Nix Tix and effect on the market

I’d like to go over ‘‘nix tix’‘ drafts and their effect on the MTGO economy for any bot owners who may not pay attention to limited.  It can be worthwhile to take a look at the nix tix schedule every now and again for even the most withdrawn bot operator.

Nix tix events are drafts in which no event tickets are charged to enter.  Usually one set/block is set to nix tix mode each week.  You can always find the schedule on wizards.com. Whenever a set is available for nix tix, its draft is drafted more.  This has the obvious effect of putting more cards from that format on the market - which will usually make it easier for those card prices to drop.  There are a few different tactics to employ during these market situations.  The simplest and most apparent reaction is to pay a bit less or stop buying cards you feel may be ready to drop in price.  On the contrary, if you are having trouble stocking any cards from that format, now may be the time to advertise that you are buying them.  If you can’t keep them in stock they are less likely to drop in price, so don’t be afraid to gather some up while you can, just because the overall idea is to back away from the set or block.

Booster pack values are also affected by nix tix events.  Whichever boosters are being nix tix drafted get siphoned off the market, causing their value to increase at least slightly.  This change is predicted fairly well by booster bots, so don’t expect to be able to scoop up a bunch of packs the day before nix tix and resell them later that week for a hefty profit.  The margin on boosters is tiny due to their liquidity, leaving little room for speculation to be worthwhile.

Even Ticket values see an effect from nix tix events, but not in quite the same way.  There’s pretty much always a nix tix format available, but depending on what it is, there can be a different effect.  Events that take event tickets off the market cause the monetary value of an event ticket to rise, while events which require no tickets have the opposite effect.  Popular nix tix formats like M10 kept more tickets on the market.  Less popular nix tix formats remove this counterbalance. Nix tix events held in tandem with a nix pax events can actually have the complete opposite effect of the standard nix tix week, instead draining tickets off the market.  The effect nix tix events have on ticket values are of course dwarfed by the thirty ticket entry prerelease events they’ve been holding lately.  With all these factors constantly changing, you would think the cash an event ticket fetches through paypal would be jumping around like crazy, but it’s actually fairly constant.  It takes long-term trends to make a significant effect on what users are willing to sell their tickets for to really cause a splash.  An example of such a change would be the first MTGO prerelease, which caused event tickets to rise in perceived value in anticipation that every new set would drain huge amounts of tickets from the market, thirty at a time.

 In summary, nix tix events can be the catalyst in price drops, cause hard to find cards to become more readily available for a short time, increase booster values, and offset the drainage of event tickets from the marketplace.