Another Time to Buy is Coming!

Hi Everyone!

I'm sure you all know that in just a few short weeks Khans of Tarkir is releasing on MTGO. The pre-release for paper is next weekend. Like everyone else in the world who doesn't have fetch lands online, I want a set of allied colored fetches. Too bad for me, the time to buy fetches is later. At least a couple weeks after Khans comes out. It used to be a hard and fast rule that 14 days after a set was released was the best day to buy. But with recent sets, like VMA and M15, this is not the case. It really reminds me a lot of how the weather shifted during the great depression. One major cause was the "Dust Bowl". The Dust Bowl was a shift in climate that changed the viability of farming on the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles.

I mentioned that because it seems at this point at least, that the Magic Online economy is changing. It's changing in two ways. The first way is that it seems to be going slower. Years ago, the best time to buy was exactly 14 days after a set came out online. That's all changed, now it's a much longer period for the prices to drop once a set is released. The other thing is that the economy seems to be a lot more stable. Yes the cards do change price more than paper, that’s mostly because the accessibility of the market far exceeds that of the Paper market. If I want a black lotus online, I can buy one right now online and play with it in 5 minutes or less. In Paper I have to buy, wait for payment to clear, wait for shipping, and finally wait to actually play a game. So by the very nature of an electronic marketplace that we can all access with our computer it will be more volatile than the paper market that is less prone to excitement and has slower availability of data.

There will always be what some consider chaos in the Magic Online economy because it still moves very quickly, although slower than before. But the economy seems a lot more predictable to me than ever before. It could be a greater number of players online that allow the market to have more stability (with more people there comes more stability). Alternatively, it could be Vintage Masters rolling off sale. I’m not sure because we have never seen anything like Vintage Masters online before and it’s really difficult to predict when we don’t have any data to compare to. Think of it like Comps in real estate. With nothing to compare to, there’s no way to know what to charge. We don’t know what’s happening as VMA goes off sale.

On the other hand, it could be that MTGO is growing and getting more popular and more people are deciding they want to play online because it’s convenient (that’s the only reason I play online instead of paper).

I know I have mentioned it before, but it’s an exciting time in MTGO and I really like to see what’s going to happen. One thing for sure that’s going to happen. Khan fetch lands will sell for a premium the first several days they are available. I’d say that it’s the best bet to stay out of them until they have been out for 2 weeks unless you’re buying them for practically nothing. Then you’re going to want to watch their trends until they start going up. I’m going to say my standard thing (I feel like a broken record with this one), four days of climbing prices is the time to buy. I say four days because it’s safer than three from being a temporary price jump, and a real trend isn’t two days long. Usually the upward trend will start between two and six weeks after the release.