Today I want to talk about one of the great traps in Magic finance, or really any kind of investing. The trap is forgetting about, or just ignoring, this statement: past performance does not indicate future results. To take it to the extreme, it’s the trap of “always” and “never.”

Let’s start with an example. Take a look at the following chart, which is the price of a Revised [card]Underground Sea[/card] circa May of 2014 (just before Journey Into Nyx hit). Before you continue reading, take a few mental notes on what you see.

Here are my notes for comparison:

• [card]Underground Sea[/card] has seen about a 150% gain since June of 2012.
• It has not seen a meaningful decrease in price during that time.
• It has recently seen a dramatic increase in price (January to May of 2014) and has not leveled off.
• The last significant jump was about one year ago, in May of 2013.

That is a pretty matter-of-fact interpretation of the data. Importantly, it’s entirely focused on what the card has done in the past and doesn’t make any predictions about the future. Let’s be honest, not many of us were quite so level-headed about duals at the time.

You were much more likely to see the following comments on [card]Underground Sea[/card]’s price movement from Magic financiers last May:

• [card]Underground Sea[/card] has never dropped in price meaningfully and likely never will.
• Based on the current trajectory, the price will certainly climb to $400 soon and $500 eventually.
• Duals now appear to have a seasonality (see May of 2013 and 2014) as people sell out of Standard in the spring and want to preserve their capital.

• Reserved List cards, with duals among the most desired, are truly the only safe haven in Magic finance.

• There is no ceiling.
• Sea, like other duals, is a good buy at any price since they will never drop.

You might notice that these bullets are made up of observations and conclusions smashed together. The support for these conclusions comes from a false equivalency of past performance and future results. Dual lands have never gone down in price so dual lands will never go down in the future. [card]Underground Sea[/card] has increased dramatically in price so it will increase further in price.

Now let’s look at how things unfolded (if you don’t already know) and then go back and take another look at the analysis.

[card]Underground Sea[/card] (like most of the duals) has dropped by about 20 percent since May and does not appear to have leveled off.

The Mistake of Always and Never

This is not an “I told you so” article. No one that I’m aware of called for a substantial decline in the dual lands this year. I certainly did not.

This is not a “we should have seen it coming” article, either. There was every reason to think that duals would continue to climb in price based on the trend. There was nothing, at least that I can tell, that forecasted this drop. Vague statements and doomsaying like “they can’t go up forever” do not count as forecasting a 20 percent decline, either.

The mistake was turning probably into always and turning probably not into never. If you deployed money based on those equivalencies, you lost and maybe lost big.

It’s a subtle distinction on paper but a massive change to mindset. We will make drastically different investment decisions when looking at probably than we will when looking at always.

Probably calls for an investment coupled with the usual safeguards: diversification, properly sized investments, and other risk mitigators.

Always is a sure thing, a stone-cold mortal lock. Always means safeguards are not necessary, that caution can be thrown to the wind, because it is 100 percent. If you ever find one, go ahead and bet it all—no one would argue against pushing all-in when your opponent is drawing dead. Good luck finding these opportunities, if they even exist.

You really can’t afford to confuse “always” and “probably” when a lot of money is on the line.

Variance in Investing

To be clear, the correct read on that first chart (May 2014) is that Underground Sea would continue to increase in price. There was nothing to support a call for a decline or a break in the trend.

The thing is, we often forget that there is massive variance in investing in Magic, just like there is variance in the game itself. In fact, there is massive variance in any kind of investing.

You can’t solve an investment any more than you can solve a game of Magic. Perfect play loses to timely top decks from your opponent, and sometimes cards drop in price that “shouldn’t” drop or have never dropped before. You can stare at charts and spreadsheets until your eyes pop, but you will never get the variance out.

Everything indicated duals were safe and would continue to go up, but they went down instead. Are there reasons for this? Maybe. Somewhere buried in a thousand variables there might be an answer, but we are not going to solve it and we are certainly not going to predict it. Call it variance.

These things just happen. Duals always go up until they go down. At some point we may get confused and think they can’t go down. The same was true of the U.S. housing market a few years ago.

The good news is that this is all very easy to work around, at least in Magic finance. Just plan for variance in your Magic investments. You can do that in a lot of ways, but here is the executive summary: never make an investment that will break you if you lose it. It’s only really a problem if you are making large bets.

Dual lands are a great example to use here because they, more than almost any other set of cards, entice financiers to make those huge bets. You don’t have to worry about variance very much when you pick up a hundred copies of a bulk rare. Your safeguards come built in in the form of a low price. A single Underground Sea costs more than that spec, and the financiers investing in duals are buying lots of dual lands. It’s adult money.

