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About the Author
@Rose0fthorns     -     Email     -     Articles Douglas Johnson is a 20-year-old MTG player who goes to college courtesy of a scholarship from Gamers Helping Gamers. He is currently found writing a weekly finance column at MTGprice.com, and you can always feel free to contact him on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit.

Conjured Currency #29: Oops.

Good morning! It very well may not be morning at the time that you’re reading this, but I get tired of the generic “Welcome back!” every week, and I figure I have a 50/50 shot of being right if I assume that it’s the a.m. wherever you may be while reading this article. This time, we’ll skip through my shameless advertisement/recap/update on my previous week’s article, and cut straight into the juicy article material that WOTC has generously provided so that I don’t have to stare at a blank piece of digital paper for a number of hours attempting to conjure up a subject matter.

Surprise! We’re Back

Pax Prime 2014 happened over this past weekend. I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I’m going to be talking about based on that statement. For those who live in the [card]Wooded Foothills[/card] and haven’t heard the annoucement yet, the original five Onslaught fetch lands will return to Standard and be introduced into Modern via Khans of Tarkir. Ninety-dollar [card]Polluted Delta[/card]s are no more, and people are free to preorder playsets for less than a single copy used to cost. Needless to say, people were slightly pleased.

If you remember nearly 15 articles ago, I wrote about how I was adamant that Onslaught fetchlands would not ever make it to Standard or Modern. Oops. I made that statement because I felt that Wizards wouldn’t want to put fetches in Standard again (adding five minutes of shuffling to every game isn’t the most fun thing in the world), and that adding Onslaught fetches wouldn’t make much difference in Modern when we already have rainbow mana in any number of different methods. Oops. Feel free to say, “I told you so,” in the comments section, even if you didn’t in fact “tell me so” and you want to pretend you did. I was wrong. It happens.

Belief Perseverance

Human brain in x-ray view

I wrote that article back in May. M15 spoilers were in full effect, the enemy cycle of pain lands was revealed, which heavily alluded to the probability of an allied cycle of lands in Khans of Tarkir. That, along with a decent number of logically sound comments on my 15th article, probably should have been enough to change my mind. Even something like [card]Ob Nixilis, Unshackled[/card] is a throwback from Zendikar, and he interacts with fetch lands.

Still, I didn’t change my mind. I felt that a reprint in a supplemental product such as Commander, Archenemy, or Planechase was more likely, and that Khans would have an all-new land cycle in the fall. I’m beating the fact that I was wrong into the ground, because changing your mind when presented with new information is hard. Has anyone ever come up to you with a deck and asked your opinion on what to change? You might be a much more experienced player than that person, provide logical and rational reasoning for all of your theorized changes, only to have that player say something along the lines of, “Well, I think I’m just going to keep it the way it is.” Being able to change your opinion in the face of new evidence is difficult, but it’s something that we should all practice, recognizing in the moment of when it happens.

I Don’t Care, Just Tell Me What to Do with my Fetches

Fine, fine. Are you still holding onto Onslaught copies? If so, I feel like you have a couple of options ahead of you. One of the best historical examples to look at for guidance would be [card]Thoughtseize[/card], a Modern and Legacy staple that hung out at around $70 and got chopped in half by its reprint. Expect the original [card]Polluted Delta[/card] to fall to around $40 soon after the reprint hits the shelves, sustained by a bit of price memory, and respect for the old border and art. As of September 2, ABUGames is still buying original Deltas for almost $35. If you don’t care about the art or border and just want to play your fetches, you might as well ship them off to a reliable buylist and then buy into the newer, cheaper copies once they start flooding the market.

tsizzletsizzle2

Speaking of new copies [card]Flooded Strand[/card]ing the market, what will the settled price of the new fetch lands be? Well, SCG is setting the bar high with preorders at $29.99, and they’re sold out. However, you can certainly find better deals than that with a little bit of Google-fu, if you absolutely need the cards in your hands the week of release. No matter how high the demand for fetches is, a booster box can only hold so much value before supply is raised by people cracking boxes for said value. After a few weeks of product being opened and drafted, I think the dust will settle around $15 (lower for the non-blue ones). Again, I think we can look at [card]Thoughtseize[/card] for an excellent example.

A Misty Future

And Zendikar fetches? If little Bobby can use $13 [card]Wooded Foothills[/card] and [card]Bloodstained Mire[/card]s, he certainly doesn’t need to drop $70 on a copy of [card]Scalding Tarn[/card] for his Burn deck. We survived on five fetch lands for several years in Modern, and players without the cash for Modern’s “original” fetches will be diving headfirst for the Khans counterparts. This relieves a little bit of pressure on the Zendikar fetches and prevents WOTC from having rocks thrown through their windows. Does this mean we won’t be getting more Mesas? I doubt it. As I stated a couple of weeks ago, I think Modern Masters 2 is on its way to blow us away, and I’m still confident that it contains Zendikar fetches at rare, with a much larger print run to prevent $57 [card]Cryptic Command[/card]s. Yes, I did just finish a section of this article talking about the negative aspects of belief perseverance and being willing to change your mind, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find enough evidence to rule out MM2 with fetches.

With these factors in mind, I’ve been looking at unloading any extra Zendikar fetches I had. If you’re not using them to play with, trade them off into safer commodities, or sell them to friends who need them right now. There is very little to be gained by holding onto them for financial gains.

In Related News

If you blinked at any point between this past Sunday and Monday, you might have noticed that [card]Courser of Kruphix[/card] went up to $17 once again. If you bought in a while ago expecting this, then congratulations, I recommend selling out now. Even if it does slowly creep up to $20 and hang out there for a while, I’m always a fan of taking profits and running onto the next thing.

Courser of Kruphix

In Unrelated News

If you’re looking for the next big thing, I’m going to be the eleventy billlionth person on the internet to endorse [card]Mana Confluence[/card] and [card]Soldier of the Pantheon[/card]. As of today, Mana Confluence has crept up to $15 average, so I’m not sure how much more time you have before it reaches $20. If you can still find a place to buy in for $11 or $12 and need them to play with, I recommend it. The ceiling on Soldier is probably only $5, but he seems like an excellent target as a cheap throw-in when it looks like there will be so many multi-color decks running around. These decks will play [card]Mana Confluence[/card] and fetch lands, which start to hurt after repeated uses. Soldier gets to ignore their golden threats, and also holds the ground well.

Wrapping Up

I’m sure that almost every other Magic financier in the world has written approximately the same article (or better) about fetch land reprints this week, but I genuinely appreciate the time you took to read my thoughts. If you’re interested in continuing the discussion, I’m glad to help! Just leave a comment in the section below, on Reddit, or hit me up on Twitter with any questions/constructive criticism. Until next week!

Conjured Currency #28: The End of Magic: The Gathering (As We Know It)

It’s Thursday once again, and I welcome all of you back to reading more words that the Brew Crew pay me to vomit onto the internet. Thanks for that. Last week, I got an extremely positive reception to an article that involved me digging through my closet and taking a good look at my current sealed product investments. If you’re considering dropping some cash on the next new product and stashing it away, I highly recommend you skim through the article first. I’m not going to spend too much time on the past, though, because this article (and announcement) is all about the future, and there’s a lot to talk about.

The news is a few days old by the time you’re reading this, but early the morning of this writing, Mark Rosewater dropped quite the bomb on us with loads of information that can be found here. Without any further unrelated words, let’s delve into a “TL;DR” of the entire article, and then extrapolate a few possibilities for what these changes could mean for Magic, mainly from the financial perspective.

I Don’t Want to Read the Article

For the readers that the above statement rings true for, I’ll explain it as quickly and efficiently as I can. Magic has had a history of the third set in a block having an identity crisis, leaving the set to often have a bad Limited environment (see Avacyn Restored/Dragon’s Maze). It’s hard to keep people interested in the same block for almost an entire year and still maintain an identity for the third set.

Similarly, the core set has been split between appealing to a more advanced and experienced crowd, while trying to teach newcomers the basics of the game. There are also issues with the “storytelling” aspect of the game being too slow (did anyone honestly give a damn about what happened in the flavor of Dragon’s Maze or Journey into Nyx?), and not having enough time to revisit our favorite worlds while still creating new storylines. With this, we end up with two sets (the third set and the core set) being the redheaded stepchildren of the Magic year, and the need to increase the quality of the storyline and add more stories.

Do You See Where This is Going?

“Beginning in the fall of 2015, Magic will have two blocks per year.” Yep. Instead of having three sets in one block followed by a core set, we’ll be receiving two blocks per year. The first two sets will be parts of the first block, and the second two sets of the year will [b]usually[/b] be part of a second. The “usually” part seems important to me, giving Wizards the ability to backtrack and shake things up with something different, like a three- or four-set block instead. In order to make room for this, they’re chopping off the core set.

Rotation, Rotation, Rotation

The last big announcement of the article is that cards in the fall set will no longer be legal for a 24-month period, starting with the Khans of Tarkir block. Khans will only be legal for 18 months, rotating in the spring of 2016 instead of the fall. Instead of a once-per-year rotation, Standard will rotate twice a year (once in the fall as we’re used to, and once in the spring as well). Three blocks will be Standard-legal at once, and each rotation will push out the third block behind it. In order to make the transition as smooth as possible, the last set of Khans block will rotate after its brothers have already left, making 2016 an interesting year for rotations.

What Happens?

Well, there are a few possibilities that immediately come to mind when presented with this new information. One of the first is that there might be fewer packs of each set opened, reducing the number of cards in circulation and likely driving the Standard staples up higher to a degree. Instead of (for example) JOU/BNG/THS, we’re losing all of the Born of the Gods and Theros packs that would have been drafted during that time, and are instead on our way to a shiny new block. Mythics and chase rares would likely see higher price floors, but for a shorter time period due to the sooner rotation.

If Wizards keeps the draft format the same as it is now (Small/Big/Big), then there will be a 5-1 ratio of “Blood” and “Sweat” respectively entering the market. While there was already a 6-2-1 ratio of a block like Theros, we’re not used to this 5-1 gap happening multiple times a year, causing staples from the second set in each block to be more expensive than we’re used to.

On the other hand, these changes could turn out great for the number of packs opened. Instead of the “third set slump,” where players are less likely to buy boxes or want to draft the third set of the block, they’re met with a brand new world, new planeswalkers, new stories, and new mechanics every six months or so. This might be enough to make up for, and maybe even surpass, the number of lost packs from the three-set draft format.

A Healthy Standard?

Rosewater blatantly stated in the article that one of the reasons for a more frequent Standard rotation is to prevent the metagame from stagnating as it has been of late. Wizards doesn’t want [card]Thoughtseize[/card] into [card]Pack Rat[/card] to become a two-year long happening, because that gets old quickly. [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] has had its time in the sun, and I don’t think I’d be assuming too much if I guessed that a majority of the Standard player base was wishing it had left long ago.

Remember the Organized Play changes from about a month ago? The ones where players were upset about having four Standard pro tours, and eventually complained enough to get OP to reverse its decision and add back a Modern PT? Well, maybe Wizards had a reason for scheduling four Standard pro tours. It makes a lot more sense to have every PT be Standard when the format rotates much more quickly, and has three blocks’ worth of variety and different themes.

If you’re someone who tends to build a single Standard deck and tries to stick with it as long as possible in order to make playing Magic cheaper, this change might actually deter you from playing the format rather than spicing it up. If enough players decide to turn their backs on the format, we could see this change drive more people to Modern, Legacy, or even EDH. I’m personally excited to have a buylist ready for all of the Modern and Legacy staples that will be rotating out of Standard every six months, because the Standard-only players will need to dump them more often to get their hands on the fresh new block.

If you tend to speculate on fall Standard sleepers like [card]Desecration Demon[/card] and [card]Jace, Architect of Thought[/card], or just primarily deal in Standard cards via TCGplayer/eBay/buying at buylist, you have less time to dump the fall-set cards before they plummet. If you’re someone who doesn’t constantly move inventory around, it might be a good idea to start putting money and trade stock towards Legacy Reserved List cards until the storm settles.

More Reprints?

Here’s another factor to consider. I’ll just leave this here:

reprintsinexpansions

I guess reprinting [card]Thoughtseize[/card] and murdering Standard for a year was worth dropping its price tag by $50. I sound cynical when I say that, but maybe it looks like a way for them to balance the amount of people who play Standard with the people who play eternal formats.  If we get reprints on the same power level as [card]Thoughtseize[/card], [card]Mutavault[/card], and [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card] in the near future, I’m on board with making Modern cheaper and easier to access for everyone involved.

It’s also interesting to note that, unlike the other “big changes” in Magic, nobody’s complaining. As far as I can tell, nobody’s getting out their pitchforks, throwing their collection into the bonfire, or rioting at WOTC’s door. Everyone (myself included) seems to just think, “Huh. Yeah, that does solve all of those problems, and sounds very exciting. I look forward to these changes in the future.”

newsetsUntitled

One way or another, this is such a huge change that it’s impossible to complete the puzzle just yet. We just had a nuclear bomb dropped on our precious little system that we thought we had figured out, and there’s a lot of traditions and systems we had in place as financiers that just go straight out the window. It becomes a lot harder to say, “X will happen on Y date, so sell Z card before A happens,” when we’re going into uncharted waters.

Is there anyone out there who hates these changes? If so, what’s your reasoning behind your opinion? I’m curious to see if everyone is as excited for these new developments as I am. It certainly stirs up the financial world of Magic like few things have, and I certainly can’t even begin to fathom the depths of all of the possible results of this announcement alone, especially in only 1500 words. Does anyone want to help me out and provide some comments on what else could happen as a result of switching to a two-block format while removing the core set from the equation?

As always, thanks for reading.

Conjured Currency #27: Checking in the Closet

Welcome back, everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the discussion on the potential for Modern Masters 2 last week, as well as my quick thoughts on the Organized Play changes.

Wizards of the Coast announced the original Modern Masters on October 18, 2012, so if they follow a similar trend for the set’s sequel, we can expect to hear an announcement in about two months. I personally loved drafting Modern Masters when it was more readily available, so I hope that the stars are aligning as WOTC appears to be granting us a second shot. Due to the fact that MM was an experiment (and therefore an extremely limited print run), it’s more likely that MM2 will be more easily available, allowing cheaper boosters and more individuals accessing the Draft format. I don’t care if the set spans from Eighth Edition to Theros, Zendikar to Khans, or whatever. I just want to jam a Limited format like that again.

Speaking of Modern Masters, I sold my sealed box a couple weeks ago. For clarity, it wasn’t because of any of my speculation in last week’s article, and it wasn’t because of anything that I’m going to say this week. I was bored at a friend’s house with several other Magic players, and he was scrolling through eBay on his phone looking up prices for a box because he was itching to do a draft. I half-jokingly offered that I had a box at my house and would sell it for $375, which caused a great stir in his mind and wallet. $300 cash and $75 in buylist value from his binder later, we were on the way to my house to pick up the box and crack it open, enjoying a good night and draft with friends. I lost.

Sealed Product Investments

I’ll spare you the details of the draft (unless you really want to know in the comments), and explain why I sold the box. The simplified version is that I was just following my own personal golden rule of, “If you can sell your Magic cards for full retail, and don’t need them in the immediate future, it’s almost always a good idea.” I can invest that $300 cash towards other collections and singles at buylist value, and sell those singles out of my case. If I put even a small amount of effort in, I’ll make a lot more than the slow and steady creep of the box that was just sitting under my bed for the past year.

After selling the box, I decided to do some checking up on some of the other sealed product I own to see where my investments were heading. You know how the general advice to people when buying sealed product is, “Throw it in a closet and forget about it for X years”? Well, let’s remember what we tried to forget, and see if our investment could have been put in a better place.

From the Vault: Twenty

FTVTwentyBox
I currently own five of these. I noticed them while digging past to grab the Modern Masters box in my tote of “sealed stuff to forget about.” I bought them around September of last year soon after they came out, from an extremely good friend and aspiring store owner who sold them to me for a pretty good $100 each. Like all FTV products, there was an extremely limited print run of these, and they include multiple old-school foils like [card]Swords to Plowshares[/card] and [card]Dark Ritual[/card], and last but not least, [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card]. There was no way this box wouldn’t be $200 in a year, and I believe I remember Ryan Bushard agreeing with me. I was confident. Easy money: just wait.

Fast forward about five months, to the winter of 2014. The cheapest Buy-It-Now eBay listing was around $140, still approximately the average price of when I bought them. I thought, “No big deal, I just need to wait longer. Forget about them.”

Fast forward several more months, to today. The current lowest Buy-It-Now listing on eBay for a sealed From the Vault: Twenty is $135, free shipping. These have moved zero dollars. At this point, I guess I’m just keeping them sealed to see if I can sell them for that to a friend, or sell a playset of Jaces for full retail if someone needs them.

What Could I Have Done Differently?

In the summer of 2013, a [card]Tundra[/card] from Revised could be found for slightly more then $100. Yeah. Remember that? [card]Underground Sea[card] was less than $200, and the world was full of lollipops and rainbows. I could have easily thrown that $500 toward a set of [card]Tundra[/card] plus a [card]Taiga[/card] and jumped the boat when Tundra hit $200. There’s the real easy money. Those dual lands would’ve also been much easier to sell than a sealed box, which will cost me at least $10 to ship with tracking, and can’t be listed on TCGplayer or buylisted.

Commander 2013

mindseize

I currently have at least five Mind Seize decks under my bed in that tote, and three each of the other four. You can find the non-[card]True-Name Nemesis[/card] ones on eBay (or at your local LGS) for as low as $20, and the Mind Seize no longer towers above the rest at its $60 price tag. Thanks to the en masse second printing (with a special emphasis on making sure casual players could buy the Grixis deck, since it was printed more than the rest), these decks flooded the market until buying them for instant flips was no longer profitable.

At this point, I think I’m just in it for the long haul with all of the decks. I obviously should have dumped the Mind Seizes at $50 when I had the chance, but I decided to be greedy and am paying the price (metaphorically and literally). Plan A is now to wait and cross my fingers, hoping that the other four decks that initially went under the radar begin to be noticed as casual gold mines. The Jund one looks especially nice with [card]Ophiomancer[/card] and [card]Primal Vigor[/card]. Still, buying every single deck at release with the intention of waiting for an extremely long time was a pretty large blunder. Let’s rewind the clock and see where changes should have been made in my battle plan.

What Could I Have Done Differently?

With Wizards having announced the release of a new Commander set every single year, I should have realized that stuff like [card]Sol Ring[/card] would not just be a $10 card every single year. That alone negates a lot of the safety of the future value of these decks. Also, Mark Rosewater warned us at the start that they were 100-percent willing to reprint these until they had enough to bury a dead horse with. They did just that. After seeing the community turn into [card]wild nacatl[/card]s and [card]raze[/card] through the Wal-Marts and Targets, the hindsight play is to wait until that promised reprint, and start grabbing $15 Power Hungry decks for the long-term instead of paying that $30 on release day.

Cracking Mind Seizes and immediately dumping the TNN to get a free other 99 cards looks like it was the correct call (speaking of which, [card]Army of the Damned[/card] is a $1 card. Even though it was printed in Mind Seize, that does not seem right to be at all). Want to see a Legacy staple that was criminally underpriced during the winter of Mind Seize?

rishadanport

During the Commander release, this card was approximately $60. In hindsight, a Legacy staple with very few reprint possibilities seems like a safer place to put money than two pre-confirmed reprintable sealed Commander decks. I don’t like to put all of my eggs in one basket, and I don’t even like buying staple singles for the purposes of long-term speculation, but it would have worked out much better in this case for me. Ports sit at $115 now, where they’ve [card]plateau[/card]ed for several months. To be honest, I can see them hitting $150 in a few months, unless Wizards does something weird like put them in the mono-colored Commander decks this year.

A Bit About Booster Boxes

I currently have two booster boxes each of Dragon’s Maze and Avacyn Restored sitting on the top of the armoire in my dorm room. Weird choice? Yeah, kind of. I didn’t exactly buy them for speculation purposes: they’re remnants of a store’s collection that I bought out a little over a year ago, and I just haven’t put a whole ton of effort into selling them (by the way, if anyone’s interested in buying DGM boxes at $80 or AVR at $130…*cough cough*). Just like in the previous situations, they’ve both sat at this price for the entire time that I’ve owned them, and they could and should have been sold immediately for the profit, or transformed into a more safe and more liquid asset of singles.

The Time of Sealed Product has Come to an End

Well, probably not entirely. Things that are explained to be experimental, have a very low likelihood of being reprinted, and are enjoyable to draft are still probably safe investments, especially if you want something that you don’t have to micromanage. If Modern Masters 2 rears its head, picking up sealed boxes is probably safe if you have the change to spare. Just be aware that dual lands also exist, have zero likelihood of being printed again, and will always be in demand. The number of sealed products that can be shoved into the closet and aged for free money is becoming extremely small.

The Reserved List combined with playability in EDH and/or Legacy are powerful weapons for the financier, and I trust them more then the next new, shiny toy that Wizards drops into our playpen. I think most people got the hint not to hoard boxes of Conspiracy, because WOTC made it loud and clear that the set was designed to be drafted [card]ad nauseum[/card] and not to be taken advantage of. The next time you’re about to hoard something away in your closet and forget about it for a year or more, consider all of your options and the other places you could be putting your money.

It’s getting to that special time of the week when I should wrap up here before I start to bore you, so let’s take the conversation elsewhere, where you can provide your own input! Hit me up in the comments section below, the Reddit thread for the article, Twitter, or Facebook (feel free to add me, just message me beforehand explaining that you’re a reader). I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read my thoughts and opinions on Magic finance once again. Until next week!

Conjured Currency #26: RAMPANT SPECULATION (and Organized Play Changes)

Welcome back, recently christened experts of personal budgeting and finance! Well, experts probably isn’t the word I should use. All I did was recommend three possible methods of categorizing your personal spending and income, but I’m curious to hear if any of those worked for you. Have you started jotting down your transactions into Google Drive? Or did you start doing your own research, and find something that works for you? I was hoping to receive a bit of feedback (positive or negative) on the second part of last week’s article, so hopefully someone somewhere learned something.

Changes in Organized Play

Even though I’ve decided to drop off the competitive scene, I begrudgingly still try to keep up to date on the updates to the Organized Play (OP) system to discern possible financial information heading forward. Even though I only play lower-level paper Magic, keeping up with the changes in things that don’t concern me personally (MTGO and OP) are still relevant to the part of the finance game that I consider myself strong at. If you’re in the same situation as I am, remember to keep up to date with MTGGoldfish.com for updates on Magic Online, and wait for the links on Twitter for information about Organized Play (unless you want to try and navigate the labyrinth of the Wizards home page).

