This is the last really good time to pick up Vintage Masters

Vintage Masters will not be draftable for much longer. Except for the occasional flashback draft, this is the time the last draft remains are dumped onto the market.

Look at the Goldfish graph here: http://www.mtggoldfish.com/index/VMA#online

VMA has - very broadly - been rising steadily for some time now. This will not stop. People will still be needing Dual Lands, Sol Rings, Mishra's Workshops etc.

Buy some now. You will thank me in the future.

Unless you have a big bankroll I would stay away from the Power 9 (they tie up too much of your liquidity) and go for the 4-of-Mythics and the rares.

This is not the best time to pick up VMA but it is the best time from this point on and probably until the end of Magic Online.

The only great argument for not picking up VMA is that rotation is almost upon us and rotation is traditionally the best time to invest in anything on Magic Online.

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.

My Path to MTGO from Paper and Vintage Masters early trends

Hi Everyone!

Welcome back for another dose of MTGO finance advice and theory!

I played magic back when 4^th edition first came out. I remember playing when they still sold revised packs in stores and they were no big deal. I even came across a couple shops that had Unlimited boosters that sold for the premium price of $3.50 (If I remember correctly, retail price was $1.99). I played when Ice Age came out, I remember Jester’s Cap being a $20 card. I remember hearing about the fabled Mana Crypt that I never saw until I attended a MTG card show and finally saw all the amazing cards I had only heard about. I stopped playing for a few years because my local shop closed and it seemed like Magic was dying out. I found another store when I turned 16 and started going there for Friday game night. I played for a couple months until, again, Magic seemed to die out compared to some other card games. A few years later I ran into some friends at a local outdoor shopping center playing Magic in the courtyard area. I reconnected with old friends and joined their play group. We played big group games all night long every Friday. It was great. After 3 months of everyone playing the same deck again and again it started to lose its appeal so we all got a crazy idea, we would check out a FNM tournament. My first tournament outing is another ridiculous story but it was during Onslaught Block, right after Scourge came out. Unfortunately, the shop was far from our houses, some of my friends were students still and some didn’t have cars. We eventually stopped going to tournaments. Our last tournament was right before Time Spiral came out.

The common theme in all the times I stopped playing was that it was hard to find people to play with, and it was expensive and inconvenient, If I wanted to play Magic, the only time was really Friday night and it was hard to find people to trade with (Trading is one of my favorite things about Magic).

After a few more years off, I started reading articles on Magicthegathering.com one day. I kept reading for a year, nearly every day toward the end of the year. It seemed that Magic is better than it ever has been, but that one problem still existed, I didn’t have people to play or trade with.

When I considered going out and buying cards again, I looked into MTGO this time. I decided it was the best bet for me because it was convenient. I could play any format at any time of any day all from the comfort of my home. Sweet deal if you ask me.

I do miss the social aspect of MTG that I get at real life events, but it’s still fun to play online. There is one other reason I really like Magic Online. Vintage Masters.

Vintage Masters gave online players for the first time ever recently the opportunity to play Vintage Magic. I love that there are people to play and trade with and the cards are available and not too expensive to be attainable. Sorry for the long lead in to me loving Vintage Masters.

One other thing that’s much easier to analyze than paper Magic is the economy of MTGO. One really interesting theory I notice in VMA that I haven’t ever seen before in MTGO is an emerging format (I didn’t play when Modern was first introduced). Right now, Vintage is an emerging format on MTGO. It’s so interesting to see how things happen.

Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it in depth yet, because it’s been around for about a month…there is no depth to speak in yet. But, I do want to just mention one trend I have noticed. The cards that are “popular” in Vintage and Legacy (have a look at blue dual lands and Force of Will) seem to steadily going down in price but the “iconic” cards that aren’t popular like scrubland, plateau, and Savannah (duals are icons of the eternal formats, no?) seem to be slowly and steadily going up in price. I don’t know exactly what this says about the health of Vintage on MTGO. 

It’s an emerging market and that’s one of my favorite things to study so I’ll keep everyone posted. Do you notice any trends in VMA card pricing? If you do, go ahead and post in the comments and we’ll chat about it.

Your plans for the V3 crash

A lot of people are mad at Wizards for shutting down the v3 client on July 16th. I will not give you my opinion here. It is a fact that it is happening. How will it affect you? How will it affect the market?

