Tag Archives: Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Magic for the Rest of Us—One for Me, One for TCGP

July 15, 2015 Travis Allen 1 Comment

By: Travis Allen

Hello, and welcome to my first unlocked article! Today we’ll touch briefly on the banned and restricted list update from 7/13. Then we’ll move on to the meat of today’s article, a speculation technique designed for those that aren’t looking to become cardboard stock traders, but rather simply want to make Magic a little cheaper to play.

Checking in on the B&R List

No changes to the banned and restricted list, eh? In the cycle of B&R updates, we were in the “something is going to change” phase, as evidenced by the fact that plenty of people were taking to Twitter to voice their (often terrible) opinions.

I’m a bit surprised Wizards hasn’t seen fit to remove some part of Amulet Bloom from the format. While it dodged removal once again, I still am not confident it’s here to stay. Part of the reason that deck hasn’t taken over Modern yet is that it’s incredibly difficult to play well, requiring months of practice to pilot optimally. Even Justin Cohen, who made top eight of a Pro Tour with the deck, was making mistakes on camera that could have won him games multiple turns earlier. Due to the challenging nature of the deck, most players can’t just sleeve up 75 and head to the local PreTQ. Right now, we’re only seeing highly skilled and dedicated players achieving. If Amulet Bloom were more simple to play, akin to the now-banned Blazing Shoal infect deck, it would be gone. Perhaps its resistance to being piloted properly will save it from the banned list altogether. It’s hard to say. The power level is certainly there, though.

Goryo’s Vengeance is the other card a handful of people were hoping to see exit the format this week, which would have been premature. I have thought for years that the card will eventually be banned, and I still expect that to come true at some point. The card is capable of killing an opponent on turn two, or even turn one in conjunction with perennially questionably legal Simian Spirit Guide.

While Grishoalbrand may prove to be the list that finally forces Wizards’s hand, we aren’t there yet. This Modern season will likely provide the data it needs to decide whether Goryo has had enough vengeance for awhile.

Oh, and people think Sensei’s Divining Top should go in Legacy. I’m sympathetic to this cause, if only on the issue that the card is miserable for tournament logistics. It’s banned in Modern because of how much time it eats off the clock, and Legacy’s card pool only exacerbates that issue. It would be nice if we had infinite time in which to play, but sadly, that is not the case. I wouldn’t want to be holding on to spare Tops and Counterbalances by the time Battle for Zendikar rolls around.

One for Me

Early in Origins spoilers, we got a handful of uncommon elves. Among them were Gnarlroot Trapper and Shaman of the Pack, two high-power elves that require black mana. I immediately dove in on Gilt-Leaf Palaces, the spike of Wanderwine Hub still fresh in my memory. (I was ultimately rewarded, initially buying in at $2 a copy, and as of Monday, seeing a NM low on TCG around $12. Auntie’s Hovel reacted similarly at the reveal of Goblin Piledriver, but has since sunk to $5.)

My behavior is not noteworthy here. I’m not the only finance-oriented individual to have done this, and I won’t be next time, either. That’s not what’s interesting.

The reason I bring this up is that as I was buying copies of Palace, a friend in our local MTG Facebook chat of about seven people said that he too was buying copies. This surprised me, as this particular individual is entirely a player, not a finance hobbyist. I’ve never once seen him speculate on anything. He doesn’t like foils, as they add nothing to the gameplay experience, and hey, any foil copy could instead be two nonfoil copies. I’ve seen him hand over 30 dollars of cold hard cash to someone for an Elspeth, Sun’s Champion when they were available on TCGplayer for under 25 bucks. His interest in the game is exactly that: as a game.

So when he said that he bought copies of Gilt-Leaf Palace as a result of the reveal, I was quite curious. Had he finally come over to the dark side of Magic? Was he going to give in and subscribe to ProTrader so that he could read all my articles? (None of my real life friends read my articles when they were free, so this was an unlikely outcome. They’re jerks.)

As it turns out, he purchased exactly four copies. A single playset. While he saw that the likelihood of the card rising in value was great enough that it warranted buying in immediately, without waiting for results, he still chose not to buy any extra copies. He now has his $10 set of Gilt-Leaf Palaces, with no copies to spare.

I was a bit struck by this decision, as if you’re confident enough the card is going to rise, why wouldn’t you pick up some number of extra copies in an attempt to profit? It’s not terribly difficult, and you don’t need to be heavily invested in the sales process to to make it worth your while.

