Tag Archives: Unlocked ProTrader

So Much Unlocked ProTrader

Every so often, we here at MTGPrice unlock some older ProTrader articles for everyone to read. Well, lucky reader, have I got good news for you: today is one of those days! Here’s a plethora of content, now available to everyone:

DEATH OF A BINDER GRINDER

By Travis “Firsty Firsty” Allen

TRIBAL GAINS

By Jason Alt”ernative Humorist”

THE FALLOUT FROM VEGAS

By Corbin “Big Hoss” Hosler

BITS ‘N PIECES

By Ross “Not John” Lennon

LESSONS LEARNED FROM GP VEGAS

By Sigmund “Freud” Ausfresser

IS MODERN MASTERS 2015 BOTTOMING OUT?

By Travis All”i”en “Encounter”

GODS AND GENERALS, PART 1

By Jason Alt “Key”

ONE LAST LOOK AT MODERN MASTERS 2015

By “Shut Up” Corbin Hosler

MY BETS FOR GP CHARLOTTE

By Guo “I’ve Heard of a Hang Nail but Never a” Heng Chin

HOMO MAGICONIMUS AND DARKSTEEL

By Ross “The Boss” Lennon

TWO MORE MODERN CARDS

By Guo Heng Chin “Up”

THE CHICKEN LITTLE OF MTG FINANCE

By Sigmund “Yeah, We’re Going Back There” Aus”Freud”er

DREGS OF TARKIR

By Danny “Not Dan” Brown

GODS AND GENERALS, PART 2

By Jason “E. (Thanks, Marcel) S”Alt

RETROSPECTIVE: GP RICHMO…ER, CHARLOTTE. WHATEVER.

By Travis “Name Not Well Suited to Puns or Nicnames” Allen

MODERN WATCH I

By Guo Heng Chin, “The Notorious GHC”

PLAYER FINANCE – TOURNAMENT FINANCE 101

By Ross “Dress for Less” Lennon

A NEW WORLD OF ARBITRAGE

By Sigmund “Never Met Him in Person and Always Wonder If He Has an Accent” Ausfresser

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT DEMAND SOURCES

By Danny “Whitest Guy in the Room but Still Named” Brown

GODS AND GENERALS, PART 3

By Jason “Mr. So-Prolific-That-I’m-Running-Out-of-Puns” Alt

TRANSACTION ETIQUETTE

By Travis Allen “Ant Farm?”

COMMONS AND PLANESWALKERS

By Ross “Not Lenin” Lennon

ELVES, MERFOLK, AND GOBLINS (OH MY!)

By Sigmund “Mr. Wall Street” Ausfresser

BUYLISTING EFFICIENTLY

By Danny “Still Not Dan” Brown

That’s, count ’em, twenty-four articles that you previously couldn’t access that you now can. You can thank us later. You’ve got some reading to do.

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Modern Flaws

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

Even from a purely financial perspective, there are a lot of things to not like about it. We got a great example of why last weekend when Collected Slivers made a surprise top eight appearance in SCG’s Modern Open. You know what? Let’s just get started, and you’ll figure it out as we go (or just smile and nod every now and then, and maybe say something like, “Hmm, interesting,” or, “That’s one interpretation.” This approach will also get you through any art gallery showing or non-French wine tasting1).

 

Wizards and Fan Engagement

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

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

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

Destructive Urge

Modern Background

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

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

If Modern was just a response to the complaints about Extended, things would probably be a little better—but there is more. Modern was created in 2011, which coincided with the surge in popularity of Legacy. Legacy, prior to the Zendikar Boom2, wasn’t even a PTQ format like Extended. It was closer to how Vintage is regarded today, in that it got a few weekends a year where people outside of the format’s hotspots watched and said, “That’s kind of neat!” and then forgot about it a week later.

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

Terror

Modern Supply Issues

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

Modern Graph

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

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

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

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

extended graph

One of the important factors that gets overlooked for Modern is that it doesn’t filter out outdated design philosophies. Part of the reason why I mentioned Affinity and Urzatron lands earlier are because neither currently fit development’s standards for Magic design. In any iteration of Extended, Urza’s Tower would be nothing more than an antiquity. In Modern, the cycle is a pillar of the environment. This is great if you are a dedicated Tron player, but boxes out room for other archetypes featuring newer cards because they can’t compete. This is a form of stagnation that prevents other decks from competing because they are primarily “worse” versions of cards deemed too good for current design philosophies3.

