can see CH1/297 in the bottom left corner of the card), then we’re not getting a legendary werewolf. In fact, it looks like there’s less than ten werewolves in the entire set. This is a whole different level of archetype support than Eldrazi were receiving in Battle for Zendikar. None of the other rarewolves have moved an inch over the past four and a half years. If you want to, it’s still extremely easy to build a werewolf deck for less than twenty or thirty dollars because all of the pieces are literally pure bulk, and the supply is plentiful.

Because of these factors, I honestly don’t think Shadows over Innistrad will spark a surge of werewolf demand like BFZ did with the Eldrazi. While the buy-in is certainly cheap and you’re running a very low-risk operation, I think you’ll at least have to wait until more news about Eldritch Moon before we can expect returns on Mayor. or any of the other werewolf creatures.

If you’re someone who wants to throw a few dollars into the ring for fun, I can think of a couple cards that I expect to stay under the radar for a while longer. While neither of these are cards you want to buy from the internet at full retail, I’ve been stocking up on these for several years in slight hopes of a casual resurgence. I had the opportunity to move them to Card Advantage for a fair 8 cents a piece, but I quickly declined.

As I said before; I really don’t expect demand for werewolves to spike significantly enough from SOI to put a dent in the current supply. When we look at the amount of stock that stores have below, it’s hard to expect commons and uncommons like this to move any meaningful amount.

What we can do, however, is hold onto the cards with the hopes that we can network and make connections with non-competitive players at the prerelease, managing to get “full retail” (and by full retail, I mean the full 50 cents a piece) for our five year old commons and uncommons that have dodged reprints up until now. Putting playsets of Moonmist in your trade binder at the SOI prerelease will go a long way towards shaving discounts off the new Standard staples that you’re hunting for in the set.

End Step

While we’re still on the subject of double-sided cards, I want to talk for a minute about Delver of Secrets. Once heralded as the Nacatl of the skies while terrorizing eternal formats, Delver’s wings have been clipped for a while now, and we haven’t seen him show up recently in any sort of high-level event. What I have seen, is a group of people advocating picking them up at their current $1.50, and foils at $10, as a result of the checklist card from before confirming an absence of reprints. I honestly don’t think that alone is enough to cause demand for Delvers to increase, so I would personally away away. As a matter of fact, I sold every single Delver that I owned to Card Advantage back in Georgia for $1.00 each (which is also an example of how strong their buylist is).

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

It’s Not About the Pro Tour (Okay, I Guess it is)

February 18, 2016 Douglas Johnson 8 Comments

Okay, it’ll probably contain a lot of stuff that pertains to the Pro Tour. What I mean is I’m not going to try to perform some fancy analysis of the decklists and then tell you to sell Eldrazi Mimics, Eye of Ugin, and Chalice of the Void. That should be fairly easy to figure out, and it’s probably too late to capitalize on the maximum possible value by the time you’re reading this. You should be aiming to sell on Saturday Night and Sunday, after the top 8 lists get posted. I sold Chalices at $50 on Saturday night, but I also sold Simian Spirit Guides at $6 each while I slept. Oh well. Anyway, today I’ve got sort of a hodge-podge list of things I want to talk about, to bear with me as we skip around a bit throughout the article.

I’d like to start out by thanking those who defended me last week, and those who contributed thoughtful and rational disagreements without resorting to ad hominem. I appreciate all of you for reading my content, and constructive criticism is always welcome.

Let’s revisit Spreading Seas, and see how that card ended up after last week’s article. The minuscule supply of foil copies on TCGplayer and SCG finally ran dry in the couple of days leading up to my article’s release, and the card has been sitting comfortably at $20 for the past few days. Interestingly enough, Seas didn’t have any effect on the Pro Tour; it was far too slow to contest with a swarm of turn 2 kills through combat damage. While I would love to list mine on TCGplayer so I can try to sell before the race to the bottom, I’m putting my inventory on ice for my trip to Georgia this week.

If you own any foils, I suggest selling out now to anyone who is brewing a list to try and wash away the Eldrazi menace. You made your money if you bought in a week ago, so start racing to the bottom and cash out now while the card is still appetizing as a way to hate on Eye of Ugin.