One for TCGP

A technique that many players use, myself included, is a “one for me, one spare” technique in speculating. Or “one for me and one for TCGP,” which rhymes if you pronounce it “T-C-G-P.” A handy little mnemonic for you there.

While you won’t make much money doing this, the two-set purchase has several benefits.

Partially subsidized or even free playsets of cards
Low effort
Low risk

The process is simple. If you see a card that you want a playset of, in part because you expect the price is going to rise soon, buy two. Keep one, and sell the other one. It’s simple enough. The idea is that the second set will rise in value enough that your profits will at least partially cover the cost of your own personal set, and at best will completely cover your price of entry. Here are two examples: one real, one theoretical.

Theoretical Example, Scenario A

Alex predicts that Gilt-Leaf Palace is almost definitely going to rise in price, with at least enough confidence that he knows he should buy a set now in case he wants to use them. Rather than buy a single set, though, he buys one extra, for a total of eight cards. After the price jumps to over $10 per NM copy, he sells the spare set on eBay for a competitive $35 in order to ensure he actually puts money in his pocket. He ends up with roughly $30 after fees, and with a buy-in of maybe $10 for the set of Palaces, he’s made $20. His own personal set cost $10, so not only has he covered his personal set, he’s made $10 in the process.

Theoretical Example, Scenario B

Alex buys the same number of copies, but Gilt-Leaf Palace never spikes. He’s now spent about $10 he wouldn’t have otherwise. He puts the extra playset of Palaces in his binder and trades them to someone else that’s looking to play GB elves at some point, netting himself a Bloodstained Mire, a card he still needs for Standard. Now he spent $10 for a Mire, which is retail cost. The end result is that he paid $10 for his Palaces, which he would have done anyways, and $10 for a Mire.

Real Example

Stormbreath Dragon was pre-ordering on ABU for $15 a copy. I wanted a personal set to play with, and at the same time, I thought that $15 a copy was too low for what I expected would become a banner mythic. We were coming off Thundermaw Hellkite, a similar card that had at one point been $50, and even if Stormbreath ended up being bad (which it wouldn’t), it would experience at least enough popularity to rise above $20, if only temporarily. I picked up three playsets at $60 a set. Stormbreath ended up hitting the street around $25 per copy, and according to my PayPal sales history, I sold sets for around $95 each. At $30 profit per set, the first two meant that the third was free.

Simple Strategy

What sets the “one for me, one for TCGP” rule of thumb apart from general speculation is mostly twofold: A) it’s a strategy that doesn’t seek to make as much money as possible, but rather, there’s a clear profit goal, and B) it minimizes risk.

When engaging in true speculation, you buy as many copies as you can at whatever price you feel falls below the threshold of risk. Your goal is to make as much money as possible. With the two-for strategy, however, you have a clear number in mind: exactly the cost you paid for a single set. This matters because it is not an infinitely scaling ambition, but rather, it is limited in its scope. Why do we want to limit our scope, rather than shoot for the moon?

The reason for that leads us directly to B, which is that you minimize your exposure. When Alex buys only a single extra set of Palaces, he isn’t putting himself in a position where he may lose a large sum of money. He’s not going to be out $100 because whoops, Palaces are in Origins. If he’s locked himself into buying at least a single set, the extra set only opens his exposure up to a single set’s value. Compare that to speculating in earnest, in which case you may buy hundreds of copies of a card, with your risk profile now tens or even hundreds of times greater than the cost of a single personal set.

Concerns over scale make this another great method for players, rather than economists, to play Magic for (sort of) free. If I buy 100 copies of Eidolon of Blossoms and it triples in value, that’s all well and good, but it means nothing until I have money in my pocket. I have in the past spoken about how difficult it can be to actually profit from a situation like this. When you’re only dealing with a single extra set, though, you don’t have nearly as many issues to contend with. You don’t have to deal with shipping twenty or thirty packages, nor do you need to learn what a buylist is and then ship to three different vendors to maximize your profits. Rather, since there’s only one extra set of cards, the methods available to profit are numerous and simple.

Sell the card on eBay. If you’re able to purchase cards on the internet, you can sell on eBay. While eBay is not a preferred method for regularly selling large quantities of cards, selling a single playset is just fine.
Sell the card locally. Whether the deal is hammered out at a kitchen-table draft or you post to your town’s Magic Facebook page, it’s a face-to-face transaction that eliminates risk and fees. You could never sell 25 playsets this way, but a single set is easy peezy.
Trade the set away. As we saw in the theoretical example, trading is a perfectly reasonable way to move a single set of cards. Chances are you can find at least one person who didn’t get in early yet still wants a personal set. You can trade your spare set for Standard cards you’re in need of, or just any decent Standard or Modern staple that you can turn into something more useful at a later date. Trading one or two sets is easy; trading twenty-five is nearly impossible.

