Foilness

This article is going to cover anything that comes to mind about foils.  There have been some significant changes in the foil market lately, which I‘d like to ramble about.  

As you ‘re all probably aware, WotC decided to try something new with starting with the Shards of Alara Block a few months ago. MtGO discontinued the sale of individualized Shards/Conflux/Reborn boosters and replaced them with a single pack containing cards from all three sets.  More relevant to this article is the fact they also created foil versions of these Shards Block packs.  These packs, as well as events paying out full foil sets, resulted in a flood of ACR foils on MtGO.  As a result, the foil value of a card which goes for three tickets is not the same in Alara as in other T2 sets.

  

Wishlist buying mode and foils do not get along.  If a wishlist includes foil cards, Mtgo will try to grab the non-foil versions of those cards if there are no foils to grab.  This is a flaw/feature of Mtgo itself, not a problem with the bot. In fact, the ML Bot removes the non-foil cards from the “You Get” column to overcome the issue. In any case, it is advised that if you are buying foils you use the normal buying mode, or if the speed of wishlist buying mode is a must, refrain from buying many foils - it takes a considerable amount of time for the bot to put back cards it doesn‘t actually want to buy, and if it can only grab 75 cards and needs to put back 74 of them, you‘re only able to buy one card.  You can actually try telling your customers they must hide all their non-foil cards before selling to the bot, if you‘d like to use wishlist buying mode for a bot buying only foils.

 The last foil topic I‘d like to touch on is buying/selling during releases. For the first month after a set releases there are no redemption requests available. Because of this, the demand for foils is almost non-existent. Despite this, you‘ll often see people charging MORE for the foil versions of a card of any given value.  Another factor to consider is that most cards are going for the highest prices they‘ll ever see at this time. Combine low demand with inflated non-foil values and it only makes sense for the markup on foils to be low at this time.