PTStandards

On August 2nd, Wizards of the Coast announced the upcoming schedule for grands prix and pro tours of 2015. One of the biggest glaring omissions in the schedule was a Modern pro tour—every pro tour heading forward for the entire year would be Standard. Seeing as how Standard is the best way to advertise the newest set, and the pro tour is one of the best ways to advertise Standard, it’s understandable as a company that they wanted to make the most of their advertising budget and highlight the newest set as often as possible. Even though it’s a beloved format, Modern doesn’t exactly allow a ton of newcomers from Journey into Nyx or M15 into its clique. However, thanks to the fact that WOTC is slightly better than Hitler and anthrax combined, they decided to make their customers hate them less and change Pro Tour D.C. to Modern.

What Does It Mean?

Well, for starters, it means that WOTC doesn’t hate you. As Helene said, they value your opinion and have proven that they are willing to change their program (and potentially lose a bit on advertising via Standard pro tours) to convince you to lower your pitchforks. It’s also another sign that reinforces a fact that should be obvious: Wizards is not giving up on Modern. It is their lovechild, it is their golden goose, it’s the single largest force to create demand in eternal cards in years. Your Modern collections are safe as a whole, and there’s no reason to fire-sell Modern decks.There are even more Modern grands prix next year than last, and LGS owners have the ability to decide the format of their own PTQ qualifiers.

Yep, that’s right. Pro tour qualifier qualifiers are a thing now. Instead of PTQ invites being a highlander contest, there will be a locally run event where the winner qualifies for a regional PTQ, of which the top X players will score a plane ticket to the big leagues. Due to the fact that store owners get to cherrypick the format for their own PTQQs, the whole concept of “Modern season” or “Standard season” gets thrown out the window. Instead of jumping from Kiki-Pod to RG Aggro because of a season change, a grinder has to lock in those decks for the long haul if he or she plans on attending a large number of PTQQs, since each could be Modern, Standard, or Sealed.

Blocked Out

If you didn’t realize, three Standard PTs and one Modern PT leaves one little format leaving lost and alone on the street like an abandoned puppy. There will be no Block pro tour in 2015. However, unlike the Modern incident, where players showed their addiction to casting [card]Dark Confidant[/card], no one cared enough about Block to see a complete backpedal to the old schedule.

And personally, I’m okay with that. Instead of a crystal ball that shows us which cards will be powerful when their predecessors leave, we have a whole new world to play with, and it will be a lot harder to predict what cards will leave a lasting impact in their second year of play. I think it’ll be more interesting for the average FNM-goer to watch the pro tour if it’s a format they actually know and enjoy, rather then something that will most likely never be relevant to them.

Mystery Prix

If you skimmed down over the list of grand prix locations because you didn’t care and weren’t going to 90 percent of them anyway, then you did what I did. Check out Season 3, on the weekend of May 30-31. Three simultaneous grands prix occurring across multiple continents, almost exactly two years after the release of Modern Masters?

STUFF

I think assuming that Modern Masters 2: Electric Boogaloo will exist is safe now. Wizards saw the results of its experiment with the first set, and deemed that the waters were safe to go full force on a sequel after what happened in 2013. What happened in Vegas will not stay in Vegas.. Unless Wizards decides that they’re allergic to money, proceed from this point forward with the assumption that Modern Masters 2 will exist, and will be in players’ hands earlier than May 30, 2015.

What’s In It?

The first Modern Masters contained cards spanning from Eighth Edition (2003) to Alara Reborn (2009). For those of us who have been playing a while, it’s kind of shocking to realize that almost the same amount of time from Zendikar to Khans of Tarkir will have passed that did between Eighth and Alara. As such, the Zendikar fetches are looking like prime reprint candidates for the set, most likely as rares. After printing the enemy cycle of pain lands in M15, it seems unlikely that an immediate followup of enemy fetchlands in Khans will happen. If we get fetches in Khans, they’ll be Onslaught allied ones, which leaves Zendikar reprints in MMA2.

I’m starting to go down the rabbit hole a bit here, but could Zendikar fetches aid in a landfall-themed environment for Modern Masters 2? Landfall was widely received as a great Limited mechanic, much like suspend helped hold together the first Modern Masters. If we have a landfall-themed Modern Masters 2, what are some of the reprints that we could expect from between Zendikar and current day?

[card]Scapeshift[/card]

scapeshift

Cornerstone of a competitive Modern deck? Check. Price has been steadily increasing over the past year? Check. No prior reprints? Check. Land-themed to potentially help with landfall? Check. If you’re holding onto any [card]Scapeshift[/card]s and don’t plan on jamming them into a deck, I recommend starting to look into selling/trading them off in the near future in search of greener pastures.

[card]Birthing Pod[/card]

pod

This is the card in Magic that has given me the most euphoria and the most stress. Every banned and restricted announcement is a heart attack waiting to happen to hear if my cardboard lover has received the cold text of the executioner. All drama aside, you should probably trade/sell these off before the card gets banned/reprinted. Yes, it’s weird and hard to reprint Phyrexian mana, but stranger things have happened.

[card]Celestial Colonnade[/card] and friends

celcol

Would it be weird and awkward for Limited purposes to have both Zendikar fetches and Worldwake manlands in the same set together? Yeah, probably. However, if MM2 doesn’t have fetches for whatever reason, these are the most likely runner-up.

[card]Goblin Guide[/card]

 goblinguide

See [card]Scapeshift[/card] reasons. Literally, all of them.

[card]Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite[/card] and friends

eleshnorn

If we’re going by the assumption that we’ll get a cycle of legendary mythics (SO MANY ASSUMPTIONS), I don’t think the praetors are a bad place to start. Norn has seen quite a bit of love from EDH/eternal players alike, and most of her friends are casual all-stars as well. Then again, Norn did just get that absolutely gorgeous judge foil…

[card]Spellskite[/card]

spellskite

Same as [card]Birthing Pod[/card]. Phyrexian mana is hard to reprint, but if the mechanic gets the green light, I can see them throwing as many reprints as possible that don’t destroy the Limited format with free spells. This might be their only chance for a long while to prevent the 0/4 lifesaver to stop growing into [card]Fulminator Mage[/card] territory down the road.

[card]Liliana of the Veil[/card]

lilianaoftv

With Vess hanging around in Standard for the next year, it’s safe to say that’s not where this $60 damsel will be making her reprint appearance. She’s definitely had enough time in the spotlight with a single printing to the point where another wave of copies would be expected, and I don’t think something like a Commander product would be appropriate for the multi-format winner.

[card]Mox Opal[/card]

moxopal

[card]Progenitus[/card] wasn’t exactly reprinted for the sake of its Limited format, and I don’t think this would be either. This is more of a safety valve reprint instead of a casual “WOW” reprint, but there feels like a ton of risk in holding onto something like this, even if it would be a dud in Limited.

Just to Be Clear

Just as a reminder, my recommendation is not to immediately fire-sell all of your Modern cards that could potentially be reprinted. The entire point of Modern is to be able to reprint these cards, get them into the hands of players, and jam games in a fun, diverse environment. I’m just trying to pick some of the tallest growing money trees that Wizards could have their eyes on trimming. I don’t expect a situation like [card]Cryptic Command[/card] or [card]Dark Confidant[/card], where the low print run is overrun by the hunger and demand for the cards. If Modern Masters 2 comes true, the printing presses will be on full blast, and the value of the reprinted cards will drop as a whole. If you currently run your [card]Goblin Guide[/card]s or [card]Liliana of the Veil[/card]s in your only Modern deck, don’t just dump the deck because of a potential reprint. I just think holding onto extra copies is a risky decision financially.

Even if every single assumption here is wildly incorrect, I think it will be fun to look back at this article around May of next year to see where things went wrong and why. If I’m hitting the nail on the head with my predictions, then I get to yell and scream, “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” to everyone (not really). It seems that rampant speculation articles get the most controversial discussions rolling, so let’s see if this one is any different. Let me know in the comments section or via social media whether you hate me for being bored by Block, or if I’m insane for thinking Modern Masters 2 is now all but a guaranteed event in our future. Thanks for reading!

Conjured Currency #25: Less Magic, More Finance

Welcome back, conjurers of currency! Pro Tour M15 was several days ago, but I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon, so any financial information that arises between now and Tuesday night is something that won’t be discussed until next week. Anyway, let’s do a quick rundown of some of this week’s winners. We haven’t seen spikes like these in months.

Winners of This Week

[card]Goblin Rabblemaster[/card]

rabblemaster

“I keep getting excited about this guy, then realize that he just sends the hasted token he made to its death. Kind of sad. Anyway, that’s one of the more prevalent reasons that he’ll be sitting in my $.25 box in September if I can’t dump off the one I own now. Predicted price: Bulk rare.” –Douglas Johnson, two weeks ago.

Oops. Well, then. I’m glad I didn’t find a way to get rid of the one I ripped open at my prerelease, I guess. If you didn’t check your MTGstocks recently, this guy jumped to $4 on the back of several brutally fast and efficient red decks that reared their heads last weekend in Portland. I think my biggest mistake in failing to predict this card’s price was not taking into account the Standard playability, only associating tribal mechanics with eternal and casual playability. [card]Mental note[/card]: Consider all tribal possibilities in Standard when new lords are printed

If you still have them, or managed to buy out a chunk of the internet or your LGS at a dollar or less, I recommend dumping them now. [card]Legion Loyalist[/card] also saw a a bit of a bump this weekend, and these two cards happen to work extremely well together. Loyalist jumps the Standard boat in a few months, and I’m not expecting Khans of Tarkir to be loaded with the tools for goblin tribal to be a thing in Standard. There’s more risk than reward here involved with holding onto Rabblemaster for a long period of time.

[card]Flames of the  Blood Hand[/card]

Image

Doubling to be one of those $5 [card]Serum Visions[/card] or [card]Path to Exile[/card] non-rares, it looks like the supply was just incredibly low and not enough people noticed until there were almost none left. I’m sure that a bunch of people were scrambling around at Modern PTQs looking for the card and none of the dealers had any. The only printings were Betrayers of Kamigawa and the PDS Fire & Lightning deck, so I think the price is here to stay. What other Modern commons and uncommons of this power level do you think could see a price increase?

[card]Xenagos, the Reveler[/card]

Image (1)
Looks like Xenagos wins the award of “most number of copies of a Planeswalker in the top eight of Pro Tour M15.” He hasn’t spiked yet, and he’s only $8. Something doesn’t seem right about that, and it kind of reminds me of the situation where [card]Jace, Architect of Thought[/card] was sub-$10 until his second year of Standard, when he reached $20 to $30. Yes, Xenagos is multicolored, but he wins the game on his own if left unanswered, and I think there’s room for growth by picking these up now.

Here ends the Magic, and begins the Finance

Anyway, let’s get to the real point of this week’s article. I’m sure you’ve already heard this at least once in a college economics class, but allow me to repeat it for the sake of the article and financial stability in general: keeping a viewable record of where your money goes in and out of your life is extremely useful. It lets you plan ahead, know your limits, and budget such that you’re not stressing out over money issues. The meat of this week’s Conjured Currency will be used to show you my own personal method of keeping track of my finances (Magic and non-Magic alike), and put the spotlight on a couple of alternate methods.

Google Drive

As a college student, Google Drive is one of the best things to ever happen to me. I can write papers without having to worry about losing my work, because everything is saved automatically. It’s simple, easy to navigate, and can be synched with your laptop and phone. I’m writing my article on Google Docs right now, and I’m going to paste it into WordPress for Danny to hack away at. Similarly, I use Google Spreadsheets to keep track of every single financial transaction I make. I have one sheet for all income in a single month, and another for all spending in a single month. Here’s a look at my August sheet:

example

I have a row for each transaction, and a column for descriptive factors about the purchase or instance of income. Every purchase is marked with a reason, so I know to think twice next time when purchasing the same item if I wrote down a stupid reason like “candy” or “impulse purchase.” It took a little while to get in the habit of doing all this, but it’s well worth it in the long run. At the end of each month, I go back and read through each transaction in the spending spreadsheet, and mark whether or not it was worth spending money on. In July, I spent a bit too much money on unnecessary snacks or junk food, so I’m making an active attempt in August to prepare lunch ahead of time if I’m going out, or bring a water bottle instead of buying one.

This method has also saved me a lot of money when I make a trip to a grand prix or other large-scale Magic event. After recording each individual expense from the entire trip to Grand Prix Richmond, I now have an approximate budget for future, similar trips. I know exactly how much of my monthly income is available to spend on singles at the dealer booths, how much is allocated for food and drink while I’m there, and I noted the names of all of the restaurants we ate at so I can compare prices next time.

If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to get a general visual indicator of where you put your money and why, this is what I recommend. You don’t have to spend hours on the computer setting it up, looking at graphs, or syncing various bank accounts up to your applications. I always keep a pen and paper on hand, so I just scribble down “+” or “-” a number, a date, and an item, or if I have time I can input it to my phone immediately. It’s just a quick way to realize that you spent $50 more than you needed to on food last July, and recognize to tone that down in August.

Mint.com

Although I’ve never used this one personally, I asked around on Twitter and the review was universally positive. Unlike my Drive spreadsheets, it allows you to look at each individual category that you create, and gives you neat little pie charts and percentages of where your money is going. Apparently it also has the ability to synchronize with several larger credit unions. You can set timers to trigger on your phone or computer when you need to pay bills, notify you of fees, and warn you when an account is getting low. It lets you keep track of your investments (but probably just stocks, not Magic cards), budget your funds, and so much more. The best part about it is that it’s free! Based on a quick look over the website and reviews I got from users, I might have to start using this myself.

Based on my quick run through of the website, Mint.com is for those who want absolute control over every single part of their financial lives. Don’t take that the wrong way, it’s a great thing. I might start using this considering how obsessive I can be about saving and making sure I know exactly where every penny goes.

You Need a Budget

Well you do, but the program is actually just called “You Need a Budget.” While Mint is free, YNAB costs $60. Yeah, yeah, it’s spending money on a program that’s supposed to help you keep track of your finances and save you money, but I still figured I should mention the fact that it exists. As a matter of fact, if you’re a college student (and can prove it), the program is free, which is why I’m currently trying it out. You start out by inputting the amount in each of your various accounts (cash on hand, checking account, savings account, etc), and then just record each transaction like the other programs, from X account into Y payee.

You can also create a payment calendar for scheduled bills and future payments, which is easier to manipulate and keep track of than what I do now (Google Calendar). Although I’ve never used them, the program also comes with online classes to teach you how to use and make the most out of YNAB, handling credit cards, and working with variable incomes. Some of the classes are free without having to buy the product, and there’s also a trial version if you just feel like testing the waters. Overall though, I wouldn’t just drop $60 on the program without a pre-existing routine of keeping track of your money. The last thing you want to do is purchase it and realize it’s not for you.

That’s All, Folks

There’s only so much I can go over in one article, but the fun doesn’t have to stop here. Are there any popular budgeting applications that you use that the world should know about? Are there any features in the ones I did spotlight that everyone should be aware of? Leave a comment or hit me up on the social media, and let’s have a talk this week about personal finance and budgeting control.

Conjured Currency #24: The Art of Negotiation

Welcome back, everyone! As we close the book on M15’s set review, I’d like to address a couple pieces of feedback that I received on these last two articles, and how my opinions might have been influenced since then. I’m certainly not perfect in my card evaluation skills, and that’s one of the reasons I kept away from doing a set review for so long. Let’s take a quick peek at a few potential nitpicks and adjust our strategies from there.

[card]Liliana Vess[/card]: Turns out this card is actually playable in Standard this time around! Granted it’s only as a 1-2 of in the sideboard of mono-black devotion, but that happens to be one of the most powerful decks in the format right now, from what I hear. I predicted that she’d only be $5 come September, but her average on TCGplayer right now is closer to $7. Don’t expect that to drop before rotation, but start grabbing as many as possible in trades if she goes back to $5.

[card]Genesis Hydra[/card]: When writing my review last week, I tried to check that this card had seen no competitive play in week one before writing it off as a casual-only hydra. Somehow I missed that it had been a four-of in the ninth place list at that week’s SCG Open. While a single ninth place finish isn’t a prophecy of being the next [card]Nightveil Spectre[/card], it shows that the card probably isn’t something to write off completely. I’m joining the hype train with the BSB cast’s Ryan Bushard and giving thumbs up if you trade for these at $3 expecting $5 in the future.

Back to Square 1.5

Alright, back to the topic at hand. While I was scrolling through my Google Drive folder of my past articles, I came to a certain realization. While many of my past publications have been along the general line of “Here’s what to do with these cards that you own”, I’ve written very little on the subject of “Here’s how to get a good price on all of these cards that will fill up your entire living room and take control of your life”. Conjured Currency #12 went over how to get singles for inventory at buylist prices, but not entire collections. About a month ago, I discussed where to find piles of bulk treasure troves that you can spend a weekend digging through for picks.

Somewhere in between getting the phone call saying, “I have a collection to sell, are you interested?” and sitting down in front of the TV with 100,000 Magic cards are the processes of negotiation and bartering—ancient arts honed by used-car salesmen around the world. It’s in your best interest to talk the owner of your targeted collection down to a reasonable price that both allows for your profit margins, and for him to not be horribly ripped off. Let’s go over some tips and tricks to ensure both of those things happen, and that your customer recommends you to his friends when they need to cash out of the game.

Transparency

This is a big issue that I think is appropriate to be addressed first. Before going forward, you need to be comfortable with revealing your entire process to the individual you’re buying from. A common response I often receive when talking about a price is. “Well I could get a lot more if I went and sold this on eBay!” Yes, you could. I’ll tell you that right now. If you took this entire collection and pieced it out, and sold the singles on something like eBay or TCGplayer, you would make a lot more than what I am offering you. However, you still have to wait up to weeks before you receive your money, you have to package and ship each card or playset individually, and still take into account the fees that these websites will take.

“This card is worth $10 on SCG, you’re doubling your money if you pay me $5. Can’t you give me $7?” Break down your outs to that person, and explain that ordinary people can’t charge full retail and make a living. “Sorry man, I don’t have the ability to sell for SCG’s retail prices. If someone wanted those prices, they’d go to SCG. The cards I’m buying from you will likely be buylisted to other websites like SCG, and I’lll probably only make $7 myself from selling that card. I usually sell for around TCG low, and have fees even after that.”

“Why do you want to buy all of these bulk commons and uncommons?” There’s no need to lie to him, tell him you’re Santa Claus and give them away for free, or anything like that. Explain plain and simple: “I’m going to dig through this box while watching Netflix for cards that are worth a dime or quarter each, sell the rest off for a dollar more per thousand than what I paid, and eventually take an entire day to buylist all of the nickels and dimes for a good price all at once.” Trust me, they’re not going think, “Oh, that’s a great idea and amazing use of my time. I should do that myself”. Explaining your process will only make you appear more reputable and knowledgeable, and your customer will feel safer that they’re discussing this matter with someone who knows what they’re doing.

Your Time Isn’t Free

Here’s another common tactic I’ve heard: “I played a lot during Ravnica block. I’m pretty sure you’ll find at least a half dozen [card]Remand[/card]s in there, so I think you could do better than $5 per thousand. There are definitely some gems in there.” My response? “Great, pull them out. If you can show me that there are [card]Remand[/card]s, [card]Sensei’s Divining Top[/card]s, or [card]Lightning Helix[/card]es in those boxes, pull them and I’ll pay you the appropriate prices for the singles. However, I’m not going to do that for you right here. My time is worth money to me, and it’s going to take me a while to sort through this entire collection. I can’t just search through all of this bulk and pull out the good cards for you, only for you to tell me you decided not to sell it.” Keep your flat rate for unseen cards. Treat everything as a [card]Sanctuary Cat[/card] until you have physical proof otherwise.

One of the best ways to avoid this situation beforehand, is to tell that person in advance to pull out anything that they want to sell separately as a single card. Don’t worry, they’ll have missed some Guildgates and [card]Exsanguinate[/card]s, and probably a bunch of [card]Electrolyze[/card]s.

As a matter of fact, there are quite a few questions you want to ask the seller beforehand, if at all possible.

“Did you separate the rares?”

“I pay a flat rate of $4.00 per thousand on unseen bulk commons and uncommons, and $.10 on bulk rares. Are you willing to accept that rate?”

“Where did you come up with the number for your total price?”

Just in Case

Most of the time, a seller will be vastly overpricing his collection. However, there are those glimmers of hope when you finish up a nice buy, and you hear these magic words: “Hey, something something more cards, something something nearby, something something if you’re interested.” Why, yes, you are interested. You’re very interested and you brought some extra money in your sock (or someplace else safe, because it’s Craigslist. Probably wise to bring a buddy—so you can get murdered together instead of alone).

Sometimes, a seller knows what he has is valuable but doesn’t have an exact number on individual cards. He’s completely willing to let you take the wheel on all of his binders and accept your fair offer because he trusts you. You might be sitting on a couch going through binders and doing quick math in your head for at least an hour. A huge lesson I’ve learned after hours of awkward silences is to not be a robot. Strike up a conversation about how long they’ve been playing, what some of their favorite formats were, or maybe the story behind the deck that you’re currently dismantling. Fewer awkward silences turns the encounter into a more casual conversation, making both parties less on edge.

Be Okay With Walking Away

Unfortunately, some people can’t be reasoned with. They think that if they leave the ad up on Craigslist long enough, a bright-eyed puppy of a new player will show up on their doorstep with $700 in cash to buy their Standard RG Monsters deck and binder of bulk rares that they priced up to be exactly TCGplayer mid (not including sleeves, though). No matter how much you explain the concept of buying a collection, or how thin your profit margins are, they won’t budge. Someone will buy it, they’re sure.

And that’s okay. It sucks to get hyped up thinking you can pull some strings and talk them down only to have the door metaphorically slammed in your face, but it’s much better to tell them, “Good luck, let me know if you decide to lower your price. I’m always available,” than to strong arm yourself into believing you can pull a miracle and flip the collection for that last five-percent profit.

That’s Probably not Everything, but Oh Well

This is the kind of topic that I feel like I could write another 1500 words on, but I’m out of space for today. There are a ton of other nuances to the subject, and I’d be glad to listen to any questions, comments, or additions to the discussion. If you have any stories about your own collection buying adventures, share those too! There’s always something to be learned from each experience.

Conjured Currency #23: Reviewing M15, Part 2

Welcome back to part two of my M15 set review! If you weren’t here last week, we went over my predictions of what some of the more expensive cards Magic 2015 would look like price-wise two months from now (in September). This gives everyone enough time to play around with their synergy with all of our current toys, without me having to do any wild guesswork on what Khans of Tarkir will look like to affect the prices of this most recent set. Today, I’ll be checking in on the rest of the rares and mythics of M15, and using the same timestamp for measurement.

Regarding Last Week

If you’re just here for the rest of the review, feel free to skip the next paragraph. I’m going to quickly cover a few things about the social media responses to part one before continuing with part two. Any card that is not mentioned is one that I believe will be a bulk rare throughout its life.