As the number of extra cards you’re looking to sell increases, certain paths begin to close themselves off to you. Trading piles of playsets locally is going to be extremely time-consuming, if not impossible. When you’re in possession of only a single extra set, though, finding avenues to rid yourself of it is not difficult.

Playing with the House’s Money

If you’re a player, not a financier/hobbyist, your goal isn’t to supplement (or outdo) your professional income by swapping cardboard. Your goal is to play Magic. Magic is an expensive game, though, and the costs can catch up to you quickly. Through the technique of “one for me, one for TCGP,” you can ameliorate the high costs of card acquisition by doubling up on your purchases before cards rise in value. It’s a simple technique that’s low risk, easy to manage, and quite profitable given the effort involved.

You may be thinking, “Okay, great, but how do I know which cards are going to rise in price?” Well, dear reader, for the answer to that, keep tuning in to my and others’ articles!

Danny Brown, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Buylisting Efficiently

June 30, 2015 Danny Brown 2 Comments

So, you have a collection that you want to sell all or part of to a buylist. Maybe it’s a collection you picked up off CraigsList, maybe it’s culling down your personal stock, or maybe you’re helping out a friend who found a box of Magic cards in his attic.

Whatever the case, you now have to balance two factors that are somewhat at odds with each other: 1) getting through the process as quickly as possible and 2) getting the most amount of money you can.

Everyone has his or her own method, and I’m interested in hearing the ways you’ve streamlined the buylisting process in the comments at the end of this article. First, though, we’ll cover some of my favorite tips to help you get your buylisting done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Why Would I Buylist?

Before we dive in, let’s address the question some of you may be asking: “Why would I buylist my cards? I could get more money selling them on eBay or TCGplayer.” While this is true, listing cards on those sites requires someone to buy your cards, which could take weeks or more. When those cards do eventually sell, it almost certainly won’t be all at the same time, which means you’ll be shipping out far more packages that if you had buylisted. And after all that is done, you still have to pay fees, cutting into that extra profit that seemed so appealing.

I was opposed to buylists for a long time, but with the advent of aggregated lists like you can find here on MTGPrice, the process became much faster and easier, as well as more profitable. I very rarely list cards for sale these days, instead choosing to send cards on my schedule either through buylisting or PucaTrade. That alone increases my MTG finance efficiency. Now let’s talk about how to improve the efficiency of your buylisting.

Sorting Things Out

We’re not going to go over how best to pick a bulk collection in this article. If you’re looking for that sort of thing, Douglas Johnson has covered that topic from numerous angles on this very site, as well as BrainstormBrewery.com. We’re going to assume that you’re starting from a point of having your mythics and rares separated out, with anything that is obviously bulk set aside. The same is true for commons and uncommons that you know (or suspect) may be worth the time to sell individually.

For years, I organized my cards by color, because from a player’s standpoint, that’s just the intuitive way to do it. Eventually, I started sorting by color within sets, because when you’re trying to build a deck for a particular format, you want to be sure the cards you’re choosing from are legal.

Nowadays I don’t really build any decks at all (I’ve been playing Limited and Cube only basically since my son was born a year ago), so anything I own is either in a trade binder, my cube, or my cube’s on-deck binder. Everything else is sorted in longboxes alphabetically by block.

Sorting alphabetically is key. No matter what buylist you’re dealing with, you will have to sort alphabetically—first by sets, then by card names within sets. However, I don’t like to go all the way down to the set level when sorting for a buylist. It just takes a little bit too much time, and it’s not that hard to flip through a block’s worth of cards a few times over when comparing to each set. That said, if you’re dealing with an absolutely huge collection, sorting by set instead of block will probably be more efficient by the end of the process.

Using MTGPrice to Your Advantage

If you go to MTGPrice.com’s homepage, this is what you’ll see at the top of the page. If you click “Browse Sets,” you’ll get a list that looks like this:

Pick up a pile of set- or block-sorted cards, find the applicable set(s), and then start comparing what you have to the buylists you see. Let’s say you’re looking to get rid of a pile of Modern Masters 2015 cards:

Initially, the cards will be sorted by descending price. Since you’re working from an alphabetized pile, though, you’ll probably want to click “Card Name” to make the list here sort alphabetically.

