Playing Mentor in Vintage for the first time

As a bot owner I have been picking up VMA cards since 2014 and seen them fall steadily for two years. So why not put them to use? Time to get into Vintage.

I have tried Workshop before but after the most recent banning the deck changed completely, turning it once again expensive to get into.

This is the deck I choose to test instead:

Main deck
2 Snapcaster Mage
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
3 Cabal Therapy
4 Gitaxian Probe
3 Preordain
1 Repeal
1 Demonic Tutor
2 Mana Drain
1 Time Walk
4 Force of Will
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
4 Flooded Strand
2 Island
1 Library of Alexandria
4 Polluted Delta
2 Tundra
2 Underground Sea
1 Treasure Cruise
3 Mental Misstep
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Mox Sapphire
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3 Gush
4 Monastery Mentor
1 Dig Through Time

Sideboard
1 Plains
2 Nihil Spellbomb
2 Disenchant
2 Ravenous Trap
1 Vendilion Clique
4 Meddling Mage
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Notion Thief

Having no idea what I was doing at all I just went to the TP room on MTGO and tried it out. It seemed impossible to find a match in any other room.

I expected to get a real good beating.


I imagined that I would be crushed instantly but that did not happen. In fact, it turned out I was playing way too slowly and I was in danger of losing to the clock (something that rarely happens in Modern but does happen in Pauper sometimes). I also did not expect that the format would be so complicated. I loved every second of it.

Now, if I just could find a primer on this deck and even a sideboard plan, I would be thrilled. If you know of any, give me the links please. Mtgsalvation, my usual source for such material, definitely did not deliver.

There is a free Vintage tournament with real prizes at Gatherling.com every Sunday. Check out more here: http://gatherling.com/series.php

Playing Tendrils in Vintage

As you might know, I am Swedish and I have managed to attract a couple of good Swedish video makers to my YouTube channel MagicGatheringStrat. One of them is Binkabi and he made a set of videos about playing Tendrils in Vintage that I figured would be interesting to publish here as well.

First, lets hear what Binkabi has to say about the deck.

Binkabi: "I don't wana brag, but I actually do have a full set of power 9! On Magic Online, that is... But still, Vintage is pretty popular and alot of fun,
so hopefully you will enjoy those videos despite my lack of experience in the format! It is also highly appreciated if you take the time to leave a comment
if you have found something that I could have done differently. I promise, there will be plenty to choose from!"

Deck List

1 Tolaria West
2 Island
2 Swamp
4 Polluted Delta
3 Underground Sea
2 Scalding Tarn

1 Blightsteel Colossus

1 Time Walk
1 Timetwister
1 Tinker
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Yawghmoth's Will
1 Mind's Desire
1 Preordain
1 Ponder
1 Demonic Tutor
4 Duress

1 Ancestral Recall
4 Dark Ritual
1 Mental Misstep
1 Brainstorm
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Rebuild
1 Chain of Vapor
4 Force of Will

1 Mox Opal
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Black Lotus
1 Memory Jar
1 Mana Vault
1 Mana Crypt
1 Lotus Petal
1 Sol Ring
1 Time Vault
1 Voltaic Key

1 Yawghmoth's Bargain
1 Necropotence

2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Sideboard

2 Steel Sabotage
2 Rebuild
2 Thoughtseize
1 Yixlid Jailer
4 Leyline of the Void
1 Island
3 Tormod's Crypt

Deck Tech video

Some matches

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.

Speculating the Magic Online Vintage community

Hi Everyone!

The past couple weeks have been really interesting regarding Vintage Masters. I wrote last week about when to sell Vintage Masters cards and basically, the pointer was to keep until another “Masters” set comes out, other than Modern Masters 2.

There is one other thing that’s important to point out that I have been encountering a lot lately. I am an avid Magic player. In fact, I changed to online because it’s convenient to open a program and be able to play a game within a minute. Vintage is my favorite format because games are never the same and there are a lot of interesting decisions. Vintage is the most played format by me, and I noticed that most of the time, the maximum number of players in the Vintage room is 10. That’s 10 at the popular times of day. When I log on at 2am Pacific time I usually don’t get an opponent before I decide to do something else instead of play Magic. 

The thing I want to say is that it appears that there are very few avid Vintage players online. So, why are cards skyrocketing online when there seems to be less and less people playing Vintage? It’s certainly not because there are more people collecting the cards they need to play, it’s because everyone seems to be speculating that the “good” cards will keep going up. This phenomenon happened once before in the stock market….it was happening rampantly when the stock market collapsed in 2008 and caused “the great recession”. People speculated that prices will go up, the same thing is happening online. Online is a different animal, I’m not saying they are the same, but some parts of the strategies for effective investing can transfer from one to the other.

So, there’s not a lot of Vintage players who want (or can afford to) play Vintage online. What’s making the prices go up? Speculators are making the prices go up. Since Vintage is still expensive, is it possible that speculators will only be selling to other speculators? I think that’s possible until there is a point when the cards are reprinted again. It’s like the dual lands, they were really expensive even though the online community of Legacy players was really small the speculators drove the price up to over $50 for Underground Sea. When Vintage Masters was released, the price dropped very low. The price was around $15 the entire time Vintage Masters was released. The price stayed low mostly because the speculators sat back and waited for the “right time” to buy their cards. It appears now is the time.