The two cards that people most disagreed with my take in my set review last week were [card]Sliver Hivelord[/card] and [card]Waste Not[/card]. The opposing concensus was that I underestimated the possibility for strong casual attraction to these two cards, and that their prices would continue to stay afloat at their current levels. While I don’t disagree that these are casual home-runs, I think that these will slowly decline, then creep back up over time—after about a year. If we look at [card]Consuming Aberration[/card], it managed to drop to near bulk rare status before making its slow climb up to $4. I think it was fairly obvious that the card was a winner for all of the homebrew mill players, but there’s not enough up-front demand right now to keep the price high on Hivelord and Waste Not, in my opinion. We’ll see them drop lower, and you’ll have your chance to pick them up then.

Back to the Set Review

Stupid Oversized Garruk

Current TCG average: $4

I’m scrolling down TCGplayer’s list of M15 cards, and this thing actuallly popped up. You know, the thing you get in your prerelease box that you can “fight against”, like the hydra from Theros and the bunch of minotaurs from Born of the Gods? I have no idea why this is worth anything, but if you can find an out for yours, do it. I checked the completed listings on eBay, and it looks like human beings have actually purchased these for at least $3 each. Check all of the good buylists (ABU/Card Kingdom/Adventures On, if you don’t remember), ask the casuals who didn’t go to the prerelease, ask your mom, ask everyone. If you can get value out of this thing, I applaud you. It was free, so you could even throw it on eBay/TCGplayer yourself and buy a drink with the money to celebrate your accomplishment of selling it. Predicted price: $1, I guess?

[card]Soul of Theros[/card]

Current TCG average: $3

I really like this card, but I don’t know where it goes in a competitive deck. If Mono-White Devotion exists (and I want it to), its six-drop is obviously [card]Elspeth, Sun’s Champion[/card], not this. Its ability is certainly powerful and auto-wins you the game if you grant your entire team that buff against a mono red deck, but you’re spending 12 mana overall. If it sees overwhelming levels of constructed play, then feel free to rub it in my face, but I’m not holding my breath. You certainly don’t want it over [card]Sun Titan[/card] in 99 percent of EDH decks, anyway. Predicted price: $2

[card]Hushwing Gryff[/card]

Current TCG average: $3

As a known fan of [card]Birthing Pod[/card], I really cringe when I see this thing hit the board. I can’t [card]Qasali Pridemage[/card] it and I can’t [card]Murderous Redcap[/card] it, so my only outs in the entire 75 are [card]Izzet Staticaster[/card], [card]Path to Exile[/card] (from the board), or hoping they’re dumb enough to swing into a [card]Restoration Angel[/card]. That being said, it’s not the end of the world for any other deck out there. Twin wields an arsenal of burn and bounce spells to take care of it, and it can’t fit into any maindeck. We know that some sideboard cards have a history of skyrocketing ([card]Spellskite[/card] and [card]Fulminator Mage[/card]) in price, but those are also older cards with much higher utility. If anything, you’ll be able to find this for a dollar, maybe $2, in September. However, foils of this will be extremely hot. Those will be safe even at $10 or higher, because, well, foil Modern-playable cards do that nowadays.

[card]Genesis Hydra[/card]

Current TCG average: $3

I think our own Jason Alt said it perfectly when discussing the value of a casual hydra: you have to be one of the top 10 hydras ever printed to be of any significant value. This is not one. Yes, you basically get to cascade for X, but your creature will be significantly underpowered in exchange, and you can’t get three-drops if you cast it for four mana. It will still be a casual hit because slapping a mini-[card]Genesis Wave[/card] onto a big green thing is fun and exciting and omgwowfreespells, but its price won’t go crazy. In September, I’ll be buying these for a quarter and throwing them in my dollar box, then immediately selling out. Rinse and repeat. Predicted price: $1, maybe $2.

[card]Soul of Shandalar[/card]

Current TCG average: $3

I honestly really like this card, but I’m not confident in its price. It fights and wins against four of the other Souls (five if [card]Soul of Phyrexia[/card] can’t pony up the mana), and its ability is always relevant. Even if the board is locked up tight, you can always dome them for three. In a different format, I’d like this guy. In fact, I’m more confident about him post-rotation than the other Souls. However, he’ll drop to being a bulk mythic before then, and that’s where I’m scooping them up. Predicted Price: $1-2

[card]Chief Engineer[/card]

Current TCG average: $2

This will be a bulk rare eventually. It might not get there by September, but it’s certainly not planting a seed for the next block like [card]Steel Overseerr[/card] did. It’s just a flavorful, top-down designed card that they were able to fit into the set. It will probably be thrown into [card]Sharuum the Hegemon[/card] and [card]Memnarch[/card] EDH decks around the world, but that won’t change its dollar-rare status. The fact that it’s not an artifact itself puts a huge damper on its potential. Maybe it will creep up to $3 or $4 eventually, but we’re talking multiple years in the future now. This is yet another “foils will be better than double” card though, so keep that in mind. Predicted price: $1.

[card]Terra Stomper[/card]

Current TCG average: $3

If you weren’t aware, there are five rares in M15 (in addition to a few other commons and uncommons that aren’t really relevant) that cannot be obtained through booster packs, but will be included in those free little starter decks that stores and conventions give out for free to introduce new players to the game. [card]Terra Stomper[/card] is the rare of the green deck, and for some reason the lowest available copy on TCGplayer is $3, even when the Zendikar one is about a dollar. This will meet up with that one at $1 before long. Even though there are probably fewer in circulation, the kind of player that enjoys a [card]Terra Stomper[/card] usually doesn’t care about the edition of his or her [card]Terra Stomper[/card]. These are awesome sells out of a dollar box to casuals, because 8/8 tramples that laugh at counterspells are their kind of card. Predicted price: $1

[card]Soul of Zendikar[/card]

Current TCG average: $2

I really don’t like this card. I think I’d honestly rather have [card]Hydra Broodmother[/card] or [card]Hornet Queen[/card] most of the time. While its ability is always relevant like Shandalar, it’s certainly much less powerful. Bulk mythic, since green obviously has many things more powerful than this in 99-card land. Predicted price: bulk mythic.

[card]Chasm Skulker[/card]

Current TCG average: $1.50

On the other hand, I love this little guy. I’m on the hunt for a foil copy to include in my [card]Marchesa, the Black Rose[/card] EDH deck. Blue loves drawing cards, and your investment isn’t totally wasted when they end up murdering your 11/11. I’d almost always rather have a bunch of islandwalkers than a fatty without evasion, so they almost have to avoid killing it. It obviously doesn’t have applications in Constructed being a three-mana 1/1 that has to wait a turn before becoming a [card]Grey Ogre[/card], so it should drop to bulk rare status before slowly creeping up as the years go by. Predicted price: bulk rare, but start grabbing them for a quarter when it does, at least if you’re into long-term investments.

[card]Soul of Innistrad[/card]
Current TCG average: $2

Does anyone else get irritated at how they keep putting deathtouch on things such as [card]Grave Titan[/card] and this guy? It’s almost never relevant. Anyway, my thoughts on this card are very similar to the other Souls. They probably won’t see high-level Constructed play, because Wizards remembered what happened with the Titans. EDH/Commander also already has a ton of stuff better on the curve, so their place is kind of awkward. I predict bulk mythic, maybe continuing to stay at his current $2. Nothing exciting here, folks. Move along.

[card]Ob Nixilis, Unshackled[/card]

Current TCG average: $1.50

Another card that I need a foil of for Marchesa, so hit me up in the comments if you happen to own one. I’d be happy to trade for it. I’ll warn you first though, that the foil price of this card won’t be going down anytime soon. People like me hunger for this guy in EDH, because it makes casting [card]Path to Exile[/card] that much funnier. Cracking that [card]Verdant Catacombs[/card] stings a bit, and the guy with the judge foil [card]Demonic Tutor[/card] is less happy overall. I fully expect this to stay at its “not bulk rare, but not going up anytime soon” status, much like a lot of these cards coming up. Prediction: $1-2

[card]Preeminent Captain[/card]

Current TCG Average: $1-2

This Lorwyn block guy managed to sneak up to almost $5 before getting hit with the reprint hammer. Is this a foreshadowing of soldier tribal in Khans? Putting [card]Captain of the Watch[/card] into play with this card on turn four is pretty fun for casuals, so grab copies of this card at $1 or under to trade off at $2. It will be a while before this creeps back up to its previous price. Prediction: $1-2.

[card]Hornet Nest[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Bulk rare. Awesome, flavorful bulk rare with amazing design, but bulk rare nonetheless. Maybe it would’ve been a $10 chase rare if they had gone full flavor and added reach, but I guess we’ll never know.

[card]Soul of Ravnica[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Bleh. I remember when people used to play [card]Azure Mage[/card] because it was a cheap body that could draw cards with extra mana, but this is taking it a bit too far. Mayyyybe it sees play as a finisher in a control deck at some point this year as a one-of? There’s not really financial relevance in that though. Bulk mythic.

[card]Spiritbonds[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Maybe there’s a hidden combo where this is amazingly broken, but I doubt it. If neither the trigger or the activation cost additional mana, then I could get behind this being extremely powerful. Unfortunately, I don’t think a [card]Suntail Hawk[/card] machine gets there. Like Hornet Nest, it’s a very flavorful card that just doesn’t get there power-wise. Bulk rare.

[card]Yisan, the Wandering Bard[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

If this guy retains his dollar status, it’s because he’s legendary and nothing else. Wizards felt bad about printing [card]Birthing Pod[/card], so this is its replacement. I am not amused. Bulk rare, but might somehow retain a a TCG average of $.89, which would technically land it in my dollar box forever.

[card]Life’s Legacy[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

If this were an instant, it might be extremely powerful and I might put it in my Savra deck. It’s not. I won’t. It’s a bulk rare.

[card]Polymorphist’s Jest[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Back when [card]Curse of the Swine[/card] was printed, some people suggested that it could have financial legs because of how humorous the concept was. The bacon wave is now a bulk rare, and this will be too.

[card]Indulgent Tormenter[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Bulk. Rare. 

[card]Aetherspouts[/card]

Current TCG average: $1
This could see a decent amount of play in EDH, which could hover its price above that of the lowly bulk we just got done blitzing through. If it does, expect $1, maybe $2. It’s not [card]Cyclonic Rift[/card], but it gives them the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes, lose a lot of draw steps, and kill a lot of tokens, at instant speed. Prediction: $1-2

[card]Hornet Queen[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Interestingly enough, the cheapest available Insect token for Hornet Queen is more expensive than the Hornet Queen itself. I find that funny. If you can grab these at $1, I think that’s a fine idea. The card didn’t climb to $5 for no reason—people wanted it for casual decks and 99-card lists. Being in Standard probably won’t do much for its price either way, but trade your [card]Indulgent Tormentor[/card]s and [card]Polymorphist’s Jest[/card]s for these and the card below. Also of note is that this is the only foil printing of the card (hint, hint). Predicted price: $1, but slowly creeping up after a year.

[card]Avacyn, Guardian Angel[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Well, this is certainly a weaker version of the $30 8/8 casual all-star we know and love. However, I don’t think that will stop people from jamming both her and her alternate self in Kaalia decks, and the triple-white mana cost might be relevant to devotion in Standard during the next year (fingers crossed). Avacyn will never be a bulk rare though, due to the fact that legendary angels refuse to be pure bulk. Trade for them at a dollar, there’s no downside. But don’t buy in looking to quadruple your investment in a year. Prediction: $1

[card]Goblin Rabblemaster[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

I keep getting excited about this guy, then realize he just sends the hasted tokens he makes to their deaths. Kind of sad. Anyway, that’s one of the more prevalent reasons that this will be sitting in my $.25 box in September if I can’t dump off the one I own now. Predicted price: Bulk rare.

[card]Return to the Ranks[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

I, much like many of you probably did, immediately thought of [card]Immortal Servitude[/card] at first glance. The difference is that Servitude turns nothing into an army, while this requires an army, to bring back an army? Seems like way too much work. Bulk rare.

[card]Aggressive Mining[/card]

Current TCG average: Bulk rare

This might stay a bulk rare, but hear me out. I think that if the format is right, this could potentially see play in Standard, in the sideboard of a mono-red or other hyper-aggressive deck. If you burn them down to five or six life and have no cards in your hand, this is an amazing topdeck that can dig you to the final points of burn to finish them off. Obviously it’s a bit of a niche scenario, but if I can grab these for bulk rare prices, I’ll toss a couple of playsets in a box, wait to buylist them for $.50 each, and do a mental fist pump. Prediction: Probably still bulk, but here’s hoping!

[card]Stain the Mind[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

Bulk rare. [card]Slaughter Games[/card] is the best we’re going to get, and that’s a bulk rare. These aren’t worth money, unless you own a time machine and go back to when [card]Cranial Extraction[/card] was first printed.

[card]Necromancer’s Stockpile[/card]

Current TCG average: $1

No matter how badly you want this to work with [card]Gravecrawler[/card], it’s not worth it. [card]Faithless Looting[/card] and other cards exist. Bulk rare.

[card]Obelisk of Urd[/card]
Current TCG average: $1

I’m pretty sure you just want [card]Eldrazi Monument[/card] or [card]Coat of Arms[/card] over this, because both of those just let you kill your opponent during the turn you cast them, or the very next one. Tapping your creatures to cast this so you can’t attack with them is counterproductive, and that hurts its price. Bulk rare.

[card]Jalira, Master Polymorphist[/card[

Current TCG average: Bulk rare

Grab these as throw-ins, because people love legendary creatures. I’ll happily put these in my dollar box. She might still be bulk in two months, but if you can get copies for dirt cheap, go for it. Prediction: Still bulk!

[card]Kurkesh, Onnakke Ancient[/card]

Current TCG average: Bulk rare

For whatever reason, this guy is also a bulk rare. He seems very strong in the red-based artifact EDH decks (obviously), so I don’t think he deserves pure bulk rare status. Stash this guy away in your specs box and wait. Just wait. Than wait some more. Prediction: Still bulk, but great target for throw-ins.

[card]Crucible of Fire[/card]

Current TCG average: Bulk rare

Wait, isn’t the Shards version of this almost $4? Yes, it is. The reprint will satisfy all of the casual players who are looking for copies for their dragon decks, but look to trade other bulk rares into stuff like this, because it’ll creep up over time. Not soon, but over time. Predicted price: Bulk rare, but long-term spec

[card]In Garruk’s Wake[/card[

Current TCG average: Bulk rare

I actually doubt that this will go above bulk rare status, because there’s a promo out there. While it’s a strict upgrade to [card]Plague Wind[/card], most players who want this for EDH will want foil copies, and the promo provides an additional foil outlet. There are enough of these in the market for everyone and then some. Prediction: Bulk rare, maybe going above that in 2018.

A Whole Lot of Bulk

Well, that’s it from me.

Every other rare in the set doesn’t look like it’s going to rise up above bulk status at all, in my opinion. I’ve gone far beyond my expected word count, so I’ll wrap this up quick. Thanks to everyone who read the entire set review. Feel free to comment with constructive criticism or add more to the discussion below! You can also leave a comment on the Reddit thread for the article, or hit me up on Facebook/Twitter to talk about M15! There seems to be something for everyone in this set, casual and competitive alike. Until next time!

 

Conjured Currency #22: Reviewing M15, Part 1

Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I don’t normally get the itch to write set reviews, but I’m once again sitting at my computer at 9:30pm. I think my editor, Danny Brown, is sitting outside of my window holding his newborn child in one arm and a crossbow in the other [Editor’s note: Mages don’t need crossbows, DJ], so I figured I should decide on a subject before things take a darker turn. Not that anything could be as dark as the current awful theme for the new magicthegathering.com home page that I immediately stopped trying to use to find the card image gallery.

There are a couple of reasons I didn’t do a standard set review for Journey into Nyx or Born of the Gods. One is that there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to be responsible for my readers losing money if someone decides to blindly follow my advice and invest $200 into a card that turns out to be complete bulk garbage. I would feel terrible about causing someone else to lose money—that’s sort of the opposite of my goal in writing this column every week. Accountability for others’ financial decisions aside, I just feel that the concept of the financial set review is beaten to a bloody pulp. I remember back when the most expensive card in my possession was a single [card]Eldrazi Monument[/card], and I would eagerly await Craig Wescoe articles on TCGplayer to plan out my trades for the next couple of months. Now you can listen to Brainstorm Brewery for my bosses’ opinions on the set, check out Travis’s thoughts on MTG Price, or read Ben Bleiweiss’s take (if you’re an SCG Premium member). Maybe it’s just because I’m more immersed in the finance world then four years ago, but I sort of feel that my opinion is just a drop in the bucket compared to the more experienced reviewers who have been doing this for a lot longer than I have.

On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll influence anyone to sell their house to buy into [card]Mass Calcify[/card], as long as I start the review by saying one thing to clear my own conscience: don’t do that.

Now let’s state some controversial opinions and make attempts to predict some price trends in this awesome new set! I’ll be skipping over the “it’s extremely obvious that this is a bulk rare” cards, and trying to keep myself under 2,000 words as to not bore you to death. This may result in a part two next week. If you want to start a discussion about a card that I made the decision to pass over or am waiting until next week to get to, feel free to do so in the comments. My target prices will be an estimate for two months from now, for the week of September 15.

Disclaimer: I accidentally prepared for this set review by completely neglecting to read or listen to any other set review that I mentioned in the opening paragraphs. All predictions are based off of my own thoughts or opinions, and those of other non-financiers.

Let’s Get to the Cards

[card]Nissa, Worldwaker[/card]

Current TCG average: $35

Can you say “Planeswalker Hype?” If you’re new to Magic finance, one of the first rules of the road is that Planeswalkers are almost never correctly priced coming out of the gates, and this is no exception. Nissa will not snap Standard in half. I think she’ll be hard-pressed to find a role in the format due to requiring such a vast number of Forests, but might see play as a one- or two-of in the Modern [card]Genesis Wave[/card] deck that tends to run Forests and [card]Utopia Vow[/card]s. Around $8 seems correct after the dust settles in two months.

[card]Garruk, Apex Predator[/card]

Current TCG average: $23

More Planeswalker privilege—Garruk seems very Nicol Bolas-esque to me. He has an extremely high mana cost, but I don’t see him being worth ramping to in Standard. His ultimate still requires you to have a few creatures to win you the game, and [card]Thoughtseize[/card] traditionally shreds the possibility of ramping to cool things. Even if he does see play, his mana cost restricts him to being a two-of at best. I’m going to be conservative and assume that casual appeal and the EDH crowd will keep him hovering at $10 before Khans of Tarkir comes out.

[card]Ajani, Steadfast[/card]

Current TCG average: $12

Ajani certainly raises an eyebrow by being one of the first cards to blatantly speed up the increase of loyalty counters on planeswalkers you control. However, he still requires you to possess creatures in play to gain maximum value from either of his first two abilities. He’s splashable, which would definitely be a huge boon if his home is in a Superfriends deck consisting of a large number of different ‘walkers to abuse his -2 ability. However, Wizards has certainly been toning down the power level of planeswalkers these past few years, and I doubt they gave us the pieces for a highly competitive deck such as that to be available. I actually think he’s much more fairly priced than Nissa, but they’ll be labeled with the same price sticker in due time. $8.

[card]Sliver Hivelord[/card]

Current TCG average: $12

They really screwed this up flavor-wise by not making it a 7/7 akin to [card]Sliver Overlord[/card], [card]Sliver Queen[/card], and [card]Sliver Legion[/card]. We all know that there’s the one individual at our LGS who wants this card, and he/she only wants a single copy. Not a whole ton to say about this, but once it drops down to the $5 I expect, I think it’s fine to grab a couple in trade for the long-run. Foils will be especially hot, so if those somehow end up below $20, they’ll be strong buys. Two months from now: $5.

[card]Jace, the Living Guildpact[/card]

Current TCG average: $10

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m puzzled at evaluating this card. On one hand, Wizards has never created an unplayable Jace. On the other hand, his +1 certainly looks like hot garbagee. On the weird, mutated third hand, a possible six starting loyalty for four mana is hooooooot (that’s an exaggerated “hot,” not an owl screaming in pain). I’m personally pretty stumped, and don’t know which way to lean. There are so many aspects of him that look promising, and a ton of others that make him look like trash. If he doesn’t find a home in Standard in the first few weeks and goes down to $5, I’ll actively trade for a bunch. He’s certainly not the next Tibalt (I really hope that one doesn’t come back to bite me). Predicted price in two months: ????

[card]Chord of Calling[/card]

Current TCG average: $10

What I do know is that Chord of Calling is a consistently good Magic card and I give two thumbs up to anyone who trades away their currently $10 M15 walkers for Chords of Calling. I expect this card to see a lot of play over the next year, and I think it has the power to creep from the $10 where it currently sits to $15. I know that there were people who felt priced out of the Modern Pod deck by being unable to afford this card at $40, so the reprint obviously satiates another separate demand in addition to Standard. The card is good, people. Predicted price: $15.

[card]Soul of New Phyrexia[/card]

Current TCG average: $7

I had this card in my Prerelease pool over the weekend, and I can honestly say that I would have rather had almost any other Soul in play at any given time. It helped me brute force a game or two through, but one huge red flag I noticed was that it doesn’t always generate an advantage. While the red one can always put your opponent on a clock and the green one can always provide a creature, making your guys indestructible doesn’t always do something. The other side of the coin is that it fits into literally any deck, so it can at least fight for a slot with every other Soul at any given point. Overall though, I think it’s a bit overpriced and won’t find a home in Standard. I won’t be putting it in any of my EDH decks, but there’s probably still enough demand to hold it at $3 or $4 in two months time.

[card]Waste Not[/card]

Current TCG average: $6

Really? This thing is $6? Where’s that demand coming from? I don’t think, “YAY, I HAD A PART IN DESIGNING IT” is worth that much coin, so I’m a bit confused. I highly doubt it will have a place in Standard, and while I’m throwing the one I opened in my [card]Nath of the Gilt-Leaf[/card] Enchantress deck, I see it being a dollar or two down the road. [card]Liliana’s Caress[/card] kills people much quicker.

[card]Perilous Vault[/card]

Current TCG average: $6

I’ve heard some murmuring of this seeing play over [card]Oblivion Stone[/card] in Modern Tron, and I can understand that. It’s a colorless BOOM effect for those few Commander decks that don’t give a hoot about abusing the hell out of their graveyard like I do do, and for that it deserves more than bulk mythic pricing. I think $3 sounds about right in the near future. Some EDH applicability, very minor Modern applicability, and maybe even a one-of in a super grindy spell-based Standard deck.