If you have a playset of Underground Seas that you can use in a Legacy deck, big deal, they are worth less now. If you dove headfirst into Magic finance by buying $5000 in duals, well, that’s a lot tougher. It could be quite a while before you break even, let alone turn a profit.

“Always” and “never” are not words that should be in your vocabulary if you are investing serious money in Magic. Top Magic pros don’t say, “There’s only one card that beats this line but I haven’t seen it yet so he’ll never have it now.” They painstakingly play around the one card that the opponent, in all likelihood, doesn’t have in his hand or maybe even his deck because they risk losing everything if they don’t.

Invest the same way. Press yourself into finding the scenarios where you lose big and don’t dismiss any of them as too unlikely. Don’t take the shortcut of simply extending the trend line.

Upcoming Opportunities

This isn’t just a dual land thing. I see it elsewhere in Magic finance. Here is a short list of investments where I regularly see people turning probably into always. If you are thinking about putting real money into one of these, be sure you aren’t making assumptions.

1) Sealed Product – Many people did well holding sealed product during the Magic boom. That has morphed into the perception that sealed product always goes up, always gives you a good return, and never drops.

Avoid This Mistake: Don’t be the one with a closet full of recent booster boxes when the paradigm on sealed product changes. Eventually it will—there are already cracks in the foundation.

2) Modern Masters 2015 – Whatever you think you know about this set, forget it. In fact, forget it is even called Modern Masters because it will behave radically different than its predecessor. Forget what you think you know about the cards that will be included and what it will do to their price.

Avoid This Mistake: Don’t empty your checking account for [card]Tarmogoyf[/card]s and other Modern Masters reprints if they show up in MM2015 and dip in price. Yes, they spiked majorly after the first reprint and turned out to be a great buy, but you are working with one data point. A repeat is far from a given, and this really could be the time that Goyfs go down and stay down.

3) Legacy Staples – If I asked every reader of this article what dual lands are going to do next, I bet some of them would say, “Duals are going back up because duals always go up.” Re-read the article. Maybe [card]Underground Sea[/card] bounces, maybe it drops another 10 percent.

Avoid This Mistake: Don’t assume that a 20 percent drop eliminates the risk from buying duals and make the same mistake this article is about by plowing all your money into them now. It very well could be a buying opportunity ([card]Volcanic Island[/card] is already ticking up) but a deeper decline is not impossible, so please use caution. Make sure your buys are appropriately sized and you are not overextending.

That’s all I have for today. You can find me on Twitter at @acmtg if you have any questions or just want to discuss Magic finance.

Thanks for reading.

The only event that happened last weekend was the Star City Games Players’ Championship, an event exclusively dedicated to sixteen incredible players that have done exceptionally well at Star City Games events across the country. There are sixteen Standard and sixteen Legacy decks that come out of the event, so lets see how well the decks did against each other when only the pro’s were around to pilot them.

SCG Players’ Championship – Standard (Roanoke, VA)

Decklists

Wow: three Sultai Reanimator decks taking the top three spots of the Standard portion really speaks to the power of the deck. Even in a field of excellent players, the Sultai Reanimator deck reigns supreme. Lets take a look at which cards were included across those decks.

Sideboard

OK, so the first thing that pops out to me is the lack of [card]Sidisi, Brood Tyrant[/card]. Yes, Brad Nelson did play them and he won the overall Players’ Championship with the help of his particular build. However, with two other competitors Gerard Fabiano and Reid Duke opting not to play them it is quite clear that the Sultai Brood doesn’t need the tyrant in order to still place well. What is important are the [card]Whip of Erebos[/card], [card]Thoughtseize[/card], and [card]Sylvan Caryatid[/card]s found across the decks. Other notables include eight [card]Eidolon of Blossoms[/card], eight [card]Doomwake Giant[/card]s, six [card]Pharika, God of Affliction[/card]. These are all cards that could be potentially undervalued going into the new year based on the results here.

Let’s also analyze U/W Heroic, as this deck appeared three times in the Top 8 along with Sultai Reanimator.

The deck is very straightforward in order to stay on the aggro tempo plan based on the linear numbers and lack of mythics. The most important cards include [card]Hero of Iroas[/card], [card]Ordeal of Thassa[/card], [card]Favored Hoplite[/card], and [card]Battlewise Hoplite[/card]. [card[Flooded Strand[/card] has been trending upwards over the past few weeks on the success of this deck. Many of the fetchlands have stabilized in price for now, so keep the ones that you’ve already acquired. The low point for fetches will come starting next spring and going into the summer, so I would only recommend picking up Flooded Strand and the rest if you plan on playing with them until then.