Judging from earlier client switchovers, the market will fall. In fact, the switchover will be an excellent opportunity for picking up cards. The market will quickly recover and probably be back to normal levels in time for the Khans of Tarkir release.

This means that you should probably pick up:

* Theros block standard cards. Pick up the cards in Theros block with focus on cards that have done well in block and cards from the two later sets.

* Vintage Masters

July 17-31 will be an excellent time to pick these up when everyone else is looking at M15 or quitting the game.

Questions? Thoughts? How many of you were there when V2 shut down?

My initial Vintage Masters Limited experience

In Sweden we celebrate Midsummer in a very unique way. It is a holiday as big as christmas and we spend our time dancing around a gigantic phallos symbol pretending to be frogs (I am not making this up). That important holiday gave me precious little time to try out Vintage Masters but I decided to get a draft in before I left to spend a week with my in-laws celebrating Midsummer.

I was poorly prepared for the format, having only listened to the Limited Resources episode on Vintage Masters and browsed a couple of articles. All I heard was that Battle Screech was a hidden gem. So I was looking for Battle Screeches.

This was my draft. I went for a Swiss Draft as I wanted as much play for my money as possible (I always go for Swiss drafts).

My preference for Battle Screeches had placed me in a Mono White Weenie deck. Mono colored decks are rare in limited but when the color was given to me in this generous way, they are usually good.

This is the list I decided to play

16 Plains
1 Secluded Steppe
3 Battle Screech
2 Afterlife
1 Radiant's Judgement
2 Brilliant Halo
3 Deftblade Elite
1 Benevolent Bodyguard
2 Phantom Nomads
2 Soltari Emissary
2 Benalish Trapper
3 Gustcloak Harrier
1 Pianna
1 Mistmoon Griffin

There were a couple of nice combos in the deck, such as Deftblade Elite + Brilliant Halo and Phantom Nomad + Brilliant Halo. I felt slightly positive about the deck. Doing a 2-1 draft with a Tundra would be positive value, so that was my goal.

Match 1 vs some four-color pile of cards

Match 2 vs UG Big Monsters
I thought this guy was playing the dreaded UG Madness deck but there really wasn't much madness going on.




Match 3 vs GR Lightning Rift
Up to this point, Battle Screech was very good. Somehow, I found myself in the finals against this slick GR Lightning Rift deck. This guy could take out a full Battle Screech with just two cycling activations in duel one. Pretty impressive.

In the end, Battle Screech performed above expectation (even thought expectations were high). I will be looking for Battle Screeches in my next draft as well.

Bonus Draft with my buddy Sam

Bonus Sealed with my buddy Julien

Overall impression of the format
My initial impression is that the format is much like Modern Masters - totally awesome! I will be doing more drafts when I get back from my crazy countrymen.


Contact me
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Web: magicgatheringstrat.com
Blog: mtgolibrary.blogspot.com

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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

The Vintage Masters preview have started so I decided to put it all together what we do know about this set.
- 325 cards in total: 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 105 rares, 30 mythics, 9 special
- a booster pack consist of 10 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare or mythic, 1 either foil card or special (p9)
- A power nine card every 53 boosters
- only cards not Modern legal, meaning everything below 8th Edition. Exception may be cards on Modern banlist.
- Archetypes.: Green-Blue(madness) Blue-White(control) White-Black(Attrition) Red-White(Weenie) Green-White("little kid") Blue-Black(storm) Blue-Red(counter-burn) Black-Red(rakdos aggro) Black-Green(the rock) Red-Green (fatty ramp)

When I saw the first cards from Vintage Masters and names of archetypes introduced by Wizards I thought to myself - it looks like old extended. At the time archetypes like Madness, The Rock, Goblins, Affinity, Psychatog were dominating the metagame. There were are some storms decks around too.

What were the flagship cards that time?
Spiritmonger, Pernicious Deed, Genesis, Aquamoeba, Wonder, Rootwalla, Roar of the Wurm, Intuition, Psychatog, Cephalid Coliseum, Fact or Fiction, Tendrils of Agony, Cunning Wish, Goblin Piledriver, Sarcomancy, Carnophage, Meddling Mage, Phyrexian Negator

There cards are high likely to get reprinted. What is more, I'm quite sure there won't be Vintage Masters 2, too many good cards were already spoilered by now and there is no much left what may attract players to draft VM2. Unless, they present very similar product. That's why I think there might be Wasteland in Vintage Masters too!

What are your thoughts about it?
What else may be inside?

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.