Burnout

Modern Fears

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

For example, the price on Smash to Smithereens got smashed (to smithereens!) when it was reprinted twice this calendar year, and it will take years for it to recover, if it ever does. More frequently, you will see cards that exist solely near the floor of the format that don’t fit current development standards spike because of their use in one narrow archetype. The most recent example is Sedge Sliver, a card that only exists because Magic was so briefly unpopular that design wanted to make a card that riffed on a rare from Alpha that most people don’t even remember4. It is highly unlikely that we see a Sedge Sliver reprint any time soon, which means that the new price ($10!) is likely going to take a while to go down, but how much actual demand now exists for the card?

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

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

Reki, the History of Kamigawa

The Modern Point

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

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

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

Liquify

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

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

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

Best,

Ross

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

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

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

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

A Whole Lot of ProTrader, Unlocked

Greetings, MTGPrice readers!

If you’re not a ProTrader yet, you’ve been missing out on some great content. Luckily for you, we’ve unlocked a whole bunch of previously ProTrader-only articles for you to enjoy! If you want to read these in a more timely fashion, keep in mind that ProTrader access is less than $5 a month. Remember: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Anyway, enjoy the unlocked content!

MM2015 — THE UNOFFICIAL MTG STIMULUS

By Sigmund Ausfresser, May 11, 2015

THE META REPORT, 2 MAY – 10 MAY

By Gue Heng Chin, May 12, 2015

LEGEN—WAIT FOR IT…

By Jason Alt, May 13, 2015

MODERN MASTERS 2015REVIEW PART DEUX

By Travis Allen, May 15, 2015

THE NEXT LEVEL OF MODERN

By Corbin Hosler, May 14, 2015

FOIL REDEMPTION FINANCE: THE NUMBERS FOR KTK, FRF & DTK

By Gue Heng Chin, May 15, 2015

DECISION-MAKING STRATEGIES FOR WHEN YOU KNOW REPRINTS ARE COMING

By Danny Brown, May 16, 2015

THE META REPORT 9 – 14 MAY

By Gue Heng Chin, May 17, 2015

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MODERN MASTERS 2015 EMOTIONS

By Sigmund Ausfresser, May 17, 2015

PUCAPRO

By Danny Brown, May 19, 2015

I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLES

By Jason Alt, May 20, 2015

LEFT BEHIND

By Travis Allen, May 20, 2015

MODERN MASTERS 2015 EARLY MOVEMENTS

By Corbin Hosler, May 21, 2015

PICKS FOR THE MODERN SEASON

By Guo Heng Chin, May 21, 2015

MODERN HISTORY 101 –EIGHTH EDITION ANDMIRRODIN

By Ross Lennon, May 22, 2015

MAKE MONEY BY GOING NOSTALGIC

By Sigmund Ausfresser, May 25, 2015

GOING HUNTING ON THE BANNED AND RESTRICTED LIST

By Travis Allen, May 27, 2015

DIGGING FOR GOLD

By Jason Alt, May 28, 2015

MODERN MASTERS (THE OTHER ONE)

By Corbin Hosler, May 28, 2015

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

By Ross Lennon, May 29, 2015

TRADE MODERN, DON’T OWN IT!

By Sigmund Ausfresser, June 1, 2015

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Shaman of the Boats

By: Jason Alt

As I alluded to last week, I am going to spend the next few articles looking at cards from Origins that may either launch new archetypes or strengthen existing ones. I think there is plenty of EDH gas in this set and that there are a few archetypes that are going to get plenty bolstered.

Last week, we discussed future Superfriends builds brought on by the new planeswalkers in Origins, and I think we uncovered some really interesting cards that are overlooked, undervalued, and poised to do big things. Inexorable Tide shows us what a reprinting can do to prices, but it can also make foils look safer, and EDH player sure do love their foils, don’t they? With the emergence of Cube as a format that can affect foil prices, as well, foils are very saucy targets moving forward. So we may not know what we want to talk about this week, but at least we know how we want to talk about it when we figure that out, so that’s good.

Packing Shamans

There was a card in particular in the spoiler for Origins that really caught my eye. It’s not getting discussed much at all, probably because it’s not a mythic rare, or even a rare. It’s an uncommon and there isn’t much financial upside to the non-foils of this card. So why am I so excited about it? Why would we spend an entire article discussing a card that doesn’t have  a ton of upside? Well, the answer to that is simple: we’re talking about the boats that are lifted by a rising tide, and sometimes you don’t need to drop a very big rock in the water to make big waves. Sometimes the card is a butterfly flapping its wings across the globe and a chain reaction of events takes care of the rest. Strap in, nerds, because it’s El Niño season and we’re about get hit with a wave so big that every other boat’s going to be all jacked up and our boat will be fine because we were prepared and got ahead of the storm and Lieutenant Dan was just daring the storm to kill him but he survived and I’m mixing my metaphors. Let’s just show the card I mean.