Four players opted to play Jeskai Tokens at the Championships, and while it only put one player into the Top 8, the deck still remains a competitive choice for players. Notables from Jeskai Tokens include [card]Goblin Rabblemaster[/card], [card]Jeskai Ascendency[/card], and [card]Hordeling Outburst[/card].

Only one player decided to play Mardu Midrange despite its recent successes. I don’t think this means it is going to be the end of the deck but unfortunately it means that there isn’t much analysis on what higher level players would play in their Mardu Midrange builds. [card]Bloodstained Mire[/card] and [card]Wooded Foothills[/card] are still the cheapest fetchlands, and if B/R/G decks prove popular next year we can expect these fetchlands to start climbing like [card]Flooded Strand[/card] has.

SCG Players’ Championship – Legacy (Roanoke, VA)

Decklists

Just like many SCG Legacy Opens that we’ve seen in the past, the Top 8 of the Legacy portion also reflects the diversity of Legacy’s metagame compared to formats like Standard. Brad Nelson’s Legacy go-to choice is Sneak and Show. Two main deck [card]Overmaster[/card] are the notable cards from this build. Everything else reflects the typical Sneak and Show decks but with the addition of three main deck [card]Flusterstorm[/card] in anticipation of Storm and Delver builds. One card with a surprising price is [card]Boseiju, Who Shelters All[/card] which is $9.50 TCG Median. This card just got a reprint in the FTV series, so I would not expect Boseiju’s price to move for quite some time.

Sultai Control is a spin on the old Team America decks, which is focused on controlling your opponent until you can drop a game-ending threat and win from there. Fabiano’s take on the deck includes two [card]Sensei’s Divining Top[/card] and two [card]Counterbalance[/card] to help against faster decks while also playing Legacy staples such as [card]Abrupt Decay[/card], [card]Treasure Cruise[/card], [card]Tarmogoyf[/card], and [card]Thoughtseize[/card].

The players’ decks reflected what they were most comfortable with, which makes sense give Legacy’s extremely diverse format. However, Reanimator was the most popular choice with three players piloting the deck. Kent Ketter and Joe Lossett were both playing four [card]Gemstone Cavern[/card]s main, which is a land that if you’re not playing first you can begin the game with the land in play with a luck counter on it by exiling a card from your hand (if you have it in your opener). The luck counter allows the land to tap for any color rather than colorless, which means that you are essentially playing a pseudo-[card]Chrome Mox[/card] on your first turn. This allowed them to have faster clocks on the draw; sometimes the difference between a win and a loss in a format like Legacy. Non-foil Caverns are $2 while foils are $10, so if this version of Reanimator continues to show up at Legacy events I would expect non-foils to rise in price since it only has one printing.

Keter and Lossett also both played two [card]Firestorm[/card] main deck. This could mean upward mobility for the card’s price, since it is now seeing additional play outside of Dredge.

Other notables from Legacy include four Overmaster between the main deck and sideboard of Omni-Tell, two [card]Dack Fayden[/card] in Grixis Control, and three [card]Knight of the Reliquary[/card] in Deathbalde.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for this weekend! Players and spectators had high hopes for the SCG Players’ Championship and Star City certainly delivered on them. We got plenty of great Magic action along with some interesting deck choices that could ultimately spell changes financially for select cards that played important roles in the decks.

The calendar of a Magic player is pretty different from most other people’s, and this time of year is probably the single best example. While many people have been anxiously counting down the days until Santa Claus comes to town, December is typically the slowest part of Magic‘s entire year. There are fewer tournaments to watch as the circuits take a rare break from hosting events, and FNM attendance dips as people (especially if you live in a college town) flock home to be in the warmth of kith and kin and kithkin.

It’s a little bit ironic that for people who get four spoiler seasons a year (that many people call some amalgamation “Magic Player Christmas”), that the real thing is our down period (although I think Fate Reforged spoilers are gonna start right around Christmas, due to the bumped release). Now maybe the reason Magic slows down at Christmas is so we can have the opportunity to cherish our loved ones and spend time in quiet reflection of the life of our savior Jesus Christ.

Or maybe we just haven’t optimized it yet! We are gonna explore a few ways to try and buck this trend, and make sure that you’re “Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime”!

Ugh, I am so sorry. That was totally uncalled for. Like, I thought I would be kinda hipstery and just sort of pull it off and move on, but I literally feel sick having written that. That song is the worst. …or is it?

BRIEF HOLIDAY POWER RANKINGS: The Six Worst Christmas Songs!