Non-foils managed to stay under the radar, and the TCG mid price has managed to avoid moving by more than a few cents. However, if you dig a little bit deeper into the actual listings, you’ll see that there are very few copies left at the $1 that the TCG price would have you believe; SCG has about 150 at $1.50, and I’m keeping a close eye on that count in preparation to sell mine on Facebook. A large majority of the listings are for at least $2-3 for near mint, and I don’t suggest buying at that price whatsoever. Let me make this clear. I DO NOT SUGGEST BUYING THE MAGIC: THE GATHERING CARD FROM THE ZENDIKAR EXPANSION PACK, FOR OVER $1.00 USD IF YOU ARE ATTEMPTING PURELY TO LATER SELL THE CARD FOR A PROFIT. (Danny: this sentence feels really weird to read to me, not sure how to fix it)

If you’ve been hoarding Seas for the past few years and setting them aside from collection picks, bulk trades, or being your own buylist in the community and picking them up at $.25, this is our chance to shine If the retail on Seas “officially” hits $3, you’re going to want to open the floodgates. A lot of the desire to include this in the current meta comes from Eye of Ugin being a big bad wolf, and any targeted bans at the deck also hurt the financial potential of Seas. Move ’em now, and be happy if you can get $2 retail on local Facebook groups or $1 buylist eventually.

While we’re swimming around in the original Zendikar block, let’s take a look at another couple of enchantments that caught my eye.

Both of these are enchantments from the good old Stonesculptor set, which was released six years ago (You might remember that as the year Inception and Toy Story 3 were released). They both appear to have significant casual appeal at first glance, because players will always want to build Megrim and Kraken decks in kitchen table land. I’m going to predict that one of these cards will probably be $5 in a few years, akin to Sigil of the Empty Throne before it got throat-punched with a double-reprint. The other will continue to stagnate and be mostly forgotten about; even without a multiplayer reprint product. Will it be the discard win condition, or the fish finder?

Here’s my theory; Quest for the Nihil Stone, even though it appears to have a casual appeal, will be ignored by casual players because it doesn’t beat out The Rack, or Liliana’s Caress (by the way; the fact that Caress has gone this long without a reprint is astounding, and I wouldn’t be holding onto these any longer than you have to) in the casual and competitive Rack decks. The deck has enough win conditions without Nihil Stone, and I’ve never actually sold one out of my dollar box even to the people who play discard religiously. While “people I’ve met” isn’t exactly the most statistically relevant sample size, I have never met a single non-competitive player who actually gives a crap about Nihil Stone, and I hang out with a lot of kitchen table players.

On the other hand, Quest for Ula’s Temple makes a great argument for a “why is this card $5” a few years down the line. If you pick up Magic and you want to smack nerds around with giant sea creatures, you need this card. You need four of this card. Nothing else drops free sashimi onto the field like some good old Ula’s Temple. With Kiora still alive and swimming after getting beaten by the Eldrazi harder than a Pro Tour competitor, it’s entirely possible that we see her again later on in the story. With more Kiora comes more big fish, and a few more people itching to make the sea monster deck.

Even with the world-specific name, the casual appeal of this card makes it very easy to jam into a supplemental product. To be honest, I was surprised that it wasn’t in the Commander 2014 mono-blue deck until I actually double-checked my work. While it obviously won’t see a reprint in a standard-legal set due to the time-specific setting of original Zendikar, it could possibly be jammed into a duel deck or Commander product along the way.

“But DJ, doesn’t that mean foils are the easy long term play here? A foil version wouldn’t be printed in a supplemental product, so it would avoid the price drop of a reprint entirely.”

Not exactly. While Modern and Commander staples are generally strong foil targets, the pure casual crowd wants to stay away from foils almost entirely. These players just want the cheapest version of the card to help make their zombie deck come to (un)life, and the foil multipliers on cards like these with minimal Commander appeal are extremely low. One of my favorite examples is Lich Lord of Unx;

Other prime candidates for low foil multipliers are Captivating Vampire and, that’s right, Quest for Ula’s Temple. While foil copies are likely to avoid getting hit by the Yu-Gi-Oh! hammer, they’re just as unlikely to be going up in price at the same ratio as the non-foil. They’ll also be just as hard to get rid of; you’ll probably have to sell them off at the same price as non-foil just to get the kitchen table players interested.

End Step

Remember how I mentioned that Laboratory Maniac was suddenly a $4 card, and I didn’t mention why that was? I was scrolling through my Facebook feed last week, and I saw someone in the casual Magic group wanting to build a deck with Lab Maniac and Inverter of Truth. While this isn’t exactly going to go head-to-head with the Pro Tour lists, it’s definitely another Leveler-esque shenanigan that will usually give you a couple of extra turns left to put the Maniac on the board and win. They curve into each other well enough, and the Inverter can bring back a Maniac that you milled earlier while digging with Thought Scour. Both of those sentences are what a kitchen table is going to tell you right before they buy your Lab Maniacs for $4 each.