Shaman of the Pack

That’s the card. Does it fit in a narrow list of decks that are able to run it? Possibly. Would it benefit most greatly from being in a deck with Rhys the Redeemed, a potent token generator? Possibly. Does that mean this isn’t a ridiculous auto-include in more decks than you might think and a potent finisher? No, this card isn’t going to routinely deal 10 or more damage to people. You have to have a formidable board state to make that happen, but this spell breaks ground stalls open and that’s the most useful thing an EDH card can do in my opinion. So which generals are able to play this card and benefit easily from it?

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This is a big one. Nath is a nathty character, he makes elf tokens, he strips cards out of opponents’ hands, and he sets you up to benefit from making them discard aggressively, turning cards like Mindslicer, Mind Shatter, and Waste Not into potent cards. Pop quiz, hotshot. How much is Waste Not worth?

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Three dollars? It’s up from $2, down from $8, this card’s price is confounding. I don’t think $14 makes sense, but if someone bothered to buy the card out at one point, a lot of the copies were concentrated in one person’s hands for a minute. This could dip even more at rotation, even though this price is entirely predicated on EDH and casual and I think this is a $5 to $7 card long-term. It’s very unlikely to get reprinted (there’s no precedent for reprinting a “you make the card” winner) and the foil has upside either way.

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This is a crazy, crazy graph. Instead of maintaining a multiplier, it has held at just about $10 even as the non-foil approached that price several times. If the non-foil has upside at $3, you’d better believe the foil has upside at $7.50. I like this pickup a lot. This is like Geth’s Grimoire on steroids.

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Speaking of which, with a decreasing spread and increasing upside, Grimoire isn’t a bad trade target in foil if you find any. The more Nath we see, the more people will want to cheat with a Geth’s Grimoire.

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Savra is another sweet legendary build-around, and having lots of elf tokens to sacrifice will really help out. Savra is a good general in her own right and an inclusion in my Nath deck as well. She’s fine in any GB elves build and also works with the GB graveyard-based strategies we see. Dredge is very potent with sac outlets, and green and black have plenty. A few that work well in decks with a lot of tokens and other elves have real upside.

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Completely unperturbed by the reprinting in a Commander deck, this card shows solid growth and is a solid, solid card.  Attrition does everything you want a sac outlet to do, and sacrificing one elf token that you got when they discarded a card to kill one of their creatures with Attrition plus everyone losing a dude to a Grave Pact trigger is potent. I think there is upside at $2.50 to $3, even with another reprint possible, seeing how Attrition shook that first one off. I used to buy these for a quarter out of binders and sell them for $5 a playset on eBay. Those were the days. I kept enough for my decks, which ended up being a pretty large number since I don’t know a ton of black decks that don’t want an effect like this. I’ve used this to protect my general from tuck spells back in the tuck days, get value out of a removal spell of theirs, and avoid returning creatures I have borrowed with Threaten effects. Attrition is a solid gainer and I would get on the train now, even with the spread doing goofy things. The foils are too expensive to trifle with.

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Recently. the buylist price was so high on foil Perilous Forays that we see something I want to take a second to talk about. I am going to zoom in a bit on a region of the graph before I come back and discuss the card.

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See the white area? When you graph the price (green) against the buylist price (blue) you sometimes see “white” regions where the buylist is above the retail price. This is an arbitrage opportunity. I won’t go a ton into arbitrage because it’s a bit outside the scope of this article and the series, but even if you don’t pounce on every arbitrage opportunity, what you can do is take note. There were two periods of potential arbitrage over the graph of foil Perilous Forays, which means dealers think there is upside. Currently the buylist price has backed way off, which tells me one dealer was paying a lot to get these in stock and then got enough copies and removed the card from its buylist, causing the buylist price to be set by the next-highest buyer. That means the demand for this card may be regional. Still, two “arbs” popping up in a one-year period coupled with the strong growth tells me this is a lowish buy-in with upside, demonstrated power, and the benefit of being in foil and less susceptible to a reprint blowout. I like foil Forays a lot, and tapping a Priest of Titania and sacrificing 11 elves to pull every last basic out of my deck in response to a Massacre Wurm saved my bacon in a game this weekend. It’s expensive to get out, but it’s worth it. It replaces Boundless Realms in my decks that want a sac outlet.