6. “Last Christmas” by Wham! 

I don’t remember anybody asking George Michael to make a Christmas song, yet he did. The ’80s are over, and this should have been destroyed along with the Berlin Wall and Brigitte Nielsen.

5. “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by Bob Geldof and a bunch of drunk ’80s musicians

 George Michael makes the list twice, which is either pretty surprising or not surprising at all. The biggest problem with this song is that yes, they (Ethiopia) do know it’s Christmas, since Africa contains almost a quarter of the world’s Christian population (23.6 percent as of 2010). Possibly almost excusable (but still super ignorant) the first time, the song was remade this year, much to the delight of literally nobody but Bono.

4. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” 

What. The. Hell. This is not even remotely okay. I had to sit through a freshmen orientation program when I started college, and every scenario they described when talking about consent is literally in this song. Season three of True Detective should be Ewan McGregor and Matthew Lillard tracking down whoever wrote this before it’s too late. If this song wasn’t somehow tangentially tied to the holiday season, this would have been banished to the Phantom Zone with all those racist Tom & Jerry cartoons.

3. “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” by Alvin and the Chipmunks, apparently

All I can say is that I was genuinely surprised this song was not listed somewhere in the CIA torture report as a means of enhanced interrogation.

2.  “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney and “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon

It’s a tie. Say what you will about the legacy of The Beatles, but these songs are lazy, tedious, and painful to listen to. You know what band never broke up and then made crappy holiday songs? That’s right, RUSH—the greatest band of all time. Shout out to Canada.

…Oh, and if RUSH ever did make a Christmas song, it would be badass, and you know it. And you know Neil would do a sick drum solo and Geddy would sing about the trees coming to life and Alex would just be shredding like he was during “Working Man” on the Time Machine tour. Man, RUSH is the best.

1. “Christmas Shoes” by NewSong 

Okay, so I was wrong before: this is the worst Christmas song. You may not be religious, but follow my logic here: Christmas is a time for celebrating the birth of Jesus, who decried materialism and the self-serving, sinful nature of man. In the song, the guy does a nice thing for a kid who is about to lose his mother. Awesome, except it feels less like “doing the right thing” and more like “let me tell you what I did.” The song becomes a smash hit, gets to #1 on the Adult Contemporary charts, and spawns a movie with Rob Lowe! And you know Rob Lowe isn’t working for cheap—Rob Lowe works for Rob Lowe. Unless 90 percent of the profits from this “song/movie/probably a book” went to some sort of heartbreaking poor kids charity, then “Christmas Shoes” shall remain atop this list forever. Do the right thing, NewSong.

Holiday Trading

With FNM attendance down for the season, it has previously been hard to capitalize on the low, low prices that accompany this time of year. Fortunately, the solution is PucaTrade. I’m not going to write a whole long piece on how great PucaTrade is, but this is the time of year to capitalize on being a member. As I mentioned, this is the time of year where store attendance will typically bottom out, drying up your opportunities to trade aggressively. The hidden costs for using PucaTrade any time of the year are going to be shipping (postage and supplies) and time (most trades will take at least a few days to complete), but the benefits include a wider card availability and access—you don’t need to wait at your store for other people to show, and you can mail out cards from wherever you spend the holidays.

Price Memory is something that ends a lot of trades this time of year, especially when prices bottom out harder than people expect. Even though more players are whipping out their smart phones at the start of a trade, most will hesitate to pull the trigger if it doesn’t feel right. If your trade partner¹ is appalled at your offer of 13 on his [card]Goblin Rabblemaster[/card], it’s not because you’re too low—it’s that they still associate it with the spike the card saw a month ago.

The beauty of the PucaTrade system is that once they’ve listed the card for trade, they’ve already partially pulled the trigger. Sure, they still have to send it, but once you see those juicy points on the side of the screen, it becomes a lot easier.

BRIEF PRICING ASIDE: Also, and I can’t speak for anyone but myself here, but I’ve started using their point values for the majority of my pricing. A lot of people argue over using SCG, TCGMid, or whatever, but when someone asks me a price, I will usually look it up on Puca and then move the decimal space two to the left. Anybody else doing this?

