A good time to buy Modern staples

Modern Master 2017 have been replaced by Amonkhet and now is the time to get your Modern staples from MM3. Also, other Modern cards are down generally because everyone is focusing on Amonkhet, both limited and the new Standard.

I decided to put my money where my mouth is and invest heavily.



This time I invested as a long-term player of Modern and not a speculator. Still, I think I made some solid investments.

Here is a list of the stuff I got:

4 Liliana of the Veil
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Cavern of Souls
4 Gemstone Mine (not in MM3 but still low)
4 Bonfire of the Damned (for RG Ponza)
3 Entreat the Angels
2 Griselbrand
4 Temporal Mastery
4 Arcbound Ravager
4 Blood Moon
4 Etched Champion
4 Gifts Ungiven
4 Inkmoth Nexus
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Primal Command
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Steel Overseer
4 Thragtusk
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Verdant Catacombs

Expect some more Modern videos on my youtube channel (above).

Cards I am buying right now

These are the cards I am picking up to sell later right now on Magic Online. I am not saying they are the best pickups. It just the ones I am buying personally. If you know of better pickups please let me know in the comments.

Fate Reforged
Fate Reforged was a small set with only a couple of valuable cards. They seem really cheap right now.

Picking those up to sell during a Standard price spike or long after rotation.
Monastery Mentor 8.36
Tasigur 4.34
Ugin 8.59

These cards are mostly in case of a Standard price spike. They just look very cheap.
Shaman of the Great Hunt 0.82
Brutal Hordechief 0.74
Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker 4.75

Boosters
I am also picking up some boosters hoping that their price increases after Play Points become a reality

Dragons of Tarkir Booster 2,14
Khans of Tarkir Booster 1.87

Long term specs
As long term specs I am picking up some rares that would skyrocket if reprinted and some Pauper cards that look like they could gain solid value in a couple of years

Chainer's Edict 0,05
Curfew 0.04
Spellstutter Sprite 0.04
Gush 0.05
Icequake 0.04
Underworld Connections 0.02
Desecration Demon 0.02
Mind Grind 0.02
Possibility Storm 0.02
Sylvan Primordial 0.02
Any RTR or GTC Shockland while Modern prices fall

Buying cards at rotation

Every year people say that rotation is different every year - that this is the year that people have finally learned that the eternal cards are great pickups at rotation, that there is a huge number of speculators that are driving the market. The same is true for this year. True in the sense that people are saying that. And this year they may be correct!

Just look at the graph for Abrupt Decay.

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Return+to+Ravnica/Abrupt+Decay#online

You should have picked this up long ago. It will not drop to its lowest point on October 20th as it "normally would".

But even then, this does not matter. You should still pick up all the cards you need for eternal formats two weeks after rotation. You should still buy all your speculative cards two weeks after rotation.

Why? Simple. They will not get any cheaper if they are indeed eternally playable. Even if you missed the boat on Abrupt Decay, people that play only Standard (and there must be plenty of such people as Standard is by far the largest format) will have to sell theirs now, increasing supply when demand stays the same.

There is also redemption happening roughly in December for Mythics, making them great pickups right after rotation.

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.

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 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

What will the Khans of Tarkir fetches sell for?

Hi Everyone!

In my article earlier this week I mentioned that allied fetch lands are coming back. Now that I have had a few days to consider what will be the forces acting upon the fetch land prices, I wanted to tell everyone about it.

If we go back in time a little and look at the Return to Ravnica shock lands, we see that they had a turbulence price wise their entire time in standard. I think this will be less true of shock lands. The reason is that fetches don’t seem so good in standard with no shock lands to fetch. It’s possible that they could do a cycle of lands that are a basic type that can make other colors of mana (like Murmuring Bosk) and then it could be just as turbulent. The other reason I don’t think prices will be so erratic because cards that are good in the “eternal formats” (I include Modern in this grouping along with Legacy and Vintage). The eternal formats seem to have much less price turbulence. It won’t all be smooth sailing, but it won’t be like the shock lands that were awesome in standard and modern, and almost never saw play in the older eternal formats. I think it’s going to be a smooth ride for the fetches through Standard...It’s possible that the fetches could barely be playable in standard. I don’t know right now.

My favorite tool when making decisions is research. Let’s have a look at the closest thing to this that happened fairly recently, the enemy fetches from Zendikar (have a look for yourself…it’s tedious and boring for a lot of people so I left the data out of this article). Unfortunately, Modern didn’t exist when they first came out, neither did Vintage Online. Fetches were as low as $3 in Zendikar standard days. I think they will be higher this time around.

My prediction is that the reprints of the Onslaught allied fetches will settle in the $7 to $10 range while they are in standard. I think they will be a great investment.

One last interesting thing I read in another article is that it’s possible that the allied fetches open new Modern deck choices. At first it sounded like nonsense until I realized that a lot of modern decks (scapeshift, UWR, and Jund) all have very shaky mana bases and taking out a key land really hurts. It’s really possible that decks with color combinations that don’t have access to the best mana with enemy colored fetches could emerge as competitive decks with the addition of more fetch lands.

One cautionary note I wanted to make: The new 2 set blocks and no core sets gives Wizards a lot more new “planes” to visit than before (twice as many to be exact). It seems to me like they could be using this opportunity to reprint cards that are expensive to make them accessible at a faster rate than before.

Mtg Confidant

The Great Depression of Magic Online

Hi Everyone!

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Magic 2015 was doing really badly. None of the cards are worth much and at the time the expected value of a Magic 2015 sealed tournament was a greater than $10 loss based on 50% match wins. I have asked why. I’m always interesting in what everyone else thinks about the cause for this phenomenon. I have narrowed the cause of this down to two major causes and several minor causes. It seems like everything is doing really badly now (there exceptions like Liliana of the Veil and Wasteland).

The first major cause driving the prices of cards on MTGO down is the switch to version 4. I don’t argue that it’s terrible software, and Wizards is awful at everything except making fun games, but seriously, people are quitting over this? I think most people are stepping away because they need time to accept the change. If everyone were really quitting, there would be hundreds of collections for sale on eBay, and I’ve only seen a few lately. I think this a temporary change in price, and will be back to normal within 2 months.

The second major cause of the depressed MTGO economy is this is the uncertainty period after RTR/THS Standard but before THS/KTK. It’s an uncertain time and people have a tendency to hang on to their money in uncertain times, even in the stock markets. Additionally, it seems like a lot of people have sold their Vintage Masters cards to recoup tickets to but Khans of Tarkir when it comes out next month. Now that that’s happened, everyone else left holding Vintage cards is either someone who plays, or someone who is speculating the cards will go up. These two elements of uncertainty are major drivers of a sluggish economy. Look at surveys of the level of uncertainty of Americans during the Great Recession, it was at the highest point since the Depression, coincidence? I doubt it. Uncertainty causes people to hold on to their money.

There’s also one minor cause that I have seen quite a lot that I think is interesting, but never the less is still a minor contributor to the sluggish MTGO economy. This is people who played in paper and wanted to play Vintage for “cheap” so they signed up for an MTGO account. They got all the cards, and played, then it seems like many of them lost interest and decided to sell their collection. It was identify these kinds of collections because the collection had all Vintage/Legacy legal cards and the seller claimed they “tried MTGO” but are going back to paper.

While it’s important to understand the condition of the market and be able to effectively identify what stage of the cycle is currently occurring always remember that it’s unlikely that the economy won’t recover.

Mtg Confidant