[card]Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth[/card]

Current TCG average: $6

God, how the mighty have fallen. If you dredge through my tweets from several months ago, you’ll see that I bought a Time Spiral block collection that contained six Urborgs. I already had a few prior to that, and I had a playset of extra ones left when this got spoiled. Within the hour, I had an order placed with Card Kingdom to sell that playset for $24 each. Other than knocking the condition of one of them down to EX and only giving me $18, they honored the original pricing of their buylist, which I was ecstatic to see, and I recommend selling to them in future similar situations.

I expect the pricing on this to stay static for a long time, fulfilling all of the current demand for EDH and a bit of Standard play. However, EDH players tend not to get rid of decks unless they absolutely have to. They just make new ones. Demand for this will steadily increase over time, and it will eventually peek its head above $10 again, but not for a while. Prediction: $5 or $6.

[card]Chandra, Pyromaster[/card]

Current TCG average: $5

This card was all the rage last year, hitting as high as $40 after making an attempt to replace [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] as a source of four mana card advantage in red, and seeing minor Legacy play in the [card]Painter’s Servant[/card] deck. I think it’s safe to say that the hype is over and that the card is overall mediocre. Chandra, Pyromaster, is not amazing, but once again: not Tibalt. She’s a ‘walker that I’m always fine with trading for at $5, because planeswalkers are easy to sell and there’s very little possibility of downside. Predicted price: $5.

[card]Liliana Vess[/card]

Current TCG average: $5

After several printings, this lone survivor of the original five planeswalkers was still managing to climb past the $10 mark. This reprint certainly served to slice that price in half, and it will probably stick for the foreseeable future, following a similar trajectory to Urborg. Demand will be satisfied for collectors and casual players for the moment, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to trade other random $5 Standard cards into Vess if you have your eyes on the long road. Predicted price in two months: $5. Predicted price at this time next year? $10.

[card]Llanwowar Wastes[/card], [card]Battlefield Forge[/card], [card]Shivan Reef[/card], [card]Yavimaya Coast[/card], [card]Caves of Koilos[/card]

Current TCG average: $2-4, depending on the colors

Although they won’t see as much play as the shock lands did in Standard, these are dual lands that come in untapped. If you bought a set for $12 and actually want to play with them, you won’t be feeling too terrible and they won’t be bulk rares. They’re mediocre but playable, and their price will reflect that, probably not budging much in their not too glorious life throughout Standard. Predicted Price: $2 to $5, depending on what the flavor of the month is in Standard

[card]Scuttling Doom Engine[/card]

Current TCG average: $4

Am I missing something? I feel like this will almost certainly be a bulk rare within a month, due to very little Standard play and enough six-mana artifacts in the casual circuit to make this much less appealing than its current price reflects. I’m glad I don’t own any of this weird artifact bug so I don’t have to be in a rush to get rid of them. If I’m missing some reason that this should be played in Standard over anything else at a similar mana cost, let me know. I’m lost. Predicted price: bulk rare.

[card]Sliver Hive[/card]

Current TCG average: $4

This probably has more demand than the Hivelord, as it’s more viable in the 60-card sliver decks that are out there and unsleeved. I think this can actually share a $5 price tag with its mythic sliver friend. Foils of this will be especially sick, and you should pick them up if you happen to find them for a 2x multiplier. Predicted price: $5.

[card]The Chain Veil[/card]

Current TCG average: $4

Well, this is certainly unique. We finally get something that lets us utilize a single planeswalker ability more than once per turn (outside of weird blink shenanigans). I still think that there’s too much hype around this even at $4, and you’ll be able to find it for half that down the road. It costs eight freaking mana to get even the first use out of it—you can play two decent other walkers for that cost. I highly doubt that casual “wow” appeal will keep it from plummeting down to $2 for the foreseeable future, but I could be wrong. Predicted price: $2 to $4.

Wrapping Up (For Now)

Overall, most of the expensive stuff in the set is overpriced, as usual. There are a couple rares that I think have the capacity to go up, and you’ll see my picks of bulk rares that I think have potential Standard playability. I’d rather not go over 2,500 words in a single article, so I think I’ll stop here and save the lower-end stuff for next week. If you enjoyed my thoughts and opinions on M15, let me know! I’d be glad to do more of these in the future if I knew they were read and enjoyed.  On the other hand, keep me updated if you’d rather have me stick to the theoretical stuff involving intuitive ways to work Magic Finance that aren’t as well known. Until next time!

Conjured Currency #21: Tackling the Boring Parts of MTG Finance

Last Time on Conjured Currency

Welcome back, newly knighted experts of bulk Magic cards! For the past couple weeks, we’ve focused on how to go full Golgari in the world of MTG finance, focusing on the “trash” that nobody else cares about. If you’re not up to speed on what to do with the thousands of commons and uncommons stored in your closet, I recommend checking both articles out here and here, with absolutely zero bias whatsoever (NB: there may be some bias). As a small follow-up to both of those articles, I’d like to mention that Craigslist does in fact work, and it’s a great way to meet new potential friends and customers. A few days ago, I sold an 11,000-card starter collection to a new player who I met on Craigslist, and it may have been the longest consensual Craigslist meet-up in history. I was able to teach her a lot about the game, and she went home happy and (hopefully) willing to come to me with any future Magic needs!

The collection contained 1,000 cards of each color, plus five random 1,000-count boxes of commons and uncommons, 200 of each basic land, approximately 15 rares from my dollar box, a dozen or so bulk rares, six booster packs from various sets in Standard, and a [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card], so she’d have at least one powerful and competitive card to start out with. As long as you make sure you look and sound like you know what you’re doing (and actually knowing what you’re doing doesn’t hurt either), then you shouldn’t have an issue snowballing the number of collections you start to buy and sell. I just wanted to mention this to show that Craigslist doesn’t have to be the place where you just throw a bunch of cards in the back of someone’s car and binge on Amazon that night with the profits, never to see that person again. Real (consensual) business relationships can be built off of that site!

Laziness

I had a bit of trouble coming up with a topic this week, so I’m going to tie that theme into the article itself. I’m a very lazy, procrastinating person. I absolutely hate doing actual work that doesn’t provide with an immediate, satisfying result. Some parts of Magic finance are fun, like the parts where you buy a huge collection for under buylist value and dig out the treasure. Selling cards in person is awesome, because you get to hang out and socialize while getting some extra spending money. On the other hand, buylisting those thousands of [card]Go for the Throat[/card]s and [card]Manaweft Sliver[/card]s make me want to never want to touch Magic cards ever again. Going on the computer and monotonously typing numbers into a list is not fun for me at all. Actually alphabetizing my bulk rare boxes so that I can find cards for my friends with ease took a level of focus and concentration I didn’t think I had in me.

The end result of this is having several thousand cards sitting in boxes, sorted by color but not by set or alphabetical order, and having months fly by with me refusing to touch them. Because seriously, League of Legends is that much more attractive to me in the short term. My solution? Convince someone else to do it. I’m not talking about the “scam your little brother into mowing the lawn for $1 when your parents are paying you $5” routine, but it’s something that I’ve found helps me teach someone else about Magic finance while getting my own work done with much less effort on my part. My best friend, Sean, has a much higher patience for the tedious process of buylisting than I do (Heliod bless him), so we worked out an arrangement where he takes 15 percent of whatever the buylist order comes out to when the check comes. In return, he takes care of all of the sorting/typing/grading for me. He also gets to learn about all of the cards that I tend to pick first-hand, why I pick them, and all of the other great parts about Magic finance that I’ve already vomited onto this site in previous articles. As long as I keep track of the prices that I pay and what my profit looks like, I’m not worried about losing a percentage if it means I get more personal time.

Insert Amazing Segue Here

This tip isn’t exactly how to make money off of Magic, but more of how to realize that selling cards isn’t a bad thing. That sounds completely weird and obvious, but it actually took a while for me to figure out. I used to buy way more at buylist than I would ever need or use, and then just never sell things. I enjoyed being the guy who had a huge collection and trade binder—basically having a good chunk of my bank account in my binder. I guess it was to impress people? I don’t know, I was young. I don’t know if anyone else suffers from the same problem, but I’ve gotten much better lately. I’ve realized that cards I don’t have sleeved up to play are often just waiting to be turned into money to buy something that U have been desperately wanting lately, but didn’t think I could afford.

With all that I had invested into this game at an early age, it took me way too long to realize that real-world expenses are actually a thing. And you know what? It’s okay to “lose value” on luxuries like going to the movies or eating out at a nice restaurant once in a while. Being someone who specializes in finance doesn’t mean I (or you) have to be that guy in the new [card]Greed[/card] art who has a lot of money (or cards) and nothing to do with it.

Random Thoughts

Seeing as we just got done talking about bulk commons and uncommons, I’m throwing out a couple of picks from M15 that you shouldn’t leave lying around on the table after your sealed event is over.

[card]Constricting Sliver[/card], [card]Diffusion Sliver[/card], [card]Leeching Sliver[/card], [card]Belligerent Sliver[/card], [card]Venom Sliver[/card]: There will always be a demand for slivers. Thousands of years from now, when aliens find a smoking, war-ravaged Earth, they will find the corpse of a Magic player holding his slivers close to his heart. Pick these. Someone will want them. Buylists will probably want the black and green ones.

[card]Mind Sculpt[/card]: Reprint is annoying, but I can usually get dimes for these when shipping buylist orders (I’m also fine with taking 8.5 cents after Sean’s cut).

[card]Lightning Strike[/card]: Standard staple. Sometimes worth a dime.

[card]Illusory Angel[/card]: Potential to be broken in Modern. Maybe with Phyrexian mana? I don’t know. I’d rather have them set aside just in case.

[card]Military Intelligence[/card]: Could be nothing, but it’s also no additional investment and continuous upside.

My favorite benefit to all of these picks is that there’s no real risk in picking them from Sealed or Draft pools: you’re just grabbing them for practically free and setting them aside. Are there other cards you’re picking out of M15 bulk in the future? Let me know in the comments section below or on social media! If you have anything you’d like me to discuss moving forward, I’d love to hear your suggestions. Until next time!

Conjured Currency #20: Buying Bulk

Sequels are Always Better than the Original

 

Welcome back, speculators and players alike. Normally I’d use this segment to look back at last week’s article and amplify a specific point that I failed to mention, or answer a question from a reader. Instead, this whole week’s article aims to be a part two of last week’s starting piece on how to deal with bulk common and uncommon parts of collections. We’ve already gone over the basics of “picking” through bulk for the dimes and dollars that others have left behind, and done a quick overview of your quickest methods available to exchange those cards for cash.

This week, I’ll answer a couple of questions from readers regarding how we can find collections containing bulk commons and uncommons, and alternative methods to sell than the “1k boxes sold on Craigslist or Facebook” option.

Buying Lots of Cards for Little Money

Other players:

One of the best reasons to deal with bulk commons and uncommons is that the cards are ones that 99.99998% of the Magic population doesn’t give a damn about (source of statistic withheld for safety of experimenter). Your average PTQ grinder and FNM goer don’t care what happens to their [card]Skull Rend[/card]s or their [card]Charging Badger[/card] after the draft or sealed event is over. After Johnny opens a booster box and has his pile of rares and mythics sleeved and in his binder, the chaff is often taken home and thrown in a closet to forget about or donate to a new player years down the road. Being offered cash for these cards becomes highly appealing when they’re doing nothing but collecting dust. As usual, don’t go offering to buy stuff while at your LGS without the owner’s permission. In my experience, store owners usually don’t care if you want to buy bulk commons and uncommons, but always ask first; better safe than sorry.

Due to the fact that those cards will never see the light of day, you need to make other people aware that you’re in the market for that particular product. Hang around after a booster box opening or draft, and offer $2.00 for the leftovers. A booster box has 36 packs, multiplied by 14 commons and uncommons per pack, equals roughly 500 cards, depending on the foils and [card]Banishing Light[/card]s that they remove. Your friend doesn’t have to carry the box home and throw it under his/her bed, and they get an extra soda and candy bar out of it.

As long as you don’t pay more than $4.00 for bulk that you know is probably devoid of [card]Banishing Light[/card]s, you’ll do fine. I personally pay $5.00 per thousand on collections that could have some spicier numbers; usually anything printed before Innistrad. That’s where you’ll find the [card]Exsanguinate[/card]s, [card]Go for the Throat[/card]s, and [card]Palladium Myr[/card]. Find a buy price, and stick to it.

Store Owners:

Not every LGS owner has multiple employees to help them sort through the stuff that they buy. If you’ve been following my column for a while, you know I’m a huge fan of setting up deals with the proprietor of the establishment where you play cards, and this is no exception. I’ve found [card]Might of Old Krosa[/card]s in a bulk box before, and if you make your presence known to the owner of the store, you can set up an agreement where you get to take home the thousands of cards that the owner doesn’t want to deal with at a bulk rate, and pull some nice gems out. Overall, it’s extremely important to make yourself known, and ensure that other people are aware you want their bulk. There are many ways to bring up the subject: “Looks like we’re $5 off in my favor in this trade. Do you have any bulk commons and uncommons at home you can bring next Friday? I’m always interested in picking up extra cards, and we can call it even at 1,000 bulk cards.”

Garage Sale Hunting:

This probably has the lowest success rate out of anything in Magic finance, but it’s still fun to take a weekend and go yard sale-ing, hoping that the next house has the dust-covered binder full of dual lands with a $20 sticker on it. It’s certainly the season for garage sales, so take a friend who might be interested in something else at the sales, and enjoy the summer weather. Considering Magic players and console video gamers are often in the same parts of the Venn diagram, you can usually score some great deals on retro video games as well!

 

Easy Estimating

 

You’ll remember from last week (or maybe you won’t, if you didn’t read the article or have extremely short-term memory loss) that a trick for estimating the number of cards in a stack is to use the side of an unsleeved card as a measuring stick that is 200 cards wide. I highly recommend that you spread this tip like wildfire, because it makes it much more likely for your friends and customers to guesstimate stacks of 200 than laboriously count to 20,000. If you own a portable kitchen scale, you can also weigh 1,000 cards. I have a cheap scale that I bought at Wal-Mart for $10, and it says that a 1k box with approximately 1,000 cards in it weighs 3 pounds and 8 ounces. This makes the whole process quicker for everyone. As an aside, the kitchen scale also helps when weighing packages to ship via PayPal, so it’s not a bad item to have on hand. 

Craigsrisk?

That’s a pretty horrible play on words, but Craigslist is often viewed as a risk for buyers. What if you buy 5,000 cards, then get home and you find 4,999 white-bordered [card]Circle of Protection: Black[/card] and one [card]Goldmeadow Dodger[/card]? Well, that kinda sucks. But it’s ok, as long as you follow a single golden rule. If you take one thing from these two articles, or any Magic finance article really, be it this: Don’t overpay. If you paid $16 for those 5,000 cards, go find someone who pays $5.00 per thousand, use the extra $4 to buy a gallon of gas to cover a part of the trip, and enjoy the fact that you got to get outside and enjoy the fresh air from sitting in your room and looking at Magic cards for 14 hours straight. We’ve all bought mediocre to bad collections, but as long as you pay less than what you can immediately flip it for, you’ll do fine. If you plan on doing some weekend Craigslist hunting, you’ll want to know a few signs to look for in a good advertisement.

Good CL example lot

 

I actually just contacted the creator of this ad, and am awaiting his response. 27,000 commons and uncommons is $135, and 1,000 bulk rares would be $100 at the least. His initial asking price is a bit higher than what we’d like to pay, but he does have the magic words “or make me an offer” included, so he probably needs the money. In addition, there were some other notables as I scrolled through the list, like [card]Braid of Fire[/card], [card]Defense Grid[/card], and [card]Porphyry Nodes[/card]. Depending on what else I see when I meet with the owner, there’s a good chance that I’ll be able to make an offer somewhere around $250 cash, and drive home with the collection. Even if there’s literally nothing in the 28,000 pieces of bulk (which I highly doubt), we didn’t overpay, and we can make our money back immediately to any number of buylists if we have to.

 

Abracadabra

New players and parents alike love the term “instant collection”, and you probably have the pieces to make them. All we need is a bunch of mixed color commons and uncommons, long boxes, basic lands, a few bulk rares, and maybe a decent rare that’s worth a couple of dollars. Throw it all together, and we have the magic power to turn “bulk” into a “collection”. Let’s take a look at an ebay listing that has over 150 completed sales, so we know that it works:

ebay instant collection

 

If you put 400 cards in a box, you can probably ship for just over $5. After ebay fees, you’re probably making $7-8 dollars, but that’s certainly better than $6 per thousand by throwing them up on Craigslist. However, this path certainly involves more effort. You have to set up the eBay account, create the listing, constantly make enough collections to sell, make sure that there’s not more than a playset of each card, and deal with online feedback and such. I personally already feel like shooting myself after dealing with bulk commons and uncommons, so I don’t want to put more effort into something like this. I have, however, created instant collections to sell locally. It’s much more rewarding and satisfying to sell to someone who will continue to be a friend and customer as they progress in their Magic lifetime.
For a quick recap before I head out to climb a mountain in the Alps and meditate alone while trying ot come up with a topic for next week: Craigslist, Facebook, and other dealers are your fastest methods to dump bulk commons and uncommons that you’ve picked over. If you’re interested in getting creative and putting more effort in, try your hand at eBay or Amazon lots, price competitively, and play the waiting game. In order to buy the lots that you want to pick and sell, be sure to never go above your decided rate, never pay for what you don’t see, and be vocal. Thanks for reading, i’d love to hear stories of your past collection buys, and tips that you used to make the most to turn [card]trash to treasure[/card]!

Conjured Currency #19: Bulk Pickings

(Cold)snap Back to Last Week

Welcome back, readers of Brainstorm Brewery material. I think I’m getting into a routine where at the beginning of each article, I’ll bring up an insightful comment from the previous week to bring full attention to it. Last week we scratched the surface of token finance, and I forgot to mention one of the more expensive tokens that currently exists. Reddit user one_among_the_fence brought up the Marit Lage token from Coldsnap. Made by [card]Dark Depths[/card], this 20/20 creature is the second-most expensive item from Coldsnap, coming in at $20, losing only to [card]Dark Depths[/card] itself. Not everyone wants to use Gerry Thompson as their Legacy Lands win condition, and because it was a promo for the release of the set, I highly doubt that we’ll see any more printings of the token. If you plan on putting 20/20 flyers into play and want to use the real thing, I don’t think picking them up now is a bad idea.

Bulk What?

The week before Tokens, we briefly went over the definition of the word bulk when referring to Magic cards. However, I didn’t go into detail on what financial relevance bulk commons and uncommons can have. These aren’t the cards you see in your local FNM binders, or in the display case at your LGS. In this article, I want to start talking about how you can make money off of the four or five opened Return to Ravnica booster boxes sitting in your friends’ closets that are full of [card]Catacomb Slug[/card]s, [card]Sellers of Songbirds[/card], [card]Axebane Guardian[/card]s, and [card]Izzet Guildgate[/card]s. We’ll go over methods of picking your bulk, how to organize it, and the various methods to get rid of it for a profit.

Different Types of Picks

Literally forever ago (well, back in January), I wrote an article about a bunch of commons and uncommons that were worth “picking” out of your collection to sell or trade separately, but I never really went over how you should go about it. If you buy a collection of commons and uncommons and you know it hasn’t been touched since the owner pulled all of the rares out, you want to have a definitive strategy to maximize your profits and minimize time spent on the project. Set a baseline for the value of cards that you’ll pull out from your bulk. My personal number is $.10, and you can find that price on a buylist aggregator like mtg.gg or mtgprice.com. I took some advice from our own Jason Alt on this matter, and separate my picks into multiple different piles. I have a separate pile for actual “picks” like [card]Lightning Bolt[/card], [card]Springleaf Drum[/card], and [card]Go for the Throat[/card], one for cards that don’t sell on a buylist for more than a dime but I know people at my LGS will need on a regular basis ([card]Titan’s Strength[/card], [card]Gods’ Willing[/card], [card]Spiteful Returned[/card]), a pile for each basic land, tokens, random foils, and anything considered MP or worse in condition.

The “picks” box gets alphabetized and sorted by color, as do the tokens, and the “not yet picks.” This makes them easy to buylist, and easy to find when a friend needs a set of [card]Grey Merchant of Asphodel[/card] five minutes before FNM. The MP/HP cards get thrown out, and bulk foils get their own box to eventually be bulked off as well. I sort the basic lands by type, because I often make custom starter decks for new players, and I plan on running local drafts at my college soon, so it will be easy to grab handfuls of a specific color. If you don’t give a damn about your basic lands, you’re in luck: we’ll go over how to get rid of those in bulk later on, because this article will probably be a two-parter.

Who Wants These Cards?

Now you’ve got your box of picks, and a ton of Magic’s forgotten heroes. The draft leavings that we deserve, but not the ones we need, or something to that effect. The stuff that people who have attended a $40 tournament won’t think twice about ripping in half. Who could possibly want these cards? Believe it or not, there are Magic souls whose hearts haven’t been tainted by the seriousness of competitive play. They play on a level of casual further than any [card]Hermit Druid[/card] EDH player could imagine. They just like owning cards and building as many 78 card unsleeved decks as possible—and there’s nothing wrong with that. So how do we make sure our cards get to them?

  • Dealers

Most people already know this, but it deserves to be said anyway. The absolute baseline for what you should be getting for 1,000 Magic: The Gathering cards is $5.00. I would never sell for anything less than this, just because there are so many stores and aspiring dealers who will pay that amount to either turn and resell, or go treasure hunting themselves. There’s no shame in accepting this price and saving yourself a ton of time, especially if you have a massive amount of cards. I’m currently sitting on at least 100,000 extra cards myself, and considering just accepting a $5 per thousand flat rate if the person is willing to pick them up at my place. If you want to dump them off at a GP, be sure to check with all of the attending vendors well in advance to set up a time and number that they’ll accept. You don’t want to be driving back with all those cards after learning none of the vendors are interested.

  • Craigslist

Yes, I bring up Craigslist and Facebook in almost every article, and you’re probably sick of it. But selling directly to another individual who is interested in your product to actually use and not resell, without having to go through a secondary vendor that costs money (read: eBay), is honestly the best way to go. Let’s look at an example advertisement:

CL ad

Our title is informative, we gave a price, a sample picture of what the customer will be receiving, and made sure they know that it’s not just a billion cases of Born of the Gods. I also recommend that you remember to put the words “cash only” in your advertisement, or else you’ll be constantly spammed with scam offers who want to PayPal you after you ship the cards to god knows where.

I am Not Counting 1,000 Cards Over and Over Again

What if I told you that you don’t have to? Another trick that I learned from our Jason Alt is that the height of a Magic card on its side is exactly 200 unsleeved cards wide. This makes it much easier to estimate piles of 200 (err on the side of caution and estimate in the customer’s favor), and fill your long boxes that you bought in bulk with approximately 1,000 bulk Magic cards, ready to ship or do what you want with.