Conjured Currency

The Mailbag Article

June 11, 2015 Douglas Johnson 16 Comments

By: Douglas Johnson

Welcome back! The week after Vegas has been anything but dull, at least in terms of Modern cards jumping up and down (mostly up).

Last week, I ended on the note that I would take specific requests concerning the financial side of Magic and answer them this week in as much detail as I could. Thankfully, I got a few responses to that, which at least proves that there are a few people who read this column. After answering some questions, I’ll go over a few of the Modern cards that jumped in price this past week, and what you should do with them depending on how many copies you own.

I’ll throw in a disclaimer first though: due to the speculative nature associated with some of these questions, my answers are not guaranteed to have a higher percentage of being correct than any of your guesses. None of us know what’s going to be in Battle for Zendikar, and my being a financier doesn’t give me an edge in those predictions.

Question #1

First off, we have Jeremy B. asking when the correct time to upgrade his Zendikar fetch lands in his Commander deck is. He’s wondering if the (assumed) reprint in Battle for Zendikar will affect the original printing’s foil price, or if the shock lands will prove to set an example of “original print foils creeping above $100.” There’s also a follow-up question about the ideal time to pick up foil copies of Survival of the Fittest and Wasteland. Even though my record with predicting fetch land reprints is not exactly stellar, I’m more than willing to vomit my opinions and thoughts onto the internet.

The general consensus on whether fetch lands will be in BFZ or not is pretty divided, but I’m standing firmly in the camp of, “Yes, Wizards will bring them back in the fall set with new art.” While this would put all ten fetches into Standard at the same time for six months, I’m willing to believe that those six months will be the last part of ripping off the Band-Aid of the new Standard rotation scheme. If they do end up in the set, foils of the new art will definitely be cheaper as product pours into the players hands en masse. That part is the no-brainer. But will the original Zendikar foils drop as well? I’m inclined to believe they will, but not by a huge amount.

An Onslaught foil Polluted Delta will run you about $400, and a large part of that is tied to a group of people who believe that old-border foils are the only way to play Magic. A 2005 foil Temple Garden is almost $75, because the old art is apparently loved by a larger group of people. I’m willing to believe that the same will hold true for these fetches—there will be people who want to believe that “older is better,” and this will keep the price tag up above the new foils—but they will still drop a bit, as some players will want to liquidate their foils in the face of the announcement.

As for Jeremy’s situation specifically: I think you can definitely wait on the fetch lands for your deck. You said in your message that you’re patient and that these aren’t something you need immediately for an event. Your Commander deck is fully functional with non-foils for the time being, and I don’t think anyone will fault you for not having the most expensive version of a card that appears to be imminent for a reprint.

Now, let’s talk about the desire for foils of Survival and Wasteland. The former is easy to get out of the way: it’s on the reserved list, so bite the bullet now and buy or trade for one if you really want it. It is not going to be printed again, and it’s an iconic enough art that it won’t be forgotten easily. I think you’re safe buying in now, and you shouldn’t have to work too hard to move it if you ever take apart the deck. If you’re patient, you can probably find one on a Facebook group or eBay auction for under $250.

Regarding Wasteland, I’ve had multiple discussions with my colleagues about whether or not Wasteland could be reprinted in Modern or even Standard. The card’s power level in those formats can be debated by those who play the game at a much higher level than I do, but my concern is focused more on whether or not WOTC feels that its presence would be promoting a healthy game type. Wizards hasn’t printed Stone Rain in forever, and it’s not because the card is overpowered. Early and immediate land destruction just isn’t where WOTC wants to take the game, so I’m inclined to believe that buying into a foil Wateland for your commander deck is still safe. It’s not as safe as a foil Survival, but it’s better than foil fetches. Your best bet for grabbing both without Wastelanding your wallet is definitely through a trade binder or eBay/Facebook auctions for cash.

Question #2

Next up we have another question concerning Battle for Zendikar. Spencer asks if I think there will be new Eldrazi to replace the current ones, as well as what other reprints we might see from the original Zendikar. I don’t think that WOTC needs to one-up their Eldrazi from last time, especially since they’ve already tied the lore to those three specific titans. What I do think is possible is printing three “new forms” of Ulamog, Kozilek, and Emrakul, similar to what was done with Niv-Mizzet in RTR. He was an iconic character that they wanted to “touch up,” so Wizards just printed a different version of him. I think the same is potentially true with the three Eldrazi, as I’m not sure how “fun” the originals were seen to be.