So if we are operating under the assumption that the benefits of availability exceed the costs of shipping and sunk time, how can we optimize the experience? Well, I would strongly suggest constructing a PucaBox, especially if you plan on taking it with you on holiday travels. Here’s how to do it:

1. If you haven’t already, determine what you want listed on your Haves. Make sure to sleeve every card individually. Finally, a great way to get rid of all those extra sleeves!
2. Get a long box that is big enough to fit all of your cards, but still has space for toploaders. If you know you will be traveling with it, make sure to not get something so big it becomes a hindrance.
3. Fill as much of the extra space with toploaders as you can. They won’t fit perfectly, but they’re crucial. Also, you may want to throw a page of stamps in there, and pack a box of envelopes. Your mom shouldn’t have to give up her perfectly good envelopes.
4. If you’re going out of town, make sure to either empty your Wants list or turn on Vacation Mode, especially if you expect to be gone for a long while.

The PucaBox is good for traveling, but it also really helps if you decide to just dedicate a portion of your tradable collection to Puca. Don’t forget, PucaTrade is like a sewer—what you get out of it is based on what you put into it.

Another tip? If you’re traveling home for the holidays, but you have some down time when you get there, make sure to look up your old friends and see if they have any cards they want to get rid of. These are all warm leads on collections where you should have an idea of what is inside (at least in terms of a year range).

Holiday Playing

So with everything dying down for the holidays, how can you keep actually playing Magic?

Very funny. No, besides that.

Stop.

DAMMIT, I WILL TURN THIS CAR AROUND.

…That’s better. So, if you want to play Magic over the holidays, what can you do? Well, Hearthstone and MODO are options, but that’s kind of a cop out. And let’s be real, you can’t just jump into either of those if you weren’t at least considering it already. If you plan on spending a lot of time with family or friends, have you considered building a Portal Cube?

The idea behind this is simple: having a box of sleeved Magic cards that you can play out of that scales down a lot of the complexity, but also doesn’t devolve into playing the same beginner decks a bunch of times until cabin fever sinks in. If you need to teach people (or give a quick refresher course to a lapsed player), you can quickly build some two color decks to show people the ropes, and get them familiar with the mechanics of the game. Then, depending on the skill level (or bravery) of the people you are playing with, you can move on to drafting.

BRIEF DRAFTING ASIDE: What we’ve done with my Portal Cube is a modified Rotisserie Draft, much like deck-building games use (think Ascension). You lay out six or seven cards, and when one gets picked, replace it out of the cube with another one. This makes it to where newer players don’t get bombarded with a bunch of different cards for the first several picks, and encourages open discussion during the process about how cards work. Newer players (especially kids or drunk adults) will be less embarrassed to asked how something works if everyone is puzzling over it together.

Why is it called a Portal Cube? Well, there was once a terrible supplemental product called Portal that tried to teach people Magic by changing a lot of the rules and wording to make cards worse (I can’t believe it flopped!). Anyways, in an attempt to lower complexity, they stripped the game down to basic lands, creatures, and sorceries.

Now, my cube doesn’t limit itself to those three types, but it does keep in the spirit of Portal in other ways. Creatures are kept less complicated, and I have tried to err towards having versions of cards with reminder text when possible. Instants appear, but at a lower frequency than sorcery. Cards are meant to be understood quickly, so I’ve tried to limit combos in the Spike sense (“Splinter Twin my Deceiver Exarch, kill you”), and gone more towards combos in the sense of interactions (Conjurer’s Closet plus a thing!). “The less text, the better” is a good rule of thumb for putting something like this together. The complexity of Magic will be there regardless.

BRIEF MARK ROSEWATER ASIDE: MaRo says in Drive to Work a lot that the complexity in Magic is always there, and playing the Portal Cube proves his point unequivocally. It is amazing how much is going on, even in these “watered down” games. So try to keep it simple, you can always add more stuff later.

Oh, and there’s one other interesting thing about my Portal Cube, see if you can spot it.

When I first started putting it together a few years back, my wife remarked to me that a lot of the artwork for the black cards I was including was likely a bit too scary for the kids that were going to be playing with it. After about five fruitless minutes of trying to find less scary black cards, my inner developer kicked in: “Can I balance a cube and exclude a color?”

So far the results have been positive, although white seems to be way better in this cube than in any other I have ever built. Personally, it’s also a good challenge since so many of my other cubes have been very black-heavy, and it’s definitely the color I play the most in Constructed. Red has also stepped up as being the other good removal color, which is what happens when you make [card]Flametongue Kavu[/card] better. Eventually I’ll add black in, but for now it is kind of fun seeing what creativity is bred from that giant restriction. Oh, and enchantress is a viable strategy in this cube, so I’m sure it’s going to be Zak Whyte’s favorite.

Well, I think that does it for this week. If you have any feedback on my Portal Cube or you’ve built your own, I’d love to hear about it. Or if you want to talk about RUSH, I’m always down for that. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week*!

*No you won’t, I’ll be off for Christmas. Same for the following week. See you in January!