I’m out of space this time, so I’ll be back next week with part two of dealing with your bulk commons and uncommons. In the meantime, hit me up with any questions on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, the comments section here, signal flare, or telepathic Morse code.

P.S. This is the Part Where I Give You Names of Cards to Speculate On

Except I don’t have any this week. If you’ve been checking your mtgstocks.com every day and have been following MTG finance for a while, you’ll know that summer is generally a very boring time of year for price changes. Other than Conspiracy and upcoming M15, we’re in a rut where we don’t see Modern prices rocketing all over the place. My advice for the next few weeks is to stop looking for the “next big spike” and take some time to organize your collection. Ship off those bulk boxes, do your huge buylist orders now, and set up that online trading list you always wanted to make. Come autumn, we’ll be getting back into a spoiler season people actually care about, and a brand new Standard metagame. Get your busywork done now so you’re cleaned up and ready for the rush when it hits!

Conjured Currency #18: Turning Tokens into Treasure

Note on last week: Welcome back, new buyers and sellers of bulk shipping supplies! Before I go on this week’s  rant, I want to take a moment of reflection on last week, and bring up a comment that Reddit User and store owner TheCardNexus brought to my attention. I showed you guys a place to order mass amounts of toploaders (Cardboardgold.com), but neglected to mention that you should always consider the size of the toploader, and how many cards each one can safely hold. The website I directed you to sells ones that will safely and easily hold two cards in one soft sleeve; anything more than that is a stretch. One method of packaging with toploaders that I have used in the past for larger orders is to use one soft sleeve per two cards, then sandwich the sleeves in between two empty toploaders. Lastly, wrap them up nice and safely with tape. I go for the sandwich route if the order is at least 6+ cards, but you can decide your own method that works for you. As long as the cards don’t move at all in transit, you should be fine.

Diamonds in the Rough

Magic players have a divided opinion on everything. The Reserved List, what deck is strong in a given metagame, fetch land reprints, and personal EDH banned lists. However, this week’s piece is going to discuss a certain subset of players who want to make their decks pretty, while also helping to clear up board staes. Some players are content to use coins, scraps of paper, or the back side of a draft common to represent their Spirits, Soldiers, and Angels. Others prefer to make their own tokens, as evidenced by the hundreds of custom-made [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card] Elementals on eBay right now:

Voice Tokens

Then there are the players who want the exact token from the original set featuring the token-maker. They want to use the blindfolded halo Angels from Zendikar for their [card]Luminarch Ascension[/card] (those are the best Angel tokens, by the way), original Wurms from Scars of Mirrodin for their [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card]s, and the official 9/9 Kraken for [card]Kiora, the Crashing Wave[/card]. Some of these tokens are harder to come by than others, and therefore they cost money. If other people are willing to drop cash on tokens, then there’s definitely money in it for us to dig out the good, the bad, and even the ugly ones (seriously though, you couldn’t pay me to use a Scars of Mirrodin Goblin). Today, let’s learn something about token finance.

SOM Goblin

So ugly

What am I Looking For?

Traditionally, tokens that have been made by rare or mythic cards are harder to come by in the token slot. The previously mentioned [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card] Elemental is bought by SCG and Card Kingdom at $2.00 cash, and you can probably slide it in your trade binder and have people biting at a $4 price tag. Kiora’s Kraken goes for $1.20 to Card Kingdom, and the Wurmcoil twins sell for around $1 each, but I can always ship these in trades at $3. Another  good marker to go by for token value is whether the token is unique. There are many different variants of the 1/1 white Soldier, but there’s only one printing of the 1/1 lifelink Vampire from Dark Ascension, so it’s worth around a dollar.

However, it never hurts to check and be thorough with your search. Some stores are willing to buy random tokens for more than what you would expect. Card Kingdom is buying Modern Masters Elspeth Soldiers for $.54 each, which seems great considering that’s not even new 1/1 white Soldier art. Just off the top of my head, SCG, Card Kingdom, and ABUgames all have tokens on their buylists. I know SCG is infamous for being the “lowest of the low,” but I’m perfectly fine with dumping an infinite number of 1/0 water ponies from [card]Master of Waves[/card] on them for a quarter each.

Promo and Old Tokens

After scanning a couple of stores’ buylists, it looks like even more recent promo tokens from events like the Magic League can have value. That Sliver token from M14 looks absolutely amazing, and if you have zero interest in owning it, it can be turned into 50 cents cash very easily. Centaurs were handed out at the Return to Ravnica prerelease and birds for Dragon’s Maze, so it wouldn’t hurt to go around collecting any of the spares that players don’t care about at future prereleases. If you happen to own any of the older Unglued tokens, or perhaps some promos from years ago sitting in a box, I highly recommend you dig those out and look up some of the values. [card]Squirrel’s Nest[/card] just got a reprint, and some of those squirrel players will be wanting the old Odyssey token to pimp out their decks. As a general rule of thumb: If your token is old-bordered, it’s worth at least a few dollars.

Emblems

Also found in the token slot of some packs, the right planeswalker emblems can fetch a pretty penny. Elspeth’s [card]Indestructibility[/card] emblem from Modern Masters sells for almost $4.00 to Card Kingdom! If you leave the other emblems in your binder close to their respective planeswalkers, you can get a dollar or two extra out of a trade by offering the emblem to go with it (depending on the emblem, of course). Liliana’s [card]Lake of the Dead[/card] emblem might be worth less than a quarter to a buylist, but there are definitely other ways to find non-monetary value out of it. Sometimes when I sell a planeswalker over Facebook or TCGplayer, I include the emblem with the order as a special gift/surprise. A small amount of effort and care leads to some of the nicest feedback on my TCGplayer store, which leads to customers being more likely to do business with me in the future. I’ve also hidden emblems in the sleeve behind the respective ‘walker in my binder, so the person I’m trading with gets a pleasant surprise when she unsleeves it to put in her deck.

Other Alternatives

While eBay recently took down its option of free “Buy It Now” listings for those of us who aren’t large-scale sellers, there are still other options. Instead of posting a Craigslist ad of bulk commons and uncommons, try making one for tokens instead and see if you get any bites. Mix up a thousand random tokens after picking out the gems, and name a price you’re comfortable with getting per creature. Facebook very rarely lets me down when I’m trying to move something, and though I haven’t tried using it for selling tokens, it doesn’t hurt to make some lots and post on your groups to find the token enthusiasts of your community.

Closing Words

Normally I’d post about a card or two that I think is a strong pickup going forward. In the spirit of the theme this week, I’m going to suggest a couple of tokens to scavenge from your draft tables throughout the remaining time of Theros block. There are two gods who make tokens ([card]Heliod, God of the Sun[/card] and [card]Pharika, God of Affliction[/card]), and the Cleric and Snake seem to fit into their respective sets as a “rare” token. Don’t be surprised if a year from now these two enchantment creatures are among the ranks of Wurmcoil Wurms. The gods will always see EDH and casual play, and these two are in the three strongest token colors.

Thanks for reading!

Conjured Currency #17: Bulk What?

The Magic community has a lot of different definitions for the word bulk. Bulk rares are the [card]Conjured Currency[/card] and [card]Whims of the Fates[/card] of the world, the dregs of Magic cards that most often sit collecting dust until they’re shipped off to a dealer for $.10 or $.13 a piece. Bulk commons and uncommons are generally sold as collections of 1,000 cards that have been picked clean of all of the [card]Go for the Throat[/card]s and [card]Young Pyromancer[/card]s. The bulk rate for commons and uncommons is somewhere around $5.00 per thousand. These labels were attached because of the volume at which these types of cards normally move. There’s little point in sending 100 bulk rares to a dealer to get your $10.00 minus shipping costs. However, it makes more sense to get rid of 10,000 at once. In Magic, just like everywhere else, prices decrease as volume increases. But do we take advantage of bulk pricing as often as we should when the items aren’t trading cards?

Bulk Supplies

Today I want to share several websites with you where I buy my shipping and organizational supplies in bulk. I cringe when I look at some of the selling advertisements on Facebook and see people request $4 for shipping with tracking in a bubble mailer. When questioned, they defensively tell you that a bubble mailer costs at least a dollar and that the box of 50 toploaders they bought cost $5. These guys even go to the post office to pay for shipping, which is more expensive than the alternative. I’ll show you where I buy my own bubble mailers, toploaders, and 1,000 boxes. If you’re an FNM trader who doesn’t do a large volume of selling or trading online, this won’t be as useful as for someone who just opened up her TCGplayer store and wants to hit Level 4 ASAP.

Longboxes

I currently use BCW for any of my orders of “long boxes” of varying sizes. There’s a decent probability that your LGS buys its boxes from the same company. The listing says 800 count, but they’ll comfortably hold 1,000 Magic cards. I use the smaller-count boxes to organize my various specs, lands, and tokens. I often fill the 1Ks with bulk commons and uncommons and sell them on Craigslist for $6 to $7 per thousand. That’s more than you can get from a dealer, and casual players love getting tons of cards for not tons of money. BCW offers free shipping on most orders of $100 or more, so I’d only place an order if you have a lot of sorting to do, because the free shipping takes a huge chunk off of the cost. I particularly enjoy the 3×4 card house storage boxes that hold 12 of the 1K long boxes, but I’ve never ordered one from this site. They’re one of the items that aren’t free shipping eligible, and I haven’t needed to buy this many additional card houses in bulk. Still, once you get free shipping on the 1K boxes, the cost ends up being $.66 per box.

Bubble Mailers

So far, this is the best deal I’ve found on mass bubble mailers. They’re large enough that you should be able to ship any normal singles order, and a Paypal shipping label fits nicely on the front. Five hundred envelopes at $32.95 with free shipping equals approximately 6.5 cents per envelope. That’s certainly a huge mark down from picking them up from the drug store for $1.

Toploaders

If you do a lot of sending out cards and not a whole lot of buying cards, you’ll notice that you run out of these little guys fairly quickly. You can find them in almost every hobby shop, and even among the ripped-open packs of Pokemon cards in your local Walmart’s TCG aisle. However, we can do better than that. Buying in bulk from Cardboard Gold lets us find these for 4.7 cents each, and even less if we need 3,000 of them. Eating the initial cost sucks, but if you know you’ll still be using these months and years down the road, it’s financially smarter to bite the bullet now and enjoy not having to pay recurring costs down the road.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of sources to obtain bulk shipping supplies. I have not scoured the internet for weeks looking for these websites and prices, and I’m not guaranteeing you that they are the absolute, 100% best option for your situation. If you read this and know where to find a better deal than what I’ve provided, please mention it in the comments below, or send me a link on Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook so I can share it. That way we can all ship and store our products cheaper. I hope I managed to help a few people cut down their shipping costs today!

A Post-Script on Temples

I recently read a post on r/mtgfinance claiming that Temples from the Theros block were not very strong investments going into next year. The argument was that they are weaker than any of our previous recent dual-land friends, like the shock lands ([card]Hallowed Fountain[/card], check lands [card]Glacial Fortress[/card], or fast lands [card]Seachrome Coast[/card]. While Temples aren’t the strongest weapon in a hyperaggressive deck, I can’t remember the last time that a rare cycle of lands didn’t average out at around $10 during their second year in Standard (assuming a first printing). I don’t think Temples are any different, and I expect to see the $3 to $5 Temples join their brethren of [card]Temple of Enlightment[/card] and [card]Temple of Malady[/card] soon enough. Real estate is the golden egg of MTG finance, and I don’t see that changing this season.

Conjured Currency #16: “Lik Dis If U Buy Evertim”

About Last Week

Welcome back, readers! Well, hopefully I still have a readerbase after last week’s article. If you’ll read last week’s Reddit thread for the article, you’ll see that several people brought up very valid arguments against my theory, and slapped me with some issues that I had left out. It’s enough for me to accept the possibility of an Onslaught reprint in a core or fall set in the next couple years. The huge reply to the piece was a good example of how I genuinely appreciate feedback on my writing and my opinions. Just because I write for this website doesn’t make me better than anyone else than this, and none of my opinions are immune to criticism. Thanks to everyone who provided reasonable input on the topic of fetch land reprints.

About This Week

Now, onto this week’s subject. For those of you who don’t have a Facebook account, this article will be less useful to you than it would be to those who do. Many moons ago (i.e. only a few months ago), I wrote a “Finance 101” sort of piece, listing your various outs for when you acquire a card and want to turn a profit on it, whether by trading up or selling out. One of the listed outs was social media, including Twitter, Facebook, etc. all in one lump. Today I want to go in depth into Facebook specifically, and look at some of the larger groups that players have come up with to trade, buy, or sell cards over the internet and through the mail. We’ll go over what each group specializes in, some of their basic rules and etiquette, and how you can go about being a part of the wonderful world of internet trading. Having a local Facebook MTG group to buy and sell cards from is great, but having access to a half dozen more across the world can’t hurt your profits too much, can it?

High End Magic stuff for sale!

[Editor’s note: Much as it pains me, I’m not going to correct these group titles, since that may impact readers’ abilities to find them. These are listed exactly as they are in Facebook.]

Do you ever feel pretty good about the amount of Magic cards you own? Are you proud of a specific card in your collection? Do you want that feeling to abruptly stop and sink to the bottom of your stomach? Look no further than the Facebook group, “High End Magic stuff for sale!” where the cover photo is dozens of [card]Black Lotus[/card]es placed on the floor to create a message spelling out “Not High End?” If you’re the lucky one who picked up a NM [card]The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale[/card] out of a Craigslist collection, this is a great place to unload it. The group is full of some of the most famous collectors in the community who have amazing reputations. And the folks here have the money to spend on foil, upside down, miscut, Klingon [card]Brainstorm[/card]s.

However, it’s definitely not the place to post a list containing a dozen copies of each shock land. It’s stated in the rules of the group (which you should always, always read if you intend to engage in business while using one of these groups as an outlet) that posts containing sub-$50 cards will usually be removed. This is an example post for what you can expect to see on the group:

example high end

Some groups disallow auctions. This is not one of them, and that can work in your favor. Collectors who are looking to acquire the weird and rare cards of the universe may tend to aggressively outbid each other if you have something that’s hard enough to come by. This group also asks that with every post, each card (or whole item, like a deck) comes with a listed price. Whether that be a firm price, an “or best offer” situation, or a starting bid, posts just asking for offers will be deleted. If you don’t know what your foreign foil gem is worth and you can’t find it anywhere else on the internet, give this group a try:

Magic the Gathering Card Price Request

I just joined this group myself while searching for additional content to include in this article. Although it doesn’t look too terribly trafficked, it’s still something that doesn’t hurt to have in your back pocket for when you pick up a strange foreign/foil/promo card that doesn’t have completed listings on eBay. You won’t sell any cards in this group, but it’s helpful if you can receive a fair price quote on the Russian foil [card]Glissa, the Traitor[/card] that you own and someone else in your local community wants.

Magic: The Gathering misprints and oddities

Similar to the high-end group, you won’t be finding cheap stuff here. The group is stricter than you might be on what should be allowed to be posted. If your [card]Charging Badger[/card] is slightly off-center, don’t freak out and upload a picture. It says in the rules document of the group: “Is your card miscut? Great! Does it show a part of another card? No? Don’t post it.” Even if you don’t buy or sell a whole ton of misprinted cards, it’s good to have an outlet in case you pick something unexpected up in a collection. You can also learn a lot about the value of misprints and miscuts by simply watching posts and conversations. I’m awful at telling the difference between 4th Edition and Alternate 4th, and probably wouldn’t spot something like Dark Beta at first glance.

If you want to learn more about the world of misprints, miscuts, and other alternate printings, I recommend following themisprintguy on YouTube. He knows what he’s talking about.

Misprint

Here’s a couple examples of misprints someone might be interested in on that group. Yes, they’re commons, but they’re also foil and showing other cards.

MAGIC THE GATHERING buy/sell/trade

This is the largest Facebook MTG group that I am a part of, and it is by far my favorite to sell from. The group holds every single type of player, from beginning casuals to competitive Legacy enthusiasts. There’s something for everyone here, and there are a lot of great people active in the group. You can easily find that sweet spot between immediately buylisting and waiting forever for an item to sell on TCGplayer. As a bonus, you can earn some “good person who goes on the Internet and doesn’t scam you” points as well.

The group recently cleaned up all of the posts that were not related to buying, selling, or trading, so if you previously left the group due to the posts that looked like, “OMG I just pulled a god card, guys!” I highly recommend you rejoin. All of the non-finance discussions have moved to a separate sister group (MAGIC THE GATHERING discussions, if you’re interested), so the only posts left are those of cards waiting to be bought, sold, or traded. It’s a great place to pick cards up at slightly lower than TCG low (although some people try to sell firm at TCG mid, they don’t get far) for decks that you need, and almost everyone in the group (in my experience) trades at TCG mid. Remember that in this group, asking for a gift or an extra percentage to cover the PayPal fee is strictly prohibited, unlike in other groups.

In Closing

That’s definitely not all of the MTG Facebook groups you should be a part of, but I’m running low on words and want to cover a few other things. For all of these groups, remember to protect yourself while conducting business. Facebook MTG in general uses a reference system, so only send first if your partner has a sizable list of people to back up his or her honesty. It’s not worth it to risk losing cards or coin on something that looks like a sweet deal, but could very well be too good to be true. If you feel something isn’t right with your transaction, I highly recommend contacting  Onar Bargior (on Twitter as @Bargior). He is an admirable crusader against the numerous scumbags who try to rip others off, and he has a large collection of confirmed scammers’ names to cross-reference against.

As always, I welcome your feedback and responses. Since I can’t cover everything within my word limit every week, I often tend to leave out something—that’s where you come in! What groups do you find helpful in your Magic financial pursuits?

Bonus! Random Thoughts

[card]Eidolon of Blossoms[/card] seems like a strong pickup moving forward into rotation. I don’t think you should go out and buy out TCGplayer right now, but get them if you need your set for Standard. It still probably won’t make [card]Mana Bloom[/card] playable, but green and black have proven to have a very strong constellation shell, and the colors have enchantments that are good on their own, like [card]Courser of Kruphix[card] and [card]Herald of Torment[/card]. Eidolon has a promo version, but so did [card]Supreme Verdict[/card] and [card]Sylvan Caryatid[/card], and they’re still financially relevant.

Conjured Currency #15: More Words on the Internet About Fetch Land Reprints

“Now let’s talk about the fetch lands. Can we talk about the fetch lands, please, Mac? I’ve been dying to talk about the fetch land reprints with you all day, okay?” –Every Modern and Legacy player ever 

Last week, I casually mentioned my own personal thoughts on Twitter about the subject of if and when Wizards will introduce the Onslaught fetch lands ([card]Polluted Delta[/card], [card]Windswept Heath[/card], [card]Bloodstained Mire[/card], [card]Flooded Strand[/card], and [card]Wooded Foothills[/card], for newer players) into Modern, or even Standard. For those interested in reading the opinions of the other members of the conversation, here’s a link to the Twitter page. Also, every person in that conversation is worth following. Twitter is one of the best places on the Internet for Magic financial updates.

If you don’t feel like reading the thread, I’ll summarize my thoughts here. I personally believe that we will not ever see the Onslaught fetch lands in Modern or Standard, but there may eventually be a supplemental product (such as a Commander-esque set) that contains them. As for Zendikar fetches, I think that the most likely candidate for delivering them lies in the unannounced, yet probably soon-to-come Modern Masters 2. This still leaves them out of Standard, but helps the Modern, Legacy, and EDH demand. If you feel like I’m on something other than cardboard crack and want to close the browser without reading further, I won’t judge you. However, I’d like to take a few moments of your time and utilize the next few paragraphs to explain my reasoning, since I couldn’t fit everything into 140-character bursts.

Crack, Fetch, Take Two Minutes, I’m Wasting Time

In these articles, and numerous other minor internet posts that I remember seeing but was unable to locate (convincing argument, I know), the people who make our card game have publicly announced their dislike for the amount of time wasted by too much needless shuffling in a game of Magic. At a casual level, it’s not a big deal. Kitchen table players have all the time in the world, and generally don’t worry about cutting the deck or having opponents shuffle.

However, at a competitive level, matches are timed. We have 50 minutes to play up to three games of Magic, and sometimes even that’s not enough for drawn out control mirrors. Taking up several minutes throughout the match to perform a mundane game action that isn’t really “playing Magic” is definitely not an optimal use of our time. I think it’s a large factor that Wizards is willing to take into consideration when deciding whether or not to reintroduce any fetch lands into Standard, or the Onslaught ones into Modern.

Does it Matter When we Have Shocks?

When discussing Modern, players often make the joke that “Modern is a 17 life format.” This is because there are so many games that start out by using a fetch land to grab a corresponding shock land, bring it in untapped, and cast a vital turn-one spell. [card]Misty Rainforest[/card], [card]Stomping Ground[/card], [card]Noble Hierarch[/card], go. Four-color decks are already easily viable in the format. Does adding the Onslaught fetches really change much, when we’re already just using shock lands to smooth out our mana? I don’t see how resurrecting [card]Polluted Delta[/card] would be at the forefront of the minds of Wizards when there is tons of unexplored land space waiting to be used.

There’s the argument that it is unfair for enemy colors having the ability to fetch basic lands as opposed to the allied colors, but I honestly don’t think it’s that big of a deal to omit the Onslaught fetches from Modern. Historically, Wizards has shown a massive preference towards allied colors in land cycles, and some incomplete cycles have shown to be more successful then others. I have seen zero requests to finish a [card]Grove of the Burnwillows[/card] cycle, even when that card is just as expensive as [card]Arid Mesa[/card]. No blood has been shed over the lack of finishing the [card]River of Tears[/card] cycle either. My point is that it’s ok to have “incomplete” cycles sometimes, even though our human minds crave patterns and want things to look finished.

But We NEEEEED Reprints!

Technically, I don’t think we need [card]Flooded Strand[/card] reprints at all. Other than the occasional [card]Land Tax[/card] unban and intentional tossed bone in the form of [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] or [card]Abrupt Decay[/card], it looks like Wizards has all but given up on Legacy. The Reserved list prevents the company from supplying dual lands, keeping a ceiling on the actual number of people able to play the format. We get approximately one Legacy grand prix a year, and it’s not a PTQ format. Like Vintage, Legacy is headed down the road to being a “privileged” format where only people who have excessive disposable income or who have been sticking with the game since its origin can afford. And that’s okay. Not every person can afford every format. This is why I believe that if we do see Onslaught reprints, they’ll  be in the form of a supplemental product, like Conspiracy (they almost certainly won’t be in Conspiracy, but a future similarly designed product could hold them). This keeps them out of Modern and Standard, but still sells product like wildfire and douses the price to a degree.

