Dive in!

Are you up to date and current with your prices? If you want to be successful as a Magic player (albeit each person's idea of success can vary drastically) part of that comes from acquiring the cards you need. Whether you want to just win that FNM at your local store, crush a Daily Event online, or qualify for the Pro Tour you gotta have the cards you need for your decks. Brian Kibler's up-to-the-second list won't help you destroy this weekend's PTQ if you can't find that playset of Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas in time!

What do I do? A bit of everything, but mostly I trade. I would absolutely love to just play the game and never haggle over the price of a Memnite, but I just don't have that luxury. What I do have is a semi-decent ability to retain knowledge and creative problem solving skills. For example let's take a look at how I've set up my trade binder:

9 * 3
8 * 4
7 6 5

That's the first page and the sets of numbers represent my perceived current value. I was experimenting this weekend with some way to look at my binder and know nearly instantaneously what I value what at. Center of the page (marked with an '*') contains some of the big ticket items like Jace, the Memory Adept or Phyrexian Obliterator. Around those I've moved in a clockwise direction to 'build' into the big ticket. I ignored most things valued at below 3 dollars because I actually sprinkled full pages dedicated to dollar cards or 2 dollar cards throughout the binder to further give the illusion of disorganization and chaos.

Armed with my newly setup trade binder (which has already been tweaked slightly) and having that confidence from knowing my binder backward and forward really helped at the M12 Pre-release this weekend.

If you aren't going to get your hair wet then why swim in the first place? Dive in! Fully immerse yourself in everything you do and you'll be surprised at the results. Promise.

Oh yeah before I forget. While I was in the middle of trading and talking to the 20-30 people that showed up at the Pre-release one of the store managers approached me and asked if I'd like a job. Unknown to the local player-base at large they'd been looking for another 'Magic guy'. Would that have happened if I'd have been afraid of getting water up my nose?