Spell Pierce is an interesting case study, especially since I saw practically zero people complaining about the fact that it wasn’t in Modern Masters 2015. It’s a $2 common with a $35 foil, but I don’t think it or Goblin Guide will be in BFZ. Maybe I’m horribly wrong, but I think RTR is an excellent model that Wizards will use this fall when returning to Zendikar. Return to Ravnica actually had zero non-land reprints from the original block in 2005 and 2006, using the ten shock lands to support a significant portion of the nostalgia from the old set, while they got to spend the rest of the block creating and shaping new identities for the guilds and their members. The company could certainly do the same thing here and choose a different style of full-art lands to help hype up the set. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see Pierce or Guide pop up in a supplemental product soon, but I don’t think either will be in the upcoming fall set.

Question #3:

Liliana has almost reached the finish line in the race of $100 Modern singles, and foil Tarmogoyf has maintained its throne as the Modern Lotus of Magic (in fact, Maynard’s Goyf from Vegas sold for more than some Lotuses). I think the right answer to this question depends on your personal goals and what you’re planning to do with the cards in the future. If you plan on completing a set of foil Goys or hope to continue trading upwards and grinding value, then I think the single $350 bill is the place to be. The only situations I can think of where you might want to keep the Lilianas is if you’re planning on using them in a deck in the near future, or if you don’t have access to trading or selling very frequently and were planning on holding them for a few months. While the Goyf is better value at this moment, the Lilianas are quickly catching up and have a chance to pass the Goyf six months from now, as a rough guess.

Personally, I’d rather have the foil Goyf, and just sell it right now for $270, instead of selling the three Lilianas for $240.

Question #4:

Wow. Thanks to WUBRG from the MTGPrice ProTrader forums for the lengthy discussion topic! Reprints have definitely been the hot topic of late, with everyone wanting to maximize on value and not be screwed over by their expensive cards suddenly being worth nothing. This question is actually pretty similar to the first one I answered, but there’s definitely room to expand on where I would place my own money. Instead of buying into casual foils that were reprinted in Modern Masters 2015, I would prefer to put my money on reserved-list stuff, as you said. Sigmund recently touched on this, and I completely agree that Modern is not the place you want to be for long-term investments.

You suggested that “pimp” EDH cards will always have demand, even if Magic dies, but I have to disagree. If the game dies, none of those cards will matter anymore. I think the only thing that would potentially hold value is Power, Alpha, Beta, and maybe dual lands. The “pimp” factor makes cards a lot harder to move, especially when there is a higher percentage of players who just want the cheapest copies available to foil out their decks. If you’re just looking to “hold” value and prevent your cards from being absolutely decimated by reprints, then I think you’re fine, but I definitely wouldn’t use it as a solid investment strategy. Buying multiple copies of EDH staples and planning to sell them at a later date results in the huge inconvenience of moving them all, as I’ve learned the hard way by still owning over 45 copies of Ghave, Guru of Spores. Foils are even slower to move, so you’ll likely end up having to buylist them for a very minimal profit.

There’s also a pretty significant factor to consider in the similarity or difference in artwork between printings. If the artwork never changes, then the original printing becomes much less of a premium if the only differing factors are the set symbol and the hologram at the bottom. Take Creakwood Liege for example: the Modern Masters 2015 foil is $10 and the Eventide one is $15. If you buy into the Eventide foil at $10 for a 33-percent discount, who do you plan on selling it to? There’s no real flair to it that differentiates it as unique, so you’ll have to find someone who really cares about the set symbol. If you really want to invest in first-printing foils, pick something with a different art or different border.

End Step

In other news, there were several Modern singles that spiked over this past week. Oblivion Stone, Creeping Tar Pit, and Olivia Voldaren joined forces to make you miserable if you have to buy them now, and they form a team of “fringe playable cards in Modern that are now worth a lot more than you probably thought they would be.” If you have them, sell them. This article comes out on Thursday, but you should still be able to get a better deal than a week ago. Meanwhile, Blood Moon is dropping back down, to the surprise of nobody. While it won’t go back to its previous $25 to $30, you can wait until the decline stops at $45 or $50 instead of buying in at $60.

So what do you do? Modern is supposed to be this reprint-centric, accessible format, but we also have $20 Tar Pits running around. Do you buy into a Modern legal-card that hasn’t spiked yet and hope it goes up, or do you wait and cross your fingers for a reprint like MMA15 before buying in ? Let me know in the comments what your approach to Modern singles is, because I’m curious about the different approaches that people are using.

Thanks for reading!

MTGPrice Blog