There you go! Now you can compare the pile of cards you’re holding to this list. If a buylist price looks acceptable, simply click on the card, click “Sell To” on the left hand of the screen, and note the name of the vendor offering the highest price.

So, if you were looking to buylist an Apocalypse Hydra for that tasty 39 cents listed above, you would see that ABUGames was the one offering that price.

At this point, I like to take a Post-It note, write “ABUGames” on it, and then start a pile of cards directly on that Post-It. For each new store that I am considering a shipment to, I’ll start a new Post-It note. Some people have playmats specifically for this purpose, but I’m not quite that fancy just yet.

The Alternative Method

If you have a completely unsorted pile of cards, you may find yourself not really wanting to go through and sort everything, especially if it’s a mixed lot with lots of different sets and not too many cards from any one block.

In this case, you can take the slightly more painful method of individually searching for cards by just typing in their names here on MTGPrice. In most cases, it will be less efficient, but there are certainly collections that warrant this approach rather than pre-sorting everything.

If your memory is not such that you can remember which pile you put a particular card in, though, you may want to at least sort cards so that that duplicates are together. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting a lot of time searching for the same card over and over again.

Shipping Out

How you ship your buylist cards largely depends on how many cards you’re shipping.

If you’re doing a quick and easy buylist including a just a few cards (no more than six), you can send them in a plain white envelope with a stamp. However, note that this method will leave you with no proof your cards were actually sent, should you be the paranoid type.

Most buylist shipments will include a few more cards than that, though, and if they’ll fit, a bubble mailer is a fine option. You can buy shipping for up to three ounces for $1.93 through PayPal, and that comes with delivery confirmation, too.

I like to use team bags with toploaders on the ends for protection. This will ensure your cards are easy to access but well protected. Whenever you’re shipping Magic cards to anybody, including merchants, if you’re taping stuff up, fold over the end of the tape to form a little tab that makes it so the tape can be very easily removed. This is 100 percent a value play for you. Think of it this way: if you were the guy grading cards for a shop and somebody packaged something up in a way that made it really difficult to open, you would probably grade their cards a little more harshly, right? Not to say you would be dishonest in your grading, but you would be less inclined to give somebody a pass on borderline stuff. I want to do everything I can to avoid that.

Occasionally, you’ll need to ship a much larger buylist order that couldn’t reasonably fit in a bubble mailer. In these cases, I fill up a regular card box (the of which is size based on the number of cards, of course). To ensure nothing gets damaged in the mail, all empty space should be filled in with folded tissues, cotton balls, packing peanuts, or other soft material that won’t damage your cards. Make sure that when you shake the box, you don’t hear cards banging on the edges. Once you’ve got that done, tape it up very well (those things aren’t fully enclosed to moisture) and ship it out in the box itself. A recent 500-count box I mailed cost just less than $10. That’s kind of a lot for shipping, but presumably you’re getting a nice return on that many cards.

Know Your Vendors

Finally, do some research on the vendors you’re considering dealing with. Some have better reputations than others, and it’s important to know what you’re dealing with going in.

I won’t do any badmouthing here, but I’ll go ahead and say that I especially find it a pleasure to do business with Card Kingdom and ABUGames. AdventuresOn is fine but I hate buylisting on its website, and ChannelFireball pays quickly on the occasions that you actually like the prices it’s offering. I’ve had good and bad experiences with other stores, but these are names I tend to trust.

More Efficient Every Time

Each time I prepare a pile of cards for buylisting, I figure something out that helps improve my efficiency the next time around. What are your best tips for improving the buylisting process?

I’ll leave you with this one last thing: find something entertaining to listen to while you’re doing all this sorting—a podcast, a TV show, a web series, whatever. This is not very engaging work, but if you want to make money in MTG finance, it’s necessary.

Until next time!

ProTrader, Sigmund Ausfresser, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Elves, Merfolk, and Goblins (Oh My!)

June 29, 2015 Sigmund Ausfresser 18 Comments

Has anyone even tested Goblins in Modern? The speculation is so rampant on a strategy that has yet to prove itself. Maybe people are forgetting there’s no Goblin Lackey, Goblin Matron, Goblin Ringleader, Goblin Warchief, Gempalm Incinerator, or Rishadan Port.

That’s a lot of gaps to overcome. Yet this still happened:

We are in the midst of rampant speculation on Legion Loyalist, Warren Instigator, and the catalyst itself, Goblin Piledriver. With prices this inflated, the risk of buying into these targets is at its highest. Being the steadfast risk intolerant speculator, perhaps I can propose some alternate targets – still potentially relevant to a Goblins Modern strategy – with a much more attractive risk/reward equation.