I just wanted to take this week to talk about how speculators can change the market and make investing more challenging. It’s really something worth talking about because there’s a lot of speculating right now that seems to be driving the prices up even though the number of Vintage players are dropping (or at most, maintaining) and the popular vintage cards that aren’t in Vintage Masters are dropping.

MTGO Library Bot 6.97 - Vintage Masters

ML Bot 6.97 has just been released, supporting the new set Vintage Masters (VMA) and Duel Decks: Jace vs Vraska (DDM).

The updated pricelist and bot are already available online for download. LITE bot uses should upgrade too because the pricelist is used as reference for the name of the cards, even if it is not used to price the cards.

Enjoy!

Noteworthy cards that were not in Vintage Masters

If you want to play Vintage (or Legacy) constructed in the coming months, you better look into picking up these cards soon as they (or already have) gone up in price.

Here are some noteworthy cards.

Wasteland
The most glaring omission of them all. What were they thinking?

When others assume that Wizards is just crazy, I often think they have things planned. Their plans might not be the best, but there are often plans. Alternate art exists and I think we will see Wasteland again quite soon. If nothing else, it could be a MOCS promo.

Rishadan Port
Does any deck actually play this? It is rare, for certain. If you need it, you should probably get it.

Misdirection
Interestingly reprinted in Conspiracy but not in VMA?

Daze
The most expensive Pauper card looks to retain that spot. Sees play in eternal formats other than Pauper as well.

Lotus Petal
This no longer sees any play in Pauper but it is still useful in the more powerful eternal formats.

Gaea's Cradle
This is the next MOCS promo. There is a window where you can get the MOCS promo for cheap. After that, this card will stay expensive and it is a card that we are guaranteed never to see in Standard.

Show and Tell & Sneak Attack
Interesting. There seems to be a pattern here. What if a Legacy Masters is planned down the line?

Mystical Tutor
Still cheap from the flashback drafts. Buy it now.

Onslaught Fetchlands
I would stay away from the Onslaught fetches. They are more likely to be reprinted for every day that passes, probably along with the Zendikar fetches.

City of Traitors
That is a lot of mana and there are not many copies available online.

Vintage Masters

It is Vintage Master Preview week.

Marshall Suitcliffe talks about the draft format here: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/li/299

I have found GatheringMagic and Wizards together have the best spoiler pages (this time spoilers have been all over the place, being revealed buried inside articles, on reddit and elsewhere)

Gathering Magic:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152346165842025.1073741852.76993727024&type=1

Wizards:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/article.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/vintagemasters/cig

It looks like a fun draft format (especially for someone who was around at the time these cards were played) but lets talk about what this means financially for speculators and bot owners.

People will dump stuff on your bots
Some cards will probably never recover their value. Force of Will is never going to be a $100 card again (it is just a rare in Vintage Masters). The Dual Lands will take years to recover, if they ever do. Don't have your bots buying these cards.

So how do you handle this?
There are several options.

* Stop buying this week
* Lower your buy prices so that someone else gets dumped on
* Stay on top of what is being spoiled and immediatly adjust

You should have been aware of this risk months ago. Always look ahead and see what is coming so you can minimize risk. A small bot chain can get wiped out by a massive reprint release like Vintage Masters.

The weekly article by Pete Jahn is a good place to see what is coming. Here is his latest article: http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-may-9th-2014

Price predictions for Vintage Masters rares
When predicting card prices, it helps to look at precedents, similar sets that did similar things. Modern Masters come to mind.

The first question is if Vinage Masters will be drafted as much as Modern Masters. That is a very complicated question that probably deserves its own article. I will assume that it will.

The bottom for Modern Masters prices was July 2nd, 2013, as you can see here:
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/index/MMA#online

Cryptic Command was the most expensive rare at its bottom, costing 7.7 tickets on June 17th.

Demand for Cryptic Command was huge. Modern was popular already then. Vintage will never be as popular as Modern, not even if you include Legacy demand in that calculation.

Hypothesis: No rare in Vintage Masters will be as expensive as Cryptic Command. 

So, if you time your buying right, you should be able to get Force of Will and Dual Lands for less than 7.7 tickets. Maybe even much less.

Mythics (and special rares like the power nine) are harder to predict.

What should you do if you have Vintage Masters rares?
Sell them. Yesterday. All of them. They will be crashing hard.

If you have money uncommons that are now being reprinted (such as Reanmite), your situation is even worse.

Commons (Daze is highly likely but not spoiled yet) will not be worth more than 15 cents (Manamorphose was one of the most expensive common in MMA and can be looked on as an example).

When should you buy Vintage Masters for speculation?
The bottom for Modern Masters was earlier than I thought before I started writing this article. My kneejerk advice would be to buy the week after the drafts end, but it is possible that you should buy earlier. So make sure you buy heavily into the set no later than the week after the drafts end. One caveat, though: If Vintage fails to take off, this might just be another Master's Edition set and you might have to pick your speculations carefully. If you bought into Modern Masters last year, it did not really matter which cards you bought. The majority of them have gone up.

Good luck and I hope you enjoy Vintage Masters.