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This is a terrible sac outlet in a deck that runs 1/1 tokens, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out how flat the price has been for a while. This is an EDH staple and it’s sicko in Cube as well. I think there’s upside here, eventually. Trade for these at $6 and put them in a shoebox and forget about them.

So what else is good in decks that want to have a ton of elves on the battlefield?

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This card has been reprinted basically into powder.  A price of $3 is a pretty cheap buy-in considering this card has demonstrated the ability to be way more and lords are always interesting, but I think it’s been printed too many times and could be printed more.

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Wizards’s demonstrated willingness to reprint foils of this card make me wary as well. I don’t know if there is a ton of downside to buying the cheapest non-foil you can for $2.50 (the entire green Commander 2014 precon is looking like a great buy with Ezuri surging), but be careful. I brought up Perfect because I think it’s a deceptively bad buy.

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This has been printed as a foil many, many times. Four times. That’s so many times. That’s one more than “too many” times for a foil to be printed. The thing is, though, I like this as a pickup at $3. Why? Let’s think about where this can get printed as a foil. Hardly anywhere! From the Vault: Elves? Commander’s Arsenal? Core sets that they’re not doing more of? I think the dealer price surging(ish) and the increasing demand for elves with Ezuri resembling the new Birthing Pod spells real upside for foil and non-foil alike. This card is bonkers and when copies start drying up, I expect foils to diverge wildly from non-foils. Priest of Titania this card is not, but sometimes it’s better and it’s legal in Modern which helps it immensely. Besides, why debate the merits of Archdruid versus Priest in EDH when you clearly run both?

If you’re trying to destroy them with Shaman of the Pack, you’ll want a way to find him.

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Check out the foil Elvish Harbinger: a recent arbitrage opportunity, steady(ish) price, and a multiplier of two on a card with two printings. There is upside here, I think. The card is fluctuating between $4 and $5, but it wouldn’t take much of an increase in play to push it up. There just ins’t much movement here—the buylist price for the Duel Deck non-foil hasn’t budged a penny in two years. Any activity could see the few copies snapped up quickly. Don’t buy in for cash on a stagnant card, but be aware: this card is very good.

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Not shocked to see that this card looks strong. It’s a good tutor in the best EDH colors. It lets you search for Craterhoof Behemoth at the end of their turn. That’s quite good. Enlightened Tutor has established that the ceiling could be around $16, so buying these at $8 seems fine, especially with the strong growth we’ve seen lately. Dealer confidence is up; retail price is up. Expect a leap and a plateau of $2 next year.

Just finding him isn’t enough, recurring him to smash them is important, too. How do we do that?

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No super-duper upside here, but just remember to keep some of these on-hand to trade out. Wirewood Symbiote is bonkers with elves that have enters-the-battlefield triggers, and since there are so few, Symbiote is underplayed right now.

We talked last time about how Superfriends would give us some real upside with Doubling Season but not so much with Primal Vigor. How’s Primal Vigor doing?

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Not bad! Having called this a pick at $4, I obviously feel great about the price doubling since then. Vigor isn’t done, I feel. While you can’t stack counters on planeswalkers and you can accidentally benefit your opponent, Primal Vigor is nuts with token decks. Imperious Perfect, Nath, Waste Not: your deck really benefits from spitting out a ton of tokens and this can help you go very wide. Doubling the number of elves you put out matters a great deal when you can KO your opponents with Shaman. This is good in lots of other decks, so the overlap will be very good. I said to buy these at $4 and I’m saying now that $8 isn’t a bad buy-in either. You don’t like to buy stuff after it doubles since it doubling again is somewhat unlikely, but this card has upside and low reprint potential. An $8 card in a $20 precon could do any number of things, all of them good.

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This could be based on an irrational fear, but Parallel Lives strikes me as a card that is super, duper, duper reprintable. I was buying the non-foils very cheaply and still had a lot left when they hit $4 and I sold then. I am just waiting for the next EDH supplementary product or even Duel Deck to have a Parallel Lives reprint (new art would be sweet). The foils can help us dodge that.

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Now this I can f@#% wit. A mere multiplier of two, very steady growth, decent dealer confidence, art that looks good in foil—I expect a divergence from the non-foil price soon. I think a higher multiplier is more appropriate and I expect that to be on the horizon. This card is a no-brainer, honestly.

I think these are all cards that have significant upside once Shaman of the Pack is out. I think Shaman will be a card you will find randomly in draft chaff for free sitting on tables, and I plan to pay cash for any foils at the prerelease that I can find. This card is good and it just might make some other cards better.

Do we want me to stop this format after Origins is released? Immediately? Sound off in the comments! Until next week.