Goblins: Not the Only Tribe in Town

Goblins are an unproven strategy in Modern. This is certain. What’s equally certain is that Elves and Merfolk are proven strategies in Modern. Both decks won a Modern Grand Prix very recently.

I proffer this idea for your consideration: why not buy into some of the cards in those decks instead? Some of the critical pieces of these decks have barely moved! So while Warren Instigator, a card I’ve never seen cast in my life, goes from $10 to $17, you could be buying into something like Silvergill Adept near its 2014-2015 low!

Silvergill Adept is critical to the Merfolk strategy in Legacy and Modern. I hear getting a Merfolk in play while also drawing more Merfolk is a pretty sound strategy [Editor’s note: Best card in the deck, not close]. And there’s no way this card should be under $3 when Nettle Sentinel – a common from the same block – is around the same price.

If you’d prefer throwing your money into Mythic Rares, you could also consider Master of Waves. It’s about to leave Standard, but I suspect nearly 0% of its value is driven by Standard play anyway. This key Merfolk card can be found for under $4. I’d much rather have my money in these than, say, Goblin Rabblemaster – a rare about to rotate that does have value driven by Standard play.

Fish not your thing? You could pick up a couple of critical Elves pieces instead. Most of the best Elves targets have already spiked, but I could see Elvish Archdruid moving higher. It’s been printed a million times, but it’ll always have some demand keeping the price above bulk. And the further away we get from the latest printing, the more value it’ll become.

If you want to trade into something newer, you could always pick up Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. The card may dip slightly at rotation, but this land is powerful and should maintain value going forward. You will likely need to be patient with this one, since I’m sure a ton have been opened. Still, you could find far worse places to park money.

Goblins, Merfolk and Elves (Oh, My!)

The rise in popularity of tribal strategies has generated newfound opportunities in Modern speculation. Most Elves cards have already seen significant appreciation. Merfolk cards haven’t moved as much, but they should bounce nicely off recent lows. And of course we’ve all seen the rampant Goblins speculation this past week on news of a Goblin Piledriver reprint.

Rather than tossing the dice and gambling on one of these strategies, wouldn’t it be nice to find something relevant across all three? In an ideal world, you could acquire key cards that play an important role in all Tribal decks. This way no matter which strategy rose to the top, you’d have exposure to important cards.

I did a quick comparison between Knocinski’s winning Merfolk build and Malone’s Elves build to start. I’m immediately disappointed. I counted exactly one card in common: a singleton Cavern of Souls played in Elves.

As an aside, Cavern of Souls is positioned to continue hitting new all-time highs given its relevance in Modern and Legacy.

While my profits were still decent, I will be first to admit I made a mistake selling this one. This is definitely a case where my perpetual bearishness in Modern narrowed my perspective too much. This land will only go higher until it is reprinted. The current $50 price tag is likely to stick.

Despite the common “tribal” theme, it would appear these three decks all have completely different building blocks. Outside of Cavern of Souls, I see no overlapping card. Does that mean we should give up? Absolutely not – it’s all about speculation!

For example, couldn’t Aether Vial be relevant in at least two of the three tribal strategies? Elves may not want the artifact for now, but I could certainly see Goblins following the Merfolk approach to flash out instant-speed lords.

I really like the card’s price chart as well, from a technical standpoint. I see some healthy growth in both retail and buy list pricing. More importantly the buy/sell spread has narrowed in recent weeks – a likely sign of further price appreciation on the horizon. While speculating on a $30 uncommon is a tough pill to swallow, I’d still support grabbing a few copies. Feel free to grab the Modern Masters version if you feel better paying $30 for a rare instead.

Perhaps a safer target is a critical land that is near an all-time price low: Mutavault.

While this land isn’t so hot in Elves, I could see Goblins picking it up. And even if Merfolk is the only deck that runs Mutavault, it’s still an automatic 4-of in every Merfolk build. This is a card I’m willing to throw cash into; it can readily spike to $20 during next year’s Modern season or possibly earlier, if the Modern metagame leads the right way.

Perhaps I’m being naïve here. I’m focusing heavily on cards that these three tribal decks would want to play. But if I want to place bets on all three at once, perhaps I should be seeking out cards that beat all three of these strategies. I believe Anger of the Gods is already a viable sideboard card in Modern. A one-sided wrath for three mana is probably decent against all three tribal strategies. Be careful with Standard rotation – we may see a small dip before the card stabilizes higher. Perhaps trading for unwanted copies is the best play here.

