MTGO VS PAPER PROFITABILITY

Hi Everyone!

I’m really excited about the fetch land reprints and I think it’s really exciting for Modern especially. It was the first format I started playing in competitively online. It is going to expand some horizons and make mana better.

I have been thinking about when specifically to buy the fetch lands. I do weekly videos on MTGO finance on the MagicGatheringStrat Youtube channel. I talked about when to buy the fetches there. Check it out if you’re interested.

I’m taking a little diversion from MTGO this week to talk a little about paper and something that made me think when I was looking at the absurdity of presale card prices. I look on eBay almost every day for good collections. I have bought collections for practically nothing that ended up being worth a small fortune, so I look for MTGO collections nearly every day. I was looking to see what the Fetch lands were going for. I couldn’t find any online fetches but I found paper fetches going for about $15 each. I thought to myself that there must be enough money in opening packs that dealers can buy boxes to open and sell the singles. I didn’t do the math but if they are selling rares and a pack costs a dealer $2 (less actually. Last I checked I could buy boxes for $71 each from a local swap meet) they must be making money. I’m not going to take the time to do the expected value formula because we know it’s positive and that’s all that matters.

I was thinking about this because it’s much harder to conduct paper business than online business. Even if I sold the cards on a website like eBay, it still takes someone to ship and process the transaction. What makes it worse is there’s no way to get packs directly from the manufacturer for less than the retail pricing.

There is one thing that’s redeeming about MTGO regarding the monopolistic aspect, that most new cards are opened in drafts. I understand that there’s no incentive to have MTGO distributors. I suppose Wizards would direct sell paper cards if they were able to.

I just wanted to write some thoughts I have about MTGO vs paper because the prices of MTGO being lower regardless of the price per pack being much higher (retail vs $2) is interesting to me.

Not Khans, but in an upcoming block, I want buy some boxes and see if it’s viable to make money from purchasing a box at a good price and selling the cards to see if I can make any money.

I’d love to try to conduct experiments and try out new theories and write about them in this column. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I’d love to give it a whirl and let you all know how it works out.

Mtg Confidant