On the other hand, we do need more [card]Scalding Tarn[/card]s in the market. It’s not okay to have a single card cost $80 in an FNM-legal format for an extended period of time. If we listen to Aaron Forsythe’s discussion on the BSB podcast a few weeks ago, it’s evident that demand exploded before Wizards had time to react. I believe that we’ll have to wait out that delayed reaction time a bit longer, because Wizards does work 18 months in advance. Back then, fetches weren’t even close to their current prices. Modern Masters was testing the waters, but I think it’s clear that it was an overall success, and the company would be foolish to not repeat the concept and increase the print run slightly. Until then, I think we’ll have to suck up having expensive fetches, and we won’t get any until a whole year from now.

Bring the Comments

I know that this is a hot topic, so I’m very interested in sparking a discussion and listening to what you readers have to say. Is there anyone else out there who agrees with me, but for different reasons? There are definitely other factors in this debate. Do you think I’m a complete idiot, and that we’ll see [card]Windswept Heath[/card] with the new border that’s being debuted in M15? Regardless, it’ll definitely be an interesting year going forward, and seeing the course of action that WOTC decides to run with. Until next week!

Conjured Currency #14: Conspiratorial Spoiler Speculation

Welcome back, readers! I always say “welcome back,” but I’d like to take a moment to mention how much I honestly mean that. It’s not a cheap way to get three extra words on the page to finish this article sooner. I received a lot of excellent feedback on my analysis of the Modern Event Deck last week, and I’ve been reading some comments and messages on the various mediums of the internet about how there are some people who appreciate my writing, and that makes me feel amazing. If I can help others out there to play Magic cheaper, or make some side cash while maintaining their collections, then that’s all I need to continue writing. If anyone has any topics that they want me to write about for future articles, always feel free to let me know!

Emotional ramblings aside, let’s talk about a word that, historically, people have wanted to avoid talking about. Conspiracy. For those who haven’t been subjected to WotC’s evil corporate mind games that are manipulating you into buying this extremely awesome product, I’ll let you in on the fun with a link to this video explaining what it is.

Having Fun

Even if you’re normally someone who never buys booster boxes on principle because they’re “bad value” (I am one of these people), I highly recommend finding a group of friends who are willing to split the costs and jam one of these drafts. Before we get into the financial analysis of the currently spoiled cards, I think that in the spirit of the set, we can just say “screw money drafting” for once. Conspiracy looks to be one of the most interesting, extraordinarily fun sets to draft in a long time, going back to Unhinged levels of absurdity. If you’re a cold-hearted, solely financially-minded individual like myself, try to consider the fun you’ll have to be part of the value in this set while drafting. I know I’m going to try to attend as many of these events as my budget allows, profit be damned.

Now, let’s look at some of the (potentially) financially interesting spoilers, try to determine whether they’re worth buying into at presale prices, and predict their future values in the coming months as more and more product is opened. We’ll also analyze what kind of players will want which cards and how that will affect their prices. There aren’t many preorder opportunities to grab Conspiracy singles at the moment, so it’s hard to actually find “current” prices to compare to. I’ll be going by a rough guide of current eBay listings for what you can order the cards for right at this moment, and whether they look like good buys. For further reference, here’s a list of every card spoiled from the set thus far.

Give Me The Financial Info Already

Dack Fayden – Currently available for $37

New cards to Conspiracy will not be legal in Modern or Standard, just Legacy and Vintage. So we have to ask ourselves: is Dack Legacy playable? My guess is no. In my opinion, a good measuring stick for Legacy playability is, “Does [card]Show and Tell[/card] care about this?” [card]True-Name Nemesis[/card] didn’t exactly topple the steady ship that is Legacy, so Dack has some pretty steep competition. Stealing [card]Batterskull[/card] doesn’t give you the germ, and there aren’t too many other game-breaking artifacts worth stealing. Also, the decks that want to play [card]Faithless Looting[/card] care that it’s a one-mana sorcery that can be cast multiple times per turn. $37 definitely seems like a case of planeswalker hype to me, so if you’re looking for one for cube or EDH, wait a bit. He’ll probably settle in the $15 range in a few months.

Scourge of the Throne – $11

Super casual EDH playable, five/six-costing red dragon that wants to attack #115? Yep, we got him. Worth anywhere near $10? Nope. It’s a mythic dragon that won’t be drafted a whole ton though, so it probably won’t hit bulk. $4-5 in the coming months seems reasonable, and it’s definitely a cool use of the dethrone mechanic.

Plea for Power – $6

Breaking News: most people won’t let you [card]Time Warp[/card] for one blue mana less. It’ll almost always end up being [card]Concentrate[/card], and that’s boring. If you can bribe your friends with some sort of multiplayer political scheme, be my guest, but that’s probably more effort then it’s worth. Speaking of worth, $2.

[card]Exploration[/card] – $23

Well. This one is a bit of a kick in the balls for me, because I happen to own five of these things from when I played Legacy Lands before taking it apart. They recently spiked to $40, I got greedy and waited to see if they’d go any higher, and now this comes along. In my opinion, the new artwork is gorgeous, and I’m glad that it might ease the entry into Legacy for a few individuals, if ever so slightly. To be honest, $15 doesn’t sound like a bad entry point if you can find them for that price, and want them to play with. It might take a couple of months, but I don’t think it’ll ever be a whole lot lower than that. If you watched the video, you’ll hear that foils of the cards in this set will exist. Foil [card]Exploration[/card]s have never existed before. Take that how you will.

[card]Misdirection[/card] – $21

This is less of a kick in the balls for me, because I own zero copies. This is another highly sought-after Legacy card, but I would wait a bit on this one and see if the reprint drops it lower. There’s much less casual appeal in this than [card]Exploration[/card], and I wouldn’t be surprised if the reprint is $10 by the time M15 is released. On a side note, I think these two reprints are a strong example of how no card that’s not on the reserved list is safe from reprint. “It’s really old,” and, “It’s too powerful,” aren’t very compelling arguments. Even cards like [card]Elspeth, Knight-Errant[/card], can receive the lash of the reprint whip several times within just a few years. If you want an absolutely safe investment, stick to the Reserved List or sealed product. I made the mistake of holding onto [card]Exploration[/card]s despite that they had the possibility of being reprinted. I don’t suggest dumping every card you own that can be reprinted, but keep it in mind if you’re holding out for that tiny bit of extra value.

[card]Rout [/card]- $8

I may or may not have previously suggested this had the possibility of being in an upcoming product named From the Vault: Annihilation. I may or may not have been horribly wrong, and that this may or may not be included in a product that does not have a limited print run and its price may or may not drastically tank as a result. Art and flavor text are sick, though.

Marchesa, the Black Rose – $15

Well, I have a new EDH deck to make. One that will have the back of a [card]Plains[/card] as a general with “Marchesa” scrawled onto the back of it in Sharpie until this card is under $6 in price. I don’t expect to have to wait too long.

[card]Brainstorm[/card] – $1-3 (edition depending) and [card]Swords to Plowshares[/card] $3-5 (edition depending)

Two of Legacy’s most powerful and versatile one-mana instant spells will always hold demand, and the prices of these will depend on whether or not the art sucks. Foils will definitely be spicy, and people will want them, but don’t expect Masques foil Brainstorm prices. These will have a much higher print run.

Lore Seeker, Aether Searcher, Deal Broker, and Paliano, the High City 

Due to the fact that such a huge portion of the attraction of these cards is only present during the draft, there will most likely be a huge flood of these singles entering the market after the dust settles, and the only target audience for the singles are people who need the cards for a cube of some sort. That audience won’t fill the demand for the massive supply, so I don’t recommend picking them up just because of how unique they are. They’ll be bulk soon enough, as will any of the actual “conspiracy” cards.

What About the Rest?

There are a good number of other $5 or $10 rares in the set, but my verdict on them is pretty much the same. The set will not have a limited print run, and Mark Rosewater stated on his Tumblr that there will be print runs as needed to satisfy demand. The [card]Silent Arbiter[/card]s and [card]Decimate[/card]s of the set will likely lose up to 50% of their prices, and remain depressed as more Conspiracy continues to enter the market. Some cards like [card]Fact or Fiction[/card] may be reduced to bulk.

What do you guys think about Conspiracy? What about other potential reprints of Legacy cards that we might see in upcoming supplemental products? Am I terribly wrong about the entire set? Let me know in the comment section, on Twitter, or on the appropriate Reddit thread on r/mtgfinance. I personally think the set looks extraordinarily fun, and I can’t wait to hear all of the hilarious stories that result from drafting this innovative set. Until next week!

Conjured Currency #13: We Have a Modern Event Deck

Welcome back, readers! Last week I talked about how you can make a positive impact on your community by making sure they’re all aware that you are willing to pick up cards for competitive buylist values. This week, I’m going to go in a completely different direction, because that’s what I do. I scavenge for topic ideas at the last minute, and have little to no continuity between my articles. It’s like a whole new adventure each week, with no need to go back and read the first chapter to be up to date. You’re welcome.

Anyway, the Modern Event deck just got spoiled this past Tuesday. While the deck is indeed B/W Tokens as we all anticipated, there are no copies of [card]Marsh Flats[/card] to be found. No [card]Auriok Champion[/card]s, and not even a copy of [card]Scrubland[/card]. LAME. Well, maybe not. Here’s a copy of the decklist, so you can decide for yourself.

The Decklist

[deck title=Modern Event Deck]

[Creatures]

*2 Soul Warden

*3 Tidehollow Sculler

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

*3 Honor of the Pure

*2 Inquisition of Kozilek

*4 Intangible Virtue

*4 Lingering Souls

*3 Path to Exile

*4 Raise the Alarm

*2 Shrine of Loyal Legions

*4 Spectral Procession

*1 Sword of Feast and Famine

*3 Zealous Persecution

*1 Elspeth, Knight-Errant

[/Spells]

[Lands]

*4 Caves of Koilos

*2 City of Brass

*4 Isolated Chapel

*5 Plains

*4 Swamp

*1 Vault of the Archangel

*4 Windbrisk Heights

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

*2 Burrenton Forge-Tender

*2 Dismember

*3 Duress

*2 Ghost Quarter

*3 Kataki, War’s Wage

*3 Relic of Progenitus

[/Sideboard]

[/Deck]

In addition to the 75 cards, you also receive 80 “exclusive card sleeves,” but the quality of those is probably questionable at best. Let’s not add those into the potential value of the deck. If we add up the value of every card in the deck, we get a TCGplayer low value of about $130. If we estimate and round down by eliminating the irrelevant commons/uncommons like basic lands, [card]Ghost Quarter[/card], [card]Duress[/card], and [card]Lingering Souls[/card], then I would put the deck at somewhere around $110 (again, we’re lowballing a bit). If you actually wanted a chunk of this deck to build the real BW tokens deck yourself, buying in at MSRP is fine. If you’re interested in buying out your LGS of these at MSRP in order to flip them online: first, you’re a jerk. Secondly , I don’t think you’ll make as much as you think you will.

Just Tell Me About the Prices

However, what will the ramifications be of this deck for the prices of the cards within? It’s hard to say. On one side is the traditional argument of, “The deck is introducing thousands more copies of [card]Elspeth, Knight-Errant[/card] and [card]Sword of Feast and Famine[/card] (which seems like a really weird inclusion to me, but whatever), so the prices will drop. This will affect cards like [card]Isolated Chapel[/card] and [card]Path to Exile[/card] even more, because they’re three- and four-ofs in the deck.” That’s certainly a valid point, but there’s more to it than that.

The other side of the coin is demand, and considering how much interest this will stir about Modern as a format. I’m sure that there are a non-zero number of Standard-only players who just recently started playing competitively, who have their [card]Godless Shrine[/card]s and [card]Thoughtseizes[/card], and are more than willing to shell out $75, touch up the deck a bit more, and jam Modern events at the FNMs they haven’t been able to play.

Our closest comparison for Modern reprints, Modern Masters, followed both of these trends. Reprints of stuff like [cardTarmogoyf[/card] increased interest in the format dramatically, and prices skyrocketed to beyond pre-reprint levels, while cards like [card]Divinity of Pride[/card] and [card]Kitchen Finks[/card] are no longer $8 to 10 dollars, and likely won’t be for several years. Overall, I don’t see Elspeth or the Sword dropping much, if at all. They’re both highly sought after in formats other than Modern, including Cube, EDH, and other casual formats (one of the strongest planeswalkers in the game, at 20 percent of the price of a [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card], and “Sword of X and Y” have always been casual home-runs).

On the other hand, I can see cards like [card]Burrenton Forge-Tender[/card], [card]Spectral Procession[/card], [card]Caves of Koilos[/card], and [card]Windbrisk Heights[/card] suffering in price even more severely, due to their limited versatility (they each really only go in one type of deck) and higher print run within the event deck.  If you have spare copies of these that you’re not using, I recommend buylisting or finding another way to get rid of them. For those who do buy the event deck for just the Elspeth/Sword/Paths/Inquisitions, you’ll see Processions/Caves/Heights sitting in binders for months. Expect the Procession to be a a dollar or less, Caves to be barely above a bulk rare, and Heights to take a hit of a couple dollars.

I think that the price of [card]Path to Exile[/card] is safe, due to the vast amount of varied play it sees in the format. Yes, it’s Path’s 100th printing, but it’s indisputable that it is the best white removal spell in Modern, and will continue to see infinite amounts of play. Maybe it dips by a dollar as people who bought the deck for profit try to unload copies quickly, but it won’t last. People will always need the card.

Who Should Buy This Product?

Overall, buy it if you’re a Standard player looking for a (relatively) cheap entry into Modern FNM. Don’t buy it if you’re trying to pick up 10 copies of the deck and flip them online. Elspeth, Sword, Path, and Inquisition won’t drop much (if at all), and I would like to casually mention to Wizards that we have had enough copies of [card]Lingering Souls[/card] in circulation for quite a while. Thank you Wizards, you have effectively printed it to death. My stack of [card]Lingering Souls[/card] is worth as much as a stack of [card]Charging Badger[/card]. I hope you’re happy.

Well, those are my thoughts on the event deck. Now let’s hear yours! Throw me a comment in the section below, or on Twitter if you want to discuss your thoughts or feelings about the deck. Should it have had a [card]Marsh Flats[/card]? [card]Bitterblossom[/card]? I’m curious to hear everyone’s opinions, and whether or not you agree with me. Until next time!

Conjured Currency #12: BYOB (Be Your Own Buylist)

I’m going to start this week’s article by linking to another person’s article from another website. Last week, Travis Allen explained how the margins on speculation are often lower and riskier than someone who is not accustomed to the workings of MTG finance would expect. As somewhat of a follow-up to that article, I’d like to explain one of the alternative methods to speculating that tends to yield a much higher return on investment, and at the same time can provide a valuable service to the community. Go ahead, read Travis’s piece. I’ll wait.

…. Are you back? Cool. It was an incredibly well written article that should hopefully help dispel the myth that speculators are making out like bandits when a card doubles, triples, or even quadruples in price. It’s very difficult to make significant money on actual blind speculation, not counting the [card]Master of Waves[/card]/[card]Thassa, God of the Sea[/card] situations where we have insider information from a pro tour leak.

The alternative method that I want to discuss this week does require a significant amount of disposable income, or the ability and dedication to make repeated short-term flips to maintain an open cash flow. It’s not for everyone, but my goal is that someone reads this article and realizes: “Hey, I could do that.” If the title is any indication, our discussion this week is on how you can act as your local area’s buylist. If you know that you can pay better than your LGS, or if you can work with your LGS when making buys, then you can help out the players in your area and sometimes even the local store. It’s a lot easier to make incremental increases in your inventory and funds when you make other people aware that you’re almost always willing to buy something for buylist prices, and then resell it at a later date.

Requirements

Be patient. If you go around on every Facebook page and constantly nag people about buying their cards at buylist, they won’t want to sell, and with good reason. Just be patient, friendly, and wait for opportunities. Magic is an expensive hobby, and people tend to overextend their budget into it. When life hands out unexpected inconveniences and people need to sell specific pieces of their collection, you can be ready with cash in hand.

About a month ago, I wrote about how we don’t necessarily need the cards that we think we do, we just want them. In my opinion, one of the core requirements to providing this service is that you make sure that when you buy cards at buylist prices, you don’t need the cards you buy. If you are offered to buy cards that you do actually want for personal deckbuilding objectives, then be honest with the person you’re doing business with, and offer up a little more than you normally would.

I recommend having access to the major retailers’ current buylists, so you always know how much to offer on a card. If you’re a Quiet Speculation Insider, you probably use Trader Tools at mtg.gg. If not, MTGPrice.com has its’ own free tool that collects current buylist prices and provides them for you to use. As a general rule, I try to almost match the highest current buylist price, so that if worst comes to worst, I can immediately out the card with no net loss.

Be fair with pricing even if you know they’ll accept less. If you buy a [card]Hallowed Fountain[/card] from one of your friends for $5, then don’t offer someone else $4 if you know they need the money badly for car repairs and you’re sure they’ll accept it. Pick a number and stick to it for as long as your inventory allows. If you start to buy too much to the point where you feel the need to lower your buy number, then you’re probably not performing enough inventory turnover, and I’ll redirect you to my fellow BSB writer Anthony Capece to learn about that issue. Keep your buy price static until you move what you have. Then there’s no cross talk between your customers about who got paid what.

What About the LGS?

If you’re still reading at this point, then you didn’t instantly close the browser when I mentioned the prospect of giving better prices than your LGS. Good. I’m sure that I lost quite a few people by bringing up the thought of purchasing cards at buylist prices instead of directing people to your friendly local game store, but hear me out. I’m not trying to say you should bring a massive trenchcoat to FNM and buy singles from under the store owner’s nose. Don’t do that. Don’t even pull the lame trick of going out into the parking lot/across the street to do your cash deals. The store owner has rent to pay, and he’s letting you play there. We all know it’s a dirty move. However, your LGS doesn’t have domain over the entire town or city that you reside in. They have their margins that they have to make, and you have yours. Yours are probably a bit more flexible because you don’t have to keep the lights on in a business. I don’t think it’s unethical to suggest offering higher prices than the store while outside of their domain.

In addition, I’ve been in multiple situations where it’s entirely possible to work together with your store so that literally everybody wins. If you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) enough to have a store that doesn’t deal in singles, then you can be the one to provide that service, and get a ton of business by asking the owner to politely direct singles purchases towards you. At another store I’ve come across in my travels, the owner was only able to offer a miniscule amount of store credit for players’ singles, not cash. Since the player was going to spend the credit anyway, I proposed that I buy the cards for more cash than was being offered in store credit. I got the cards at buylist prices, the player got more value for his cards that he didn’t want anymore, and the store owner got actual cash in his register instead of just the player spending store credit. Everyone wins!

Be Your Own Buylist

Obviously some of these are pretty niche situations that won’t apply to a ton of readers, but the moral of the story is that it’s still entirely possible to buy cards at buylist prices locally if you’re patient, polite, and know your outs and margins well enough. I started out doing this a few years ago just by being the first to respond to Facebook posts of friends. If you have the income (or can flip the items you acquire for a fast profit), then this can be a way to help those in your community while increasing your available funds for Magic.

Do you disagree with any of my personal ethics on the area that an LGS has? Do you have any other suggestions that slipped my mind while writing the piece? Your comments are often just as important as what I write, so I’d love to hear them.

Conjured Currency #11: Speculation for Annihilation

Welcome, speculators! Magic financiers, PTQ grinders, EDH junkies: you’re here because you want to not spend so much money on this game we all know and love, and are looking to find a place to learn to do just that. This is that place. If you keep up to date on spoilers for upcoming product, you’ll know that [card]Wrath of God[/card] is about to be printed for the fifteenth time, in the From the Vault: Annihilation product scheduled to be released this August. However, the other fourteen are currently a mystery. This week I want to take a look at some of the other candidates for reprint coming this summer based on the description of the product, and need for a reprint. For starters, let’s look at some of the higher priced, powerful spotlights that could be used to sell the product. I don’t think there will be more than one of the following in the product, but WotC has surprised us before.

Potential Chase Cards

[card]Damnation[/card]

They probably could have just named the product: From the Vault: Here’s your stupid Damnation reprint. While the color-shifted Wrath just recently made its ascension to the current absurd price of $45, I still think this is a strong candidate to be the “headliner” of the product. It was only around $28 when the product would have been designed 18 months ago, and it’s a strong casual favorite that does see fringe play in Modern. While I don’t think the card will plummet if it finds a home in Annihilation, it’s safe to say to stray away from buying these at the current $45 price tag, especially if you don’t actually need them to play with.

[card]Karn Liberated[/card]

Is there anything more annihilating than picking up every single card, board, hand, graveyard, exile and all, off of the table (except maybe Karn’s permanents), and shuffling them back into their owners’ decks? I’ll admit this one is a bit of a stretch, but it’s worth considering. Karn is an iconic planeswalker known for his worldshaping deeds, so maybe 18 months ago Wizards predicted that this guy would need a bit of a release valve and decided this was the appropriate slot. Wizards hasn’t exactly succeeded in matching the prices of the cards in these From the Vaults to add up to MSRP, so maybe Annihilation will give us a monster like Karn.

[card]Kozilek, Butcher of Truth[/card]

Well, he has the word “annihilate” printed on the card. In addition, he’s the only one among his siblings to not have an additional printing; [card]Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre[/card] has FTV: Legends, and [card]Emrakul, the Aeons Torn[/card] has the prerelease promo. If any of the eldrazi get reprinted in an attempt to put more in circulation and sell product, it’ll probably be this one.

Medium Value Candidates

Obviously all 15 cards can’t be valuable staples. For every [card]Maze of Ith[/card] and [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card], that they stick in these boxes, there will be follow ups of [card]Windbrisk Heights[/card] and [card]Green Sun’s Zenith[/card] that people shove in their EDH decks and cubes. Here are a few cards that fall in between the cracks of “Expensive spotlight card” and “Wizards, why is this even in the box?”

[card]Child of Alara[/card]

When Wizards mentioned in their announcement for FTV: Annihilation that the player would be able to “sweep the battlefield clean” with “superweapons.” this is the type of card that comes to mind. It’s legendary, mythic, and certainly fits the definition of “annihilation.’ I’m pretty sure EDH players love this card, but maybe I’m biased because I have a Child deck myself. Until we learn whether or not this card is included, I recommend staying away from picking them up. It’s a great long-term pickup, but you have time to wait and see the full spoiler before making that decision.

[card]Rout[/card]

Here’s a real old one that actually hasn’t been on the printers for 14 years. While [card]Fated Retribution[/card] was just printed, Rout is generally seen as the iconic “instant speed Wrath you” from ages ago, and it wouldn’t shock me if they brought it back to exist in foil for the first time. It’s sat at $4 for years now, and the creation of a foil copy would likely have a strong multiplier, similar to how the [card]Swords to Plowshares[/card] from FTV: 20 has a 3x multiplier because foils are hard to come by.