If you’re looking for a more permanent fix, you could try Night of Souls’ Betrayal. It doesn’t kill as many creatures as Anger, but sticking two copies could really wreak havoc on tribal decks. The card has spiked recently but buy lists haven’t chased nearly as much. I’d watch that spread closely – the opportunity to pick up this sideboard card may close faster than you think.

Lastly, there’s my favorite sideboard tech: Engineered Explosives. This artifact seems well-positioned in a tribal-heavy metagame. Played right, you can set yourself up for a solid 3-for-1 or 4-for-1 play. This card is destined to go higher, and I don’t expect to see a reprint in 2015 or 2016.

Modern Not Your Thing?

Most of you know by now I’m not as excited about Modern as the rest of the player base. Even though I’m trying to flip Modern specs, I really prefer to sink my funds into safer investments. I still believe most Modern staples will pull back in price in a month or two, so I’ll be content to largely sit on the sidelines until then.

My quest to move profits into older cards is not a solo one, it seems. Did you notice some other really interesting price moves from last week? I’m talking about this:

And this:

These charts are extremely attractive from an investor’s point of view. Barring a minor hiccup on Library of Alexandria last year, we’re seeing monotonically increasing prices over time. I’m not sure if Mishra’s Workshop’s price tag will stick above $1000, as reflected in mtgstocks.com’s most recent Interests page. But the card will certainly maintain its upward momentum in the years to come. I’d pay close attention to that buy-list curve, in blue, on these charts. They will reflect how eager dealers are to pay higher prices for these old-school cards. Library of Alexandria is even playable in Old School MTG, perhaps catalyzing some upward price movement.

If I had to recommend picking one of these valuable Arabian Nights cards, I’d recommend Bazaar of Baghdad.

The card is a 4-of in Dredge, a powerful Vintage deck with an important defining characteristic: no Power! Once you have your 4 Bazaars, you’re most of the way toward building a viable Vintage deck. Even if you never plan on playing Vintage, you have to admit the artwork on the card is one of the sweetest in the game. I’ve been eyeing this for almost a year now, and I’m only seeing upward movement on prices.

Wrapping It Up

The theme of last week: tribal Modern decks and high end Arabian Nights cards. These are on opposite ends of the risk/reward spectrum. On the one side, we have rampant Modern speculation based on unproven deck strategies (Goblins). On the other side, we have measurable price growth in classic cards on the reserved list.

While my affinity is always to err closer to the conservative side of the spectrum, I see many opportunities in between. You don’t have to chase Warren Instigator higher to make money on the latest trends. There are far better plays – especially at this point, where prices have already jumped so high. Aether Vial, Nykthos, Cavern of Souls, and Mutavault are all well-positioned no matter which tribal deck earns the top spot of future Modern events. If you really despise all three strategies, maybe now’s the time to pick up your Engineered Explosives.

Targets like these are far safer than cards that have already spiked solely based on speculation. They have plenty of upside potential, with minimal downside risk at this point. These are my kind of pick-ups, and I’d encourage you to move some of your newfound profits into these cards as well. Give it a year, and you’ll likely be looking at more sizable gains. Plus you’ll have the upside of preserving your capital in case one of the tribal strategies becomes a major flop. It’s the best scenario for investing, and it’s why I’m moving my resources accordingly.

…

Sig’s Quick Hits

Some tribal-specific lands have moved a ton lately. Wanderwine Hub has jumped all the way to $11.99 at Star City Games. The major retailer has no copies in stock. If I was going to spend $12, I’d rather pick up a Mutavault anyway.
Gilt-Leaf Palace is the Elf equivalent to Wanderwine Hub. The only difference is Knocinski’s Merfolk build actually runs Wanderwine Hub, while Malone’s Elves list did not use Gilt-Leaf Palace. Despite this critical fact, Star City Games is still completely sold out of the palace, though their price tag hasn’t corrected the latest spike: it’s only $3.99…for now.
I wasn’t exaggerating when I mentioned how popular Engineered Explosives is right now. These tribal themes are only going to make the artifact more powerful. Perhaps that’s why Star City Games is completely sold out of all non-foil copies of the card, with a $17.99 price tag. These will retail for $20 very soon.

Accumulated Knowledge, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Commons and Planeswalkers

June 26, 2015 Ross Lennon 3 Comments

We are going to jump around a little bit this week, but not too much. There is a lot of ground I want to cover, so let’s dive in.

