Why it matters that "I can always get more later"

Hi Everyone!

This week I was shopping online for some cards for a standard deck I'm building. I came across Siege Rhino and was surprised by it's super low price. It got me thinking, it sees a lot of Standard play and even some Modern play and it's so cheap, not that I'm complaining. This made me wonder why did cards like Glittering Wish skyrocket in price over an anticipated deck that was fragile with mana dorks and four colors. The deck that used Glittering Wish didn't even pan out like the speculators thought.

It all comes down to the ability to obtain more copies of the card. When you look at the fact that there's no way to get more Glittering Wishes (into the economy), but there is a way to get more Siege Rhinos. So there's a premium to getting more Glittering Wishes and that's reasonable. There's also a discount associated with Siege Rhino because we can get more new Siege Rhinos.

What's the discount for there being the ability to get more Siege Rhinos? There are 53 rares in Khans and let's assume someone somewhere online wants every rare so they should in theory all be $3.99 (the price of a pack on Magic Online). They all should be $3.99 minus the value of commons and uncommons but that's not the case because there are cards that people want more and some that people want less.

If this is a card that more than 1 in 53 people want when they open the pack (I'd make that bet) Siege Rhino should cost more than the cost of a pack (of course minus the value of uncommons and commons)?

So what the heck? Siege Rhino is only $2.60 on Magic Online. There appears to be a discount of $1.39 for the ability to buy packs that could contain Siege Rhino. There are of course many factors, and many Magic Online players just draft and sell their cards or whatever, but they are essentially of no value to that player after they are done with the draft, or I could be wrong about 1 or more in 53 people saying, "I'm not disappointed in this rare" upon opening a Siege Rhino in a pack. As an aside, there is one more factor that is important and worth mentioning. Standard is wide open right now, there are many decks performing well. This is good for the game
but it makes it harder to speculate on cards.


Now the fun part, what can we do with this tedious, boring information? Taking only a couple factors won't give you an exact formula to find over or under valued cards, it will give you a ballpark though if you use the most important factors. The factors vary from card to card so you'll need to use good judgement and do your best to look at the important factors and ignore the unimportant ones.