[card]Austere Command[/card]

Another Commander all-star, the white cycle of the commands is one of the more versatile wrath effects, customizable to the caster’s need. Maybe I’m overestimating the number of EDH staples that Wizards is going to throw into this Annihilation product, but it’s definitely the format where most of them shine. I can see this getting some sweet new art, even if it has experienced a reprint in the Heavenly Inferno Commander deck in 2011.

[card]Bonfire of the Damned[/card]

Did you know that this card is still $5.00? A large chunk of that is likely due to price memory; similar to how [card]Thragtusk[/card] is chilling at above-bulk prices. I wouldn’t put it past Wizards of the Coast to throw this spell into the set with its new foiling, and bring back the dark memories that those of us who played Standard during that era experienced when playing against it.

Bottom of the Barrel

Unfortunately, there has to be some cards that fill in the bottom end of the value spectrum. We were all let down when [card]Kessig Wolf Run[/card] and [card]Char[/card] were revealed as the “all-stars” of their respective years, and no panties were thrown when [card]Desert[/card] was spoiled for Realms. Every FTV has a few cards that end up rotting in binders for years after the release of the product, but let’s try to guess at what a few of those cards could be, even if there’s little financial value to be had.

[card]Decree of Annihilation[/card]

While Karn at least usually brings a quick and speedy death to the artificial “game two,” this doesn’t carry the same mercy, unless someone has a planeswalker ready to ultimate. That being said, I’m not sure how much Wizards wants to push these super-nukes that drag games on for turn after turn while everyone tries to reassemble the pieces of their broken drea- I mean board states. Maybe they’ll bring it back for simple nostalgia and flavor reasons, just to show the power of some of the older cards to new players. As with Kozilek, the card literally has the word annihilation on it.

[card]Novablast Wurm[/card]

There aren’t many Green ways to say, “Blow up all of the life that we enjoy creating,” but maybe this Worldwake mythic will be their way of adding a green thumb to what I expect to be a predominantly red, white, and black group of cards.

[card]Evacuation[/card]/[card]Upheaval[/card]

If they’re going to put blue cards in the set, I have to imagine it would be something similar to either of these. They both made their mark on history at one point or another, and have to be respected as the color-of-manipulation’s old way of cleaning house of every problem at once. I briefly considered [card]Cyclonic Rift[/card] in this spot, but I don’t think its non-overload cost is impactful enough to be let into the club.

I think the main takeaway point from a financial perspective is that the original prices of the cards that end up being in From the Vault: Annihilation won’t drop too drastically. The FTV sets have always been tagged to have an “extremely limited print run.” Their unique foiling process deters many players from using them in Constructed decks, and those who buy the complete set are often only looking for a couple cards and are willing to move the rest for less.

Even if I’m not shoving methods of how to make money down your throat, there’s always a bit of fun to be had speculating what cards will be in upcoming product, and it might help some people make decisions about what cards to buy before seeing the completed product contents. However, if you feel strongly about any of these being in the product this summer and you’ve been eyeing the cards to jam in EDH/casual/Modern, then it almost certainly won’t hurt to wait and see if you can snag one of these sets for MSRP. Based on the pattern of past FTVs, you won’t be disappointed.

How do you think my predictions will hold up? Are there any obvious inclusions that I completely missed on? Do you think one of my ideas is idiotic and would never see print ever? I’d love to hear your feedback and explanations.

Conjured Currency #10: Which Spec is Right For You, Part II

Welcome back! Last week I briefly discussed how there are different kinds of speculation targets, and why they should be targeted in varying ways depending on factors such as your budget, whether you trade or buy, and whether you’re looking for long-term holds or quick flips. I had planned to go more in-depth and have all of the information be wrapped up into one article, but in the end decided to split it up to include a second piece. I’m going to analyze a couple more card types that you should be looking to pick up, how they’re different, the various methods that you should be using for each, then do a wrap-up summary.

Pre-Spike Buys:

[card]Ghave, Guru of Spores[/card], [card]The Mimeoplasm[/card], [card]Tropical Island[/card]

Yes, [card]Tropical Island[/card] and [card]The Mimeoplasm[/card] are being put in the same pile of related things for the first time since “That Guy” played his $4,000 Mimeoplasm combo EDH deck full of Alpha duals and Japanese foils. I recently stated on Twitter that Ghave was “the next Tropical Island”, and received some questioning and confused responses. Before [card]Tropical Island[/card] spiked, its best of friends [card]Underground Seas[/card] and [card]Volcanic Island[/card] were several weeks ahead of it.

The original Commander product is experiencing a similar situation, where the low supply of cards like [card]Damia, Sage of Stone[/card] and [card]Animar, Soul of Elements[/card] were realized, and they experienced a price correction. Ghave wasn’t far behind, and those who picked up copies for cheap will be happy they did. These are situations where (budget allowing), it’s a better idea to buy as many as you can afford at retail, and then look for a quick flip to buylists or TCGplayer/eBay. These are a better buy because the evidence supporting the spikes already exists, just look for the signs. Trading for copies is also obviously fine, but cards like these are usually relatively scarce in binders, and their owners may have the same goals as you.

Here are a few cards that I believe fall into the same category:

[card]The Mimeoplasm[/card]

[card]Damia, Sage of Stone[/card] is an $11 card. [card]The Mimeoplasm[/card] is a $3 card. Is there reason for this? No? Ok. There are only three existing BUG-colored commanders in the entire game, and this is the only graveyard-centered one. It also has a T-Rex for an arm. I will be shocked if this card is not $10 within the next couple of weeks.  If you want to play with these, or are willing to buy in to speculate, do it now.

[card]Karador, Ghost Chieftain[/card]

Karador just recently got a judge promo printing, but I don’t think that will discourage the original printing from jumping in price in a relatively soon time frame. In fact, a judge promo might be speeding up the process by introducing newer players to the card via the announcement of the promo. These are quickly diminishing in stock across the Internet, and people like casting things from the graveyard, and this is a unique Commander in that aspect.

Long-Term Trades

I was once asked by a player who was just getting into finance and speculation whether [card]Abrupt Decay[/card] was a good spec target. When I replied with an affirmative answer, he asked how many he should buy to turn a good profit, and was surprised when I answered “zero.” If you don’t intend on playing with the card, I don’t think you should be spending money on it at all. Instead, I would wait and look for the Ghaves that you can make an easy flip off of quickly. The following are examples of cards that I think are very strong to trade for, but wouldn’t input cash personally (unless I was playing them). Your wait on a significant return will be multiple months, and during that time you will most likely have several other opportunities to make money.

[card]Abrupt Decay[/card]

There aren’t a whole lot of Standard-legal $50 foils, but [card]Abrupt Decay[/card] is one of them. The reason being is that it’s extremely prevalent in Modern and Legacy over Standard, and players in eternal formats are much more likely to commit to foiling out their eternal decks. However, this isn’t something I would buy into now. Similar to [card]Griselbrand[/card], I think it’s safest to wait until rotation, or right before that, for the buy in on Decay. Even though it won’t drop much, I see it following the trend of “lose a couple of dollars, then slowly trend upward.” However, if you can lock these in during trades, I wouldn’t fault you. As we approach rotation, these may actually become more scarce in binders, because everyone knows that its price is based on eternal playability.

Shock Lands

After Wizards decided to print these to death in Dragon’s Maze, we finally saw the low point on these a few months ago at around $8 (depending on the colors). Did you know SCG is still paying $8 buylist on some of the shock lands? If that doesn’t show dealer confidence in these being a good pickup, I don’t know what does. Unless you’re okay with putting money away for several months, stick to trading away your plummeting RTR cards ([card]Desecration Demon[/card] and [card]Jace, Architect of Thought[/card] are examples of cards that you do not want to own if you are not playing them) for solid value that won’t budge downward. Pick them up at rotation from Standard-only players.

[card]Deathrite Shaman[/card]

This is a card that you may want to target and pick up based on the points I have made in the previous two paragraphs. I mention the elf shaman in this article only to point out that I strongly advise against speculating on it right now. I believe that there are two reasons this card is still $11 after its Modern bannings: the first is obviously that the card is extremely powerful in Legacy, and the second is that people who were speculating on the card before its banning refuse to dump them and accept that the card will take literally forever go go up. If you can trade these away at the price they are at now (or even better, sell them), do it. Even if you are a fan of long-term speculation targets, I would prefer to own shock lands, Decays, or other eternal staples.

Wrapping Up

Keep in mind, there’s not always “the next big spike” that you need to buy into right that moment. Part of MTG finance is knowing when to hold your money, and differentiating the Ghaves from the Abrupt Decays. However, your personal buying strategy should differ depending on how often you intend to resell, and what your outs are. If you prefer quick consecutive flips on faster-acting spikes, then you want to keep your ears to the ground and wait for the next [card]The Mimeoplasm[/card] or [card]Tropical Island[/card], depending on your budget. If you can afford the Trop, it’s probably better to buy that over dozens of Mimeoplasms. The dual land will be easier to move to a buyer. When your strategy involves shoving cards into a box and forgetting about them for several months at a time, then you could start stocking up on the well-known multi-format staples, or invest in some sealed product. The most important take-away is that while there are always multiple “good specs” out there, you should take into account the time it will take to obtain your return on investment, as well as your possibility of outing the various cards.

Did I miss anything? Is there a different breed of spec target that acts differently then the ones listed in the past two articles? Drop a comment in the section below, or hit me up on Twitter to discuss anything!

Conjured Currency #9: Which Spec is Right for You?

Welcome back, readers! If you keep up to date on price trends at all (which you should), then you know that [card]Tropical Island[/card] is approximately $200 TCGplayer median at the time that I am writing this (Monday, April 14th). In the weeks prior, when the card could be found for $100-120, you may have seen several prominent financiers recommending you buy the card. The increase was inevitable. There was no reason for [card]Tropical Island[/card] to be half the price of an [card]Underground Sea[/card] or [card]Volcanic Island[/card].

And they were right. Those who bought [card]Tropical Island[/card]s can be happy that they bought in at the lower price, and either play them, hold them, or resell them. But not everyone has the ability to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on single cards. Today I want to go over where your budget lies for speculation, and the most effective way you can allocate that towards cards that you feel will rise in price. I’m going to take a look at a few cards in each price range that I feel have a strong chance moving forward.

Cheap Pickups

In this section, we will look at a few cards from recent sets with playability and strength that don’t match up evenly with their very low prices. For the sake of newer players, who are mostly relegated to FNM or casual Magic nights at the LGS, I am going to restrict this section to cards that were printed in the past couple of years. Snag these out of binders in trade, but don’t go rushing to buy out the internet. The upside isn’t extraordinarily high with the large print runs, and you won’t see 1000% increases. Regardless, these are cards that have (or are just starting to) proved their worth, and will continue to be in demand in the future.

[card]Rest In Peace[/card]

The most powerful graveyard hate spell ever printed costs approximately $1 with shipping. Of course, there’s a massive price discrepancy between the non-foil and the foil copies. Players who put RIP into their Modern and Legacy decks tend to stick with their decks longer, and therefore have a higher chance of wanting to foil out the deck. If the non-foil creeps up to $3 over the next few months as we approach Modern PTQ season, I don’t think that anyone will be surprised. If you have these in your binder, I would reconsider having them available for trade. I’m gladly snagging these at a dollar.

[card]Nighthowler[/card]

Until today, I had a bunch of these in my $.25 rare boxes that I let people pick through every week. I did not know they were up to $1.50. I don’t play Standard, so I don’t know if [card]Pharika, God of Affliction[/card] is good enough for Green-Black Dredge, but [card]Nighthowler[/card] is definitely a staple in that deck. I doubt it’s the next [card]Desecration Demon[/card], as so much of the deck is lost upon rotation, but go ahead and pick these up at near-bulk prices if you can find them, or trade for them at a dollar. I’d be happy if I could turn an [card]Underworld Connections[/card] into a RIP and a Nighthowler. Up to $4 doesn’t seem unreasonable for this guy, in my opinion. The bestow costing only one more mana than the actual creature makes me like him even more. I might actually play Standard again if this deck becomes good. It’s a very cheap list to build right now, so something will start jumping if it gains popularity.

[card]Pain Seer[/card]

No, this is not [card]Dark Confidant[/card] 2.0. However, it could find a place in black aggressive decks after rotation. Seer curves out nicely with [card]Tormented Hero[/card] and [card]Herald of Torment[/card]. This is another one that will take a while to come to fruition, but I don’t see it dropping below $2. Born of the Gods was a set that everyone mocked and bought less of when it was released, so these could be in short supply come rotation. As long as you’re trading away irrelevant stuff from RTR that’s on the downturn ([card]Jace, Architect of Thought[/card], [card]Desecration Demon[/card], etc.), I like this as a pickup in trade.

[card]Herald of Torment[/card]

Apparently, Wizards really wanted to make Black a strong color in Standard this time around, and not just as a support color. Where [card]Nighthowler[/card] is more of a short-term spec (short-term as in the span of a couple of months), I like Herald and Pain Seer going into next year’s Standard. They could also both see slight bumps before rotation hits. Herald is very aggressively costed in black, and just like Pain Seer, $2 seems like a low point.

Trade, or Buy?

While I understand that some (if not all) of these speculation targets have had their praises sung by other finance writers, I would like to impress how these pickups specifically should be acted upon differently than other cards. If you are new to the finance game, don’t have a lot of initial capital to dump on high-end Legacy cards, and don’t have a massive trade binder, then targeting the small stuff while getting rid of niche, less-desired cards will usually be the correct play.

When picking up cards like [card]Sigil of the Empty Throne[/card], [card]Endless Horizons[/card], or [card]Edric, Spymaster of Trest[/card] that have already spiked, it’s a better maneuver to actually buy the card from places where the price hasn’t yet been raised. Scour the internet (Cardshark, eBay, Amazon, and your LGS all exist. They are alternatives to TCGplayer and take longer to be bought out.) I managed to grab copies of all of these cards at their pre-spike prices from vendors at Grand Prix Philadelphia last weekend, so there’s definitely money to be made! Trying to trade for cards after their prices increase might work a few times, but it also has a real possibility of your partner looking up the card and seeing the real price and realizing you’re trying to shark them. Don’t be that guy. We’ve been over that.

I didn’t expect the part on extremely cheap trade targets to get this long, so I might turn this into a bit of a mini-series if I get enough positive feedback. The main point that I want to impart is that while we all have approximately the same goal (making Magic cheaper), we all have different budgets and incomes. Not everyone can buy into [card]Tropical Island[/card] at retail, and the people who can buy into dual lands at retail shouldn’t be buying 70+ copies of [card]Herald of Torment[/card], even if it is a “good spec.” Your targets should change as your budget does.

Loose Change

On another note, I asked last week if anyone had any questions for this article. One of the questions that a friend asked me after reading was why I haven’t played Standard at all. The answer goes back to the same article that the question came from. I absolutely hate switching decks every week, and Standard often requires one to do just that in order to keep up to the minute on metagame shifts. Even if a deck is still viable, the 75 cards in it may change drastically over a few months. I hate needing cards, so I would rather just keep to a format that I find fun, without having to change my deck. This isn’t to say that Standard is a bad format, it’s just not for everyone.

Have comments on today’s article? Sound off below!

Conjured Currency #8: The Definition of “Need”

Do we need it or want it?

Let’s be honest. We live in a society where we exaggerate a lot. Our ancestors would be absolutely baffled if they saw us Magic players exclaiming our “need” for foil copies of [card]Misty Rainforest[/card] to finish making our deck of cards look fancy. Hell, they’d be shocked at our “need” for anything but the bare essentials of consistent food, water, and shelter. If you’re reading this, I’m going to safely assume that you have the financial stability in your life to afford to spend at least some amount of money on a trading card game, and free enough access to the internet to be able to spend your time browsing this website casually. If we boil it down to the bare essentials, we don’t need to play Magic to survive. We want to play it for fun. Whether it’s to pass the time, hang out with friends, win money, get on the Pro Tour, become a recognized face in the community, or even just escape the real world for a few hours, it’s a hobby. Magic is a customizable hobby to suit your own financial budget, interests, and schedule. (Yes, I understand that there are some players who technically play for a living, or those who work at SCG/CFB/other stores. Most of us aren’t those people. For the sake of the article, bear with me.)

One of the larger topics within the Magic community as of late has been the dramatic price increases for cards in all of the major formats. Players have pointed accusing fingers in every direction as a result of being financially restricted from playing Modern or Legacy (the two formats where these price jumps have had the most impact). Speculators are blamed for hoarding thousands of copies of [card]Birthing Pod[/card] in their basements, stores like Star City Games are being accused of manipulating the market on [card]Scalding Tarn[/card] and [card]Volcanic Island[/card], and even Wizards of the Coast has been blamed for not taking to the skies in a blimp and dumping duffel bags of reprinted fetch lands all across the country 24 hours a day. Whether or not this blame is rightfully placed is another issue entirely. We should not be wasting time pouting and blaming others for what we can’t afford. We should try and figure out alternate methods so that we can get these expensive decks if we really want them. Or maybe just decide if wanting them is even the correct decision.

Picking a Deck (and Sticking to It!)

When this piece was just an idea on my notepad, I found a post on the MTG finance subreddit written by user “HaplessMagician,” where he mentioned the term “Deck ADHD.” I didn’t have a term for it at the time, but the idea is basically what you would expect if you understand what ADHD is: a mental disorder where individuals have issues with focus, hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior outside of a normal range. In Magic, I know several individuals who constantly change entire decks after playing theirs for only a week or two. If you’re a Standard grinder at SCG Opens and always want to play the best deck for that particular week, then it’s more understandable to eat the costs of selling or trading a deck into a different one every single week—if you can justify it with results.

However, Modern and Legacy are different animals. The much higher barriers to entry into these formats prevent most average players from being able to hop from owning one deck to another every single week. When picking a deck for an eternal format, I strongly suggest playtesting the hell out of it to ensure that you’ll get a good amount of use and fun out of the deck. Goldfish your opening hands with proxies, and play against most other competitive and popular lists at least once or twice. One of the main benefits of being decisive about your deck choice is how proficient you will become with the list. Eternal formats in Magic are much less forgiving than Standard when it comes to knowing your matchup and decision trees. You’re less likely to need to switch decks every week if you know how to play your bad matchups better than your opponent.

Many professional players have been quoted as saying Modern is much more of a format about knowing your own deck inside and out, instead of recognizing what the “best deck” in the format is and picking it up for the first time at a particular event. Alex Majlaton is a good example of this: he has been playing Affinity since its debut in the original Mirrodin block, and manages to put up consistent results with it by knowing the deck inside and out. Brian Kibler can usually be seen casting [card]Knight of the Reliquary[/card] or [card]Noble Hierarch[/card] if they are legal for the format in question, because his experience with these strategies in particular allows him to gain every little edge.

How Much Utility are You Getting?

One last thing to consider when building a Modern (or more likely, Legacy) deck is, in reality, how often are you going to use it? I made this mistake when building my Legacy Lands deck a year and a half ago—I wanted a Legacy deck just to say I had a Legacy deck, and “just in case” an event popped up locally. I ended up never playing the deck in an actual tournament for the 18 months that I had it sleeved, and I probably could have made better use of the trade stock that went into putting the 75 cards together. In my mind, I needed a Legacy deck, simply because I didn’t have one. I did not take into account the number of tournaments or even casual games that I would get out of the deck. In the same vein, is it worth jamming hundreds of dollars into a Modern or Legacy deck if you’re only going to FNM once a month? I’m not saying that it’s not—that’s your decision to make. I just think that it’s best to [card]ponder[/card] these decisions before tossing money around.

In the end, it’s best to remember that Magic is (to most of us) just a game. It’s always fun to have the coolest toys at the table, but it’s also important to know the difference between needing and wanting something. If you can’t afford [card]Misty Rainforest[/card]s right now, so what? They’ll probably be reprinted by this time next year, and until that day, there are at least a dozen cheaper formats that are fun if you allow them to be. If you hate current Standard with a burning passion, then maybe it’s best to take a break from it and spend your FNM trading into Modern stuff that’s less likely to drop as the year continues.

I understand that this article may not apply to many people out there, and I think that’s fine. If I can help at least one person, I’ll be happy. Have comments? Let me know. Until next time!

Conjured Currency #7: Buying and Selling at Grands Prix

Welcome back, podders and speculators and financiers all! My last two articles got much less response than normal, probably due to the fact that I strayed from what I consider myself skilled in. I’ll stick to teaching you guys how to make money, and not actually playing the game.

Now, let’s get right into a tournament report of GP Richmond! It won’t be the report of how I scrubbed out at 1-3. Instead, this is a report (or general list of tips and tricks) of my strategy for maximizing value while buying and selling with the vendors on site. I have learned that being on-site at a grand prix is one of the best opportunities to grab cards that recently spiked, finding deals on odd foils you’ve been patiently searching for, get the best deals for the cards you’re looking to sell or trade off, and much more!

Arrival

One of the most important factors to getting value out of your next grand prix is to arrive as early as possible. I cannot emphasize this enough. My travel companions and I headed out from northern New York at approximately 12:00 a.m. on Friday morning, and ended up getting to the convention center at approximately 10:00 a.m. We ended up being among the first 100 or so people in line, registered very quickly, and were inside the convention center before noon! There were very few other people inside at this point, so I essentially had first pick of all the dealers’ display cases. This might be obvious, but I want to restate it to demonstrate its’ importance: the early bird gets the worm! Try to leave as soon as possible, plan for inconveniences in your travels, and aim to be one of the first people in the event hall. It will pay off. While SCG was able to provide a playmat for all 4,300 people attending Richmond, Grand Prix Philadelphia will not be as kind. Only the first 700 people to register on-site (and those who purchase the $100 VIP package) will be allotted a [card]Fated Infatuation[/card] playmat.

Buying Strategies

After arriving, a quick search of the interests page on MTGstocks.com revealed that [card]Birthing Pod[/card] had just spiked a day or two ago, from its steady $10 to almost $20! Unlike the [card]Runed Halo[/card] spike in a similar time frame, Pod has shown a consistent history of high-level play. This isn’t a flash in the pan or a frenzied hype buyout. With this information, I made inquiries for Pods at every single vendor. From16 different vendors, I found a lot of Pods ranging from $8 to $12, and grabbed every single one I found. By Sunday, some of the same vendors were paying $15 for Pods and were sold out at $25.

Bragging stories aside, the lesson here is to utilize some form of information on recent spikes (MTG Price and MTG Stocks are two of my favorites) to grab cards that vendors haven’t had the chance to update prices on. Vendors’ pre-event Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually filled with a lot of packing and driving, and many won’t see a card jump in price. Get there early, get that internet signal on your phone, iPad, or whatever, and go grab underpriced cards!