The Tragedy of the Commons/Uncommons

Don’t worry, this section of the article is not going to focus on feudalism or agrarian economics in any way, I just really loved the title. I want to hit first and foremost on something that seems pretty weird, and that is the spiking of commons and uncommons in Modern.

When a rare or mythic spikes, it isn’t terribly surprising, since they are usually either out of older, underprinted sets (Blood Moon) or are multi-format staples that have just left print (Abrupt Decay). When demand exceeds supply, the cost has to go up to compensate.

You can even understand it in certain situations with uncommons—Kitchen Finks was north of $10 once, and it looks like it will be again soon. Kitchen Finks only exists in Modern Masters (underprinted compared to demand), Shadowmoor (underprinted versus current small set printings), and FNM promos (given out before at least a few of you were even playing Magic).

Terminate, though? Terminate is a common in Planeshift and Alara Reborn (both small sets prior to the Zendikar Boom), has had two promotional printings (Magic Player Rewards and FNM), and has been featured in three different supplemental printings (one of the original Commander decks, one of the Archenemy decks, and the Sorin vs Tibalt Duel Deck). I can understand the promos increasing, especially the MPR version—those have been very popular in the last year or so, and I am almost entirely out of mine (even the bad cards!). The supplemental copies make some sense too, since the first Commander run was kind of small, and I don’t know anybody who purchased Archenemy or Sorin vs Tibalt.

All that being said, I’ve found about ten copies of Alara Reborn Terminates lying around my house since I started typing this sentence. Am I just rich, or is this price unrealistic?

The problem with commons is that their base price is essentially free. The price you typically pay for commons in a store is the fee that is involved with actually going through the inventory to find it for you. Commons also have a much lower ceiling than any other rarity due to as-fan: I may only get one mythic in eight packs, but I’ll get eighty different commons. Khans and Dragons of Tarkir each had 101 commons, while Fate Reforged had 70. if I opened eight packs, it’s possible that I’ve gotten the vast majority of KTK/DTK commons, and every single FRF common (with repeats!). By contrast, Planeshift, featuring the first (and superior) version of Terminate, only had 55 commons in the set. Alara Reborn had 60.

Playability can drive the price of a common, but in general, the rarity is limited in power level due to its prevalence. A draft will feature 240 commons, and by making commons too powerful, you warp Limited.

So what do you do when a common card spikes? Well, the first thing you do is make sure that you have a neat and organized system for finding cards (or you swear to change your ways during the next available long weekend).

The next thing is you look for the best buylist price. Since Terminate has “spiked,” I have not been able to move any at the new price (be it through sales or PucaTrade). I was able to move one foil Alara Reborn copy, but it was on PucaTrade and at a discount. Currently, the best buylist price on the non-foil Alara Reborn Terminates is $1.78 from Strike Zone, which feels like an absolute steal. If you find you have a stack, then out them to a guaranteed source and let it absorb the risk.

If you have a regular game store that you shop or play at, I’d let them know of any that you come across, but I wouldn’t buy them for pennies with hope of a quick flip—you aren’t going to make very much, but there is potential to damage your relationship with the owner/operators. Typically, stores that don’t have all of their inventory electronically categorized can be places to find lots of unpicked longboxes, but you are likely to get more out of going through them as a helper than as a hunter. My LGS is staffed only by the owner, and he has more longboxes than he has time. I pull out things that I come across in his boxes when I’m bored and looking for something to occupy my ADD, but I get more in karma than I do in value.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the true corner case scenarios, like Serum Visions. In the case of certain cards, the avenues for a reprint are limited. Serum Visions, Daze, Brainstorm, and Preordain are the kinds of cards that can grow reprint equity at common (they are also all blue), but can’t be reprinted in a Standard expansion. Fortunately, WOTC is doing more supplemental products than ever before, so there are means to see more copies printed, but I think you have to be realistic about which ones offer the best possibilities. This is all speculation, but Wizards put reprints in products where they best fit (things like Flusterstorm aside). Serum Visions is a pretty lousy card in Commander, so I wouldn’t expect it in one of those types of products as opposed to Modern Masters 3 or a Modern Event Deck (are we still doing those?). I’d expect Rhystic Study to appear in a Commander set instead, even if it isn’t a better card for people wanting new copies of particular blue commons.

Moral of the story: Don’t bother chasing the vast majority of these spikes. There isn’t enough action to be hard, and the margins are probably too small. If you find that you have a pile of them, enjoy your trade-in credit.

