MTGO Market Manipulation is afoot!

Hi Everyone! I’m excited to be back with todays article!

Today I’m talking about market manipulation. It’s one of my favorite topics. Market manipulation is when a person or group get together and work to make something happen in the market. The classic example of market manipulation is OPEC. OPEC are the Oil Producing Eastern Countries. They work together to restrict the supply of oil to keep the price high. That’s a little different than MTGO because oil is used and it can’t be reused, MTGO cards never reach their “end of life” because once they are in circulation, they are in circulation forever.

So market manipulation has to do with restriction of supply. That’s easy if you’re WOTC, in fact that’s an effect of the mythic rarity. It restricts the supply of cards and makes it harder to obtain, notice how the most expensive cards are the ones that are good, but also mythic. Look at VMA, the most expensive cards are the power 9 excluding Timetwister and their rarity is about 1 per 100 packs…Sure there’s prestige to owning power but the rarity has something to do with the price too.

If we try to manipulate the market for bananas we’re going to have a hard time with that. There are just too many bananas to buy. The small economy is what makes market manipulation possible on MTGO.  Here’s a link to my friend Dan’s video on hisYouTube channel MagicGatheringStrat (where I do a weekly show on MTGO finance called Ferocious Finance also, click here for the playlist).

Dan bought 100 copies of a card and drove the price up 19%. The card cost less than $.50 and he bought 100 copies. So for $50 he can drive the price up by 19%. With another $50 invested in the same card, he can drive the price up more than 19% because it’s easier to manipulate the market more because the supply is now 100+ cards smaller. I’m not saying anyone’s going to manipulate the market with a few dollars but if you look at the cost as an investment, it’s worth it if the gain is worth the cost.

What can you do with a manipulated market? The answer to that question is long. I can write a 50 page paper on how to abuse a manipulated market on MTGO, but I doubt any of you want to read something like that in one sitting.

The reason I wanted to talk about market manipulation this week is that I noticed that the Urza Lands from ME4 suddenly shot from $.10 to $3 in one day. Have a look. It’s only one version of the art that did it for each land. Someone went out and bought a lot of Urza lands. What they will do with this artificial high price, I do not know, but the point is the price is manipulated and if you have the now expensive Urza Lands, you should sell them before whoever is manipulating the price is done doing what they are doing and sells them causing the price to drop.