On a similar note, if you’ve run your singles budget dry for the weekend, promised yourself you wouldn’t spend anything on speculation, or have an ethical stance against getting one over on a vendor, don’t be afraid to tip off the dealers to price changes, buyouts, or hot cards. While they’re confined to a booth for the majority of the day, you’re free to roam around the convention center and collect information. If you don’t plan on using that information for personal gain, don’t let it go to waste! Creating a reputation and relationship with the vendors may also have its own benefit if you go to enough events.

Occasionally, you might see a gem that you’ve been hunting for a long time. In my case, it was a set of foil Ravnica [card]Life from the Loam[/card]s. If you’re confident enough that they’ll still be there after a couple of days, it might be better off to hold off on the temptation to instantly snatch them up. The longer you wait, the more flexible a dealer is likely to be with regards to negotiating the price of something that has been sitting there gathering dust. Since nobody else had picked up the set of Loams by late Saturday night, I was able to make an offer lower than the sticker price. The dealer was comfortable with it, so I got my cards. Although this won’t be the case every time, it’s worth trying if you see an odd foil/foreign piece for an EDH deck with a high price and low demand. This event will likely be the only opportunity the vendor has to unload these weird niche singles until the next GP.

Selling Strategies

Doing your homework before the event can help save you a ton of time while you sell to vendors. What I mean by this is to be aware of how much cash you expect to receive for each card, so you’re not wasting time looking up comparative buylists online while sitting at the table. If you have a ton of cards to sell, there is a process called “ogreing” that you can use to make every trip to each vendor fast and easy. Basically, you put all of the cards that you want to receive $.25 for in a pile, all of the $1.00 cards in another pile, etc. Walk up to a dealer, and tell them to pull out anything from the stacks that they want to pay that much for. It makes everyone’s lives easier, but don’t set your expectations too high. If your prices are out of range of what almost every dealer will pay, it’s not exactly worth it to have them look through your stack of 1,000 cards just to pull out one or two cards, then have every other vendor at the event do the same.

Many of the larger stores will come to a grand prix equipped with printed out buylists for anyone to grab. They only print out a limited number, so get one while you can, and scan over every inch of every buylist to make sure that you get the most cash for your cards. Grab a pen or sharpie, and circle all of the cards that even have a chance of being sold out of your collection. This narrows down your decision and makes it easier on your eyes to see only the relevant choices. Double-check your work to ensure that you didn’t miss any weird outliers. The first time I went through all of the Richmond buylists, I didn’t see that Strikezone was offering $30 on my foil [card]Sorin Markov[/card]! Doing this process before you take your ogred boxes to the dealers can allow you to make even more separate piles for each vendor for quick cash. If you have a pile of cards at an agreed upon sale price, it will make the transaction much quicker.

Don’t be afraid to ask for more on cards that are hot or sold out at the tournament, but don’t go overboard. Trying to haggle for more on every single card will obviously discourage whoever you’re trying to sell to and make the whole process arduous. Sure, if every other vendor is sold out of [card]Birthing Pod[/card], then it’s probably fine to ask for an extra dollar or two per copy. Just mention that they’ll probably sell out within the night. What you don’t want to do is ask for $2.00 on [card]Celestial Mantle[/card] if they offered $1.50, especially if they already agreed to previous requests to pay more. Although some dealers will be allowed to negotiate buy prices, others’ will be set firm throughout the weekend, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t give the person you’re doing business with a hard time, they’re probably just following orders from a spreadsheet and their employer.

Any Thoughts or Questions?

I hope I was able to teach everyone at least one new thing about conducting financial business at a larger scale event such as a grand prix. One of the most difficult things about writing an educational piece is figuring out exactly what my readers know, don’t know, and want to know. I have trouble deciding if a certain nugget of information is simply common knowledge and wasting your reading time, or if I haven’t explained a concept well enough.

With that said, I’d like to ask the readers of this column to send me any questions, subjects, or really just anything that you’d like me to write about! Apparently my editor Danny and my boss Jason think that my writing is good enough to deserve a weekly column on the website, so I’ll need a lot of material. Feel free to Tweet me at @Rose0fthorns, message me on Reddit at the same name, or just comment below.

Conjured Currency #6: Learning from Past Mistakes and Podding into the Future

Welcome back, readers! In my last article, I discussed why I (erroneously) thought that Kiki-Pod would be stronger then Melira Pod at Pro Tour Born of the Gods. Today, I thought it would be a beneficial exercise to analyze why this was a mistake, and take a [card]peek[/card] as to why Brian Liu was able to adapt his Kiki-Pod list to be far more consistent and versatile than my own—enough to take down the 4,300 person field at Grand Prix Richmond. Just for reference purposes, I’m going to list my own personal version of Kiki-Pod that I played in Richmond, Jacob Wilson’s Melira Pod that he earned him second place at Valencia, and Brian Liu’s updated Kiki-Pod from Richmond.

The Lists

[deck title=Kiki-Pod (DJ)]

[Creatures]

*4 Birds of Paradise

*4 Noble Hierarch

*3 Voice of Resurgence
*1 Wall of Roots

*1 Spellskite
*1 Qasali Pridemage

*1 Tarmogoyf

*1 Phantasmal Image

*1 Fauna Shaman

*2 Kitchen Finks

*1 Izzet Staticaster

*2 Deceiver Exarch

*1 Magus of the Moon

*1 Loxodon Smiter

*3 Restoration Angel

*1 Glen Elendra Archmage

*1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

*1 Murderous Redcap
*1 Zealous Conscripts

*2 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

*4 Birthing Pod

[/Spells]

[Lands]

*1 Plains

*1 Forest

*3 Arid Mesa

*4 Misty Rainforest

*4 Grove of the Burnwillows

*1 Stomping Ground
*1 Hallowed Fountain

*1 Breeding Pool

*1 Steam Vents

*1 Sacred Foundry

*1 Temple Garden
*2 Gavony Township

*1 Rugged Prairie
*1 Clifftop Retreat

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

*1 Aven Mindcensor

*2 Scavenging Ooze

*1 Spellskite

*1 Huntmaster of the Fells

*1 Obstinate Baloth
*1 Voice of Resurgence

*1 Domri Rade

*1 Avalanche Riders

*1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben

*1 Ancient Grudge

*1 Bant Charm

*3 Path to Exile

[/Sideboard]

[/Deck]

[deck title=Melira Pod (Jacob Wilson)]

[Creatures]

*4 Birds of Paradise

*1 Eternal Witness

*4 Kitchen Finks

*1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

*1 Melira, Sylvok Outcast

*2 Murderous Redcap

*3 Noble Hierarch

*1 Orzhov Pontiff

*1 Qasali Pridemage

*1 Ranger of Eos

*1 Scavenging Ooze

*1 Shriekmaw

*1 Viscera Seer

*2 Voice of Resurgence

*2 Wall of Roots

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

*4 Birthing Pod

*3 Chord of Calling

*2 Abrupt Decay

[/Spells]

[Lands]

*3 Forest

*3 Gavony Township

*1 Godless Shrine

*4 Misty Rainforest

*2 Overgrown Tomb

*3 Razorverge Thicket

*1 Swamp

*1 Temple Garden

*4 Verdant Catacombs

*1 Woodland Cemetery

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

*1 Entomber Exarch

*1 Harmonic Sliver

*1 Kataki, War’s Wage

*1 Obstinate Baloth

*2 Path to Exile

*1 Scavenging Ooze

*1 Sin Collector

*2 Slaughter Pact

*4 Thoughtseize

*1 Voice of Resurgence

[/Sideboard]

[/Deck]

[deck title=Kiki Pod (Brian Liu)]

[Creatures]

*4 Birds of Paradise

*1 Deceiver Exarch

*1 Eternal Witness

*1 Glen Elendra Archmage

*2 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker

*2 Kitchen Finks

*1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

*1 Murderous Redcap

*3 Noble Hierarch

*1 Qasali Pridemage

*4 Restoration Angel

*2 Scavenging Ooze

*1 Spellskite

*2 Voice of Resurgence

*3 Wall of Roots

*1 Zealous Conscripts

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

*4 Birthing Pod

*3 Chord of Calling

[/Spells]

[Lands]

*3 Arid Mesa

*1 Breeding Pool

*2 Fire-Lit Thicket

*1 Forest

*2 Gavony Township

*4 Grove of the Burnwillows

*1 Hallowed Fountain

*4 Misty Rainforest

*1 Plains

*1 Sacred Foundry

*1 Steam Vents

*1 Stomping Ground

*1 Temple Garden

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

*1 Ancient Grudge

*1 Avalanche Riders
*2 Combust

*1 Ethersworn Canonist

*1 Fiery Justice

*1 Kataki, War’s Wage

*2 Negate

*3 Path to Exile

*1 Shatterstorm

*1 Thragtusk

*1 Thrun, the Last Troll

[/Sideboard]

[/Deck]

Why My Deck was Worse than Wilson’s

One of the interesting statistics about the most recent pro tour is that over 60% of the field was packing some sort of combo that allowed for high rates of degeneracy. Unfortunately, my Kiki list has very few ways of interacting with and disrupting other combo decks. We have [card]Qasali Pridemage[/card], [card]Glen Elendra Archmage[/card], and [card]Linvala, Keeper of Silence[/card] in the maindeck, and these are all situational at best. Pridemage and Elendra don’t help in the mirror, and Linvala becomes much worse without being able to shut down [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card]. We don’t have any way to interact with our opponents’ hands, and the interaction we do have is all creature-based and can be killed off via removal.

If you didn’t figure it out yet, the answer is this: [card]Thoughtseize[/card]. It’s a pretty good Magic card in a field full of combo, and Wilson got to play four copies out of the board to dismantle opposing decks that relied on key cards to function. [card]Sin Collector[/card] probably stole a [card]Cryptic Command[/card] or two, and [card]Slaughter Pact[/card] allowed him to tap out without fear of not having a response to creature-based combos.

In addition to having access to black disruption, the mana in Wilson’s list is far superior to my own. While my list tried to piece together four colors, often dropping to 13 life on turn two to cast Birthing Pod, the Melira Pod deck can run on three colors and utilize [card]Wall of Roots[/card] as an efficient blocker against aggressive strategies like Zoo. This lack of pressure on his own mana base allowed the registering of three copies of [card]Gavony Township[/card], which is now rightfully a $4 card. The activations of this land provide Pod the means to win an inevitability war if it needs to, and by running three in a less demanding deck means that you can draw into it more frequently with a lower chance of missing a color or two.

And Why It was Worse than Liu’s

Both Wilson and Liu brought back a combo that I haven’t used since Modern was first created, back when I played Melira Pod: casting [card]Chord of Calling[/card] to get one of my favorite Magic cards, [card]Eternal Witness[/card]. Witness brings back Chord, so you can Chord again, this time for [card]Restoration Angel[/card], blink Witness, get back Chord…SO MUCH VALUE! Although the Selesnya instant is far too clunky for my build, [card]Wall of Roots[/card] provides a large body that can hold the fort and provide two mana towards Chord by itself (tap it for convoke, and add a mana using its ability). In a field of 4,300 people, this level of consistency was undoubtedly a large part of why Brian Liu made it to the endgame. Instead of four copies of “resolving this card pretty much wins you the game,” he gets to play seven. His Pod deck is far more consistent than my own creation, and shows that I still have a lot to learn about deckbuilding.

Another point that I want to touch on is the number of combo pieces in Liu’s maindeck. I played [card]Phantasmal Image[/card] due to its utility in allowing us to combo off of a Pod, a 1-drop, a 2-drop, four open mana, and eight life. However, I haven’t used that route to combo for several months, and it was against a new player. Any experienced player will know your combo routes just as well as you, and you can’t expect your opponent to just let you start comboing off a large chain without a response, and the same goes for the second copy of [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card]. Neither of these cards efficiently bring the beats on their own, a criticism I made in my last article of Melira and [card]Viscera Seer[/card]. Instead, Liu was able to max out on [card]Restoration Angel[/card]s, and play two copies of [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card] in the maindeck, reinforcing the “fair” plan of beating the opponent’s face in when we can’t combo.

Lastly, I want to discuss why Liu’s sideboard choices were better than my own. Although I do not have Liu himself available to provide a sideboarding guide or explanation, I think his choices are very interesting and powerful, even if counterintuitive at first glance. Pod decks are the most creature-heavy main decks in Modern and are known for their utility toolboxes. Pod sideboards often feature several one-ofs, and the deck runs so enough tutors that it can consistently draw them. What’s strange is that there are 10 spells in Liu’s sideboard, and only five are creatures! Although he can’t tutor for these spells at will, they have extremely powerful effects that make it worth diluting the creature count.

[card]Combust[/card] is one of the most backbreaking answers to a [card]Splinter Twin[/card] combo, and let’s face it: nobody expects an instant-speed response from the 30-creature deck with a [card]Wall of Roots[/card] and [card]Grove of the Burnwillows[/card] open. [card]Ancient Grudge[/card] and [card]Shatterstorm[/card] are a bit obvious in how hard they crush Affinity, and [card]Fiery Justice[/card] is a Magic card that works absolutely beautifully in this deck when facing opposing creature swarms. Much like how we don’t care about giving the opponent a few life with Grove, it seems fine to completely blow out an opposing board of creatures at the cost of five life to an opponent. After all, you plan on swinging for millions.

And That’s All, Folks

I hope that you guys stuck around for my short break from finance-related articles and found something of use in these two pieces. I know that they’re both a bit late to the party, and for that I apologize. It probably seems counterintuitive to write an article, then have the follow-up piece be “TL;DR: Ignore everything I just said,” but I think that there is always value in analyzing the reasons why we are wrong. That way we can learn for the next time!

My next article will be my personal story from Richmond (don’t worry, you won’t have to read about how I went 1-3). I’ll be discussing some of the finance lessons I learned at the grand prix, as well as my process of selling to the dealers there. Until next time!

Conjured Currency – Pod, Post-Prohibition

[Editor’s note: DJ submitted this article before the pro tour took place. Some of his metagame predictions didn’t turn out quite the way he thought they would, but the thought process behind them is still valuable and informative. DJ will be back next time to address what went wrong in assuming Kiki Pod would be more popular than Melira Pod, so stay tuned! In the meantime, enjoy a nice analysis by a player well experienced with the deck.]

Welcome back, readers!

With the recent updates to the Modern B&R list, players clamored over what new and old archetypes would be strong at the recent pro tour. Players wondered: will Faeries wake up from its dark slumber and annihilate everything we hold dear? Does the unbanning of [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] mean that Shards of Alara commons will spike to $2.00 retail? (Unfortunately, yes.) Am I sad that I currently own 20+ [card]Deathrite Shamans[/card]? A little bit, but I’m crossing my fingers that Legacy play and price memory won’t tank the price too hard. It was undoubtable that adding and removing three cards of this power level from the format would have a massive shakeup on the decklists at Pro Tour Born of the Gods. Almost every competitive Modern player on the internet was predicting what decks would become tier-one, what decks would become unplayable, and everything in between.

Today, I am going to take a slight detour from my normal financial advice column, and talk about a deck that became incredibly powerful with the new banned and restricted updates, but hasn’t been talked about nearly enough.

Which Pod is Best Pod?

When I ask you about [card]Birthing Pod[/card] in Modern, what deck do you think about? Does your mind whisk you away to images of [card]Melira, Sylvok Outcast[/card], [card]Viscera Seer[/card], and [/card]Kitchen Finks[/card] gaining a trillion life? I know mine used to. After winning multiple grands prix in the past year, many players consider Melira Pod the premier Pod deck, and as such, [card]Noble Hierarch[/card] spiked to nearly $60 when [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] made its exit. However, in my opinion, there is another version of Pod that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention for quite some time, and I feel that it has the edge over Melira. I am talking about Kiki Pod.

While Melira Pod is widely regarded as a midrange deck with a combo available as a plan B, Kiki Pod is on the opposite side of the spectrum. It usually wins using a two-card combo of [card]Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker[/card] plus any one of [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card], [card]Restoration Angel[/card] or [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card]. It combos out far more often than it wins with fair creatures and sub-20,000 damage combat phases, but it can still tussle with the best of ‘em and fight out a fair game of Magic. For reference, here’s a sample list that I’ve been working with.

[deck title=Kiki-Pod]

[Creatures]

*4 Birds of Paradise

*4 Noble Hierarch

*3 Voice of Resurgence

*1 Wall of Roots

*1 Spellskite
*1 Qasali Pridemage

*1 Tarmogoyf

*1 Phantasmal Image

*1 Fauna Shaman

*2 Kitchen Finks

*1 Izzet Staticaster

*2 Deceiver Exarch

*1 Magus of the Moon

*1 Loxodon Smiter

*3 Restoration Angel

*1 Glen Elendra Archmage

*1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

*1 Murderous Redcap
*1 Zealous Conscripts

*2 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

*4 Birthing Pod

[/Spells]

[Lands]

*1 Plains

*1 Forest

*3 Arid Mesa

*4 Misty Rainforest

*4 Grove of the Burnwillows

*1 Stomping Ground
*1 Hallowed Fountain

*1 Breeding Pool

*1 Steam Vents

*1 Sacred Foundry

*1 Temple Garden
*2 Gavony Township

*1 Rugged Prairie
*1 Clifftop Retreat

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

*1 Aven Mindcensor

*2 Scavenging Ooze

*1 Spellskite

*1 Huntmaster of the Fells

*1 Obstinate Baloth
*1 Voice of Resurgence

*1 Domri Rade

*1 Avalanche Riders

*1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben

*1 Ancient Grudge

*1 Bant Charm

*3 Path to Exile

[/Sideboard]

[/Deck]

There are several reasons why I prefer this strategy to Melira Pod. Our combo only consists of two cards, while Melira requires three to be in play in order to go infinite. Also, [card]Restoration Angel[/card], [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card], [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card], and [card]Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker[/card] have all proven their worth in their respective Standard formats, having solid combat stats or abilities that can be relevant to a board state that does not involve an infinite loop. On the other hand, [card]Melira, Sylvok Outcast[/card] is just a glorified [card]Grizzly Bears[/card] and [card]Viscera Seer[/card] is nothing to write home about on its own. Lastly, do we really think [card]Noble Hierarch[/card] can pull its weight so much that DRS won’t be missed? Deathrite was a large part of Melira’s fair gameplan, providing incremental advantage on the life pad, and exiling crucial opposing graveyard pieces. All in all, I don’t see a very strong argument for playing Melira in the new metagame.

Chaining Pod Activations: How Can We Kill?

This is an extremely complicated deck to play, and having Pod on the battlefield with at least one creature gives you a huge number of lines of play that you can take in any given turn. Unlike Melira Pod, our blue splash lets us “chain” our Pod activations multiple times in one turn, assembling the two card combo from what would at first appear to be nothing. Let’s go over the ways in which you can kill your opponent, assuming the required pieces are still in your deck:

  • Two-drop + one-drop + four Pod activations: This is the one that catches many players off guard: Pod your two-drop into a [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card], untapping Pod. Turn the one-drop into [card]Phantasmal Image[/card], copying Exarch and untapping Pod again. Because the Image copies the converted mana cost of Exarch, you can turn Image into a [card]Restoration Angel[/card], flickering Exarch and untapping Pod again. One more activation turns your angel into [card]Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker[/card], and you can make a billion dudes with haste (unless you need to play around [card]Rakdos Charm[/card]).

  • A pair of two-drops + four Pod activations: The exact same as the above scenario, but the fact that we play two [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card]s allows us to substitute out [card]Phantasmal Image[/card] for the second Exarch.

  • Two-drop + three-drop + three Pod activations: Again, we start with a two-mana creature into Exarch, then a three-drop into [card]Restoration Angel[/card], blinking Exarch, untapping Pod, and then turning Angel into Kiki.

  • Two-drop + four-drop + two Pod activations: Identical to the chain directly above, but we save a mana and skip getting Angel because we already have a four-drop in play.

  • Two-drop + [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] + three Pod uses: Chain from two-drop into  Exarch into [cardRestoration Angel[/card], blinking Conscripts to untap Pod. [card]Restoration Angel[/card] turns into Kiki-Jiki, and you can kill them with that + Conscripts.

  • Three-drop + [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] + two Pod activations: Identical to above, we just skipped a step.

  • Three-drop + four-drop + three Pod activations: Pod the four-drop into [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card], untap Pod. Three-drop into Resto, blink Conscripts. Angel into Kiki, enjoy your army of 3/3s.

  • A pair of four-drops (or a single un-persisted [card]Murderous Redcap[/card]/[card]Glen Elendra Archmage[/card]) + two Pod activations: Pod into Conscripts, untap Pod. Pod remaining four-drop into Kiki-Jiki.

Why is this Deck Better Now than Before?

Birthing PodWell, hypothetical reader, I’m glad that you asked. Although our deck didn’t play Deathrite before the banning, and it doesn’t play [card]Bitterblossom[/card] or [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] now, before the bannings, Jund was one of our more even matchups. But now Jund has lost DRS, and Kiki-Pod has lost nothing.

We have the tools to fight a potential Fae deck in the forms of [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card], [card]Loxodon Smiter[/card], [card]Magus of the Moon[/card], [card]Izzet Staticaster[/card], and the fact that a good chunk of our cards have flash as well.

Out of the Zoo lists that I’ve seen, the scariest is the Tribal Domain deck that plans on casting [card]Tribal Flames[/card] for 5 damage on turn 3 while attacking with Wild Nacatls. Due to our life payments through our manabase and Pod, this is an unfavorable matchup. However, most of the Zoo lists I’ve played against have been the traditional Naya lists that advocate for just good old beatdown and burn. In my experience, Pod can attrition the deck through Voice tokens, Township activations, and Restoration Angels, finishing games with the combo. Just remember to play around [card]Lightning Bolt[/card] and [card]Lightning Helix[/card]. Do whatever you can to force them to give you Voice tokens.

One of my favorite things about this deck is the number of one-ofs that we can jam into the list to hose certain decks. Going four-color Kiki-Pod instead of three-color Melira allows us a much stronger variety of hate cards to slip into the list. These singleton hate cards will end up getting tweaked based on a given metagame. If creatureless combo has a massive prescence, we might be able to relegate [card]Linvala, Keeper of Deathrite Shamans[/card] to the sideboard. If there’s a Pod mirror in the finals of Valencia, than maybe [card]Aven Mindcensor[/card] gets moved to the mainboard over [card]Tarmogoyf[/card] in order to get an edge.

As someone who has been casting [card]Birthing Pod[/card] almost nonstop since it was introduced in 2011, the strongest aspect to the deck has always been its adaptability. It is very difficult to hate out a two-card combo deck that can just as easily beat your face in with an army of 6/6 elementals. To anyone looking to find a new Modern deck, Kiki-Pod is a strong choice that will also help you improve as a player due to all of the decision trees. I might make this article into a multi-part series, with future pieces going deeper into card choices, covering matchups seen at the pro tour, and examining niche lines of play that rarely come up (but can save your life). Let me know in the comments section below, on Reddit, or  on Twitter what you think of the deck.