Planeswalkers and Design Philosophy

My academic background, if I haven’t mentioned it before, is in history. One of the most important things you can learn with regards to history is that events are always influenced by their causes, and so you have to take the context of those causes into account whenever you are analyzing a given event. The new planeswalkers in Magic Origins, most specifically Jace, are being looked at the wrong way, and I think it is because WOTC is trying to change the way planeswalkers are used. I’m going to use the history of planeswalkers (both as a card type and as a, uh… fantasy… thing?) to make my point.

I’m not a very good Vorthos, but here is the history of planeswalkers in a nutshell. In the beginning, WOTC’s creative team made planeswalkers into basically indestructible, omnipotent gods who could make and destroy entire worlds at whim. This, surprisingly, is a terrible character type to try and build meaningful storytelling around. WOTC realized that planeswalkers were too powerful to be compelling (note that this is around the time that WOTC started looking into a potential movie deal), so the story was steered toward the Mending, where planeswalkers sacrificed much of their power to heal the fracturing of Dominaria or something.

The Mending, which occurred during Time Spiral block, meant that moving forward, planeswalkers wouldn’t make Emrakul, Aeons Torn look like a plant token and that they could be more realistically represented on cards! It is no coincidence that the first planeswalker cards appeared the following year (after being pushed out of Future Sight because of development concerns—the empty green card slot became Tarmogoyf!). The first five planeswalkers (known sometimes as the Lorwyn Five) were hugely resonant successes, and they all saw various amounts of constructed play (Chandra the least, Garruk and Jace the most).

For the first few years, however, planeswalker cards were somewhat lacking in terms of broader developmental context. A lot of the appeal was “shiny new things!” and without as much concern to whether they were good or not. I think for a little while WOTC was just glad they seemed to be working, but eventually R&D moved forward into new design space. Few colors had more than one planeswalker, so the good ones (think Elspeth, Knight-Errant) were played and the much less good ones (think Liliana Vess) mostly just weren’t. In a way, Jace, the Mind Sculptor represented what planeswalkers were like before the Mending: he went into every deck that played blue, and encouraged you to play blue if you weren’t already. JTMS wasn’t a nuanced, situational chess piece—he was a nuclear bomb. You either played Jace, or had to have a really compelling reason not to.

Designing planeswalkers is difficult for WOTC, since there are only a few printed during each given year. This low amount over time means that it takes longer for changes in design philosophy to manifest. Since Worldwake, there has been a push for planeswalkers to be more situational, rather than a pass/fail test of quality.

For example, is Ashiok good? Ashiok isn’t played as a four-of in the main deck of every list that could run it, but the card is also crucial in control mirrors. And the new Jace is very similar to Ashiok in that way. Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy comes down before most countermagic comes online in the control mirrors, and unlike Ashiok, it creates a difficult sideboarding decision for your control opponent: how much creature removal can they sideboard out and not be worse against an early Jace? Historically, looters have certainly been playable in control decks. Jace is a looter with high upside, including being a potential finisher for no additional mana investment. There are a lot of matches, however, where a 0/2 looter for two is going to be nothing more than eventual Shock fodder. The downside to being a situational star is that not all situations are favorable.

The finance lesson here is that planeswalkers are likely to be more specialized moving forward. This means that on the whole, they will be more consistently playable, although there will likely be much less crossover. Even though they are popular, WOTC doesn’t want a lot of Elspeth, Knight-Errants or Jace, the Mind Sculptors, because they narrow the range of the card type in general.

And just to take it a step further, this push isn’t unique to planeswalkers. Take a look at what Sam Stoddard had to say about Languish:

This really seems to be WOTC’s design and development philosophy moving forward, and I think it probably means a stronger, more active market for Standard. I’d much rather be trading and selling in a format with lots of “sometimes really good” cards than just a bunch of “good” or “not good” ones. If future formats can be as good as the one we have now, I think this means a lot of potential for the future. Make sure you have a diverse standard stock moving forward!

Moral of the story: planeswalkers, and Standard as a whole, are being developed in a way that is conducive to a wider format. I expect most of the future formats to be like Ravnica/Time Spiral in the sense that there are several good decks, but no overtly oppressive ones. These wider formats have more good cards, but fewer staples. If that’s the case, you can expect prices to be a little bit more even, as opposed to boom or bust. Tip: in these types of formats, the safest bets, as they always are, are the lands.

That’s all for today. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these topics, especially the second one. It was kind of a hard concept to put to paper, but I’d be more than happy to flesh it out in the comments. See you next week!

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