Vintage Masters and the Effect on the MTGO Eternal format Card Market

Hi Everyone!

I have some exciting news. I have mentioned before that I do a weekly show on YouTube talking about MTGO finance. I also record gameplay videos, usually Modern, but lately I have been playing a lot of Vintage. Today I finally got Twitter and Facebook accounts. Everything I post here, any other blogs I write for, and anything on YouTube will be on both my Facebook and my Twitter feed. Friend me on Facebook or follow me on twitter for instant updates on everything I post along with any other posts I think are interesting. The real point of me having a better presence in social media is that it's time consuming to post things in multiple places. It ends up being very tedious when I do the same thing 7 times for one new YouTube video or article (it gets really tedious when I have to post multiple things on all the sites. This will give me the ability to spend more time producing quality YouTube videos and articles instead of feeling like I might have to start skimping on quality so I can get everything posted before I run out of time. Below are my Facebook and Twitter pages. Please friend or follow me to get my latest articles and videos delivered directly to your computer or mobile device.


Mtg Confidant


Now that I have that exciting news out of the way. This week, I want to talk about the "eternal" formats. In my ongoing series of articles regarding trends in various formats, I don't think it's fair to not discuss Vintage and Legacy. Now they don't have normal behavior like the other constructed formats. There are no cycles, so how do the eternal formats behave?  There aren't any PTQ seasons or sets rotating out of the formats so there aren't any patterns to follow then, right? Wrong, there are trends, but unless people have been playing in the format for a long time, they don't observe long enough to see the trends repeat, which is how you can identify a pattern.

Now on to the solution, it's pretty obvious that part of the solution is to watch the market for a longer period of time to get a better representation of the trends in the format. The second part is to look at what affects the format as a whole?

There are only two real things that affect the eternal formats. Card bannings/restrictions, and new cards. Since once in a while a card becomes broken due to an interaction with a new card (Flash for example wasn't played until Protean Hulk was printed). So really, the only factor is the affect of new cards on the formats.

Most cards that are newer and good in eternal formats aren't allstars like Abrupt Decay, most of them are mediocre or just plain bad in Standard of Modern (think about Trygon Predator, it didn't even see play when it was first printed in Dissension and it's an all-star creature in Vintage).

The price of cards that are good in eternal formats seem to just creep higher and higher. Aside: I'm only talking about Mythic and Rare cards, and I realize Trygon Predator is uncommon, but it made the point that good in eternal formats does not mean good in standard. The cards seem to creep up in price until they're reprinted. Fortunately for everyone, Wizards doesn't really care about making eternal formats "accessible" they way they have been trying to make Modern more "accessible" (check out my next article for why there are quotes around "accessible") so it's unlikely cards that will be released will have a major impact on eternal format card prices (excluding reprint sets like Vintage Masters, designed to impact a specific format, sort of, at least, more on that another time).

I noticed that my last article got a lot of interest. It was about predictability in MTGO. It is my most popular article to date, but I didn't really think it was about MTGO as much as the business of MTGO or the Metagame of the business of MTGO (you know like a dream in a dream, lol). If my readers want articles about certain topics, I'll certainly write about them. you can leave your comments below and suggest any article topics, or email me directly at MTGConfidant@gmail.com.