What does spring rotation mean for Khans of Tarkir prices?

18-month rotation will soon be in effect. In fact, Khans of Tarkir and Fate Reforged will rotate out in March/April 2015 (I don't think there is an exact date yet) after being legal in Standard for only 18 months.

What do we know about speculation in the fall set of yesteryear?
Fact #1: The good time to buy last years fall set (Khans of Tarkir in that case) is usually during the summer when interest is low and prices will rise when interest for Standard increases again in the fall. The peak price is usually in January or February in the next year (2016 in this case) before prices start to drop because of fall rotation. This could be a little bit different because KTK has not been drafted for a long time, but for simplicity's sake we will assume that this is true for KTK (and even more so for FRF).

I talk about this at length in this blog post: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-invest-in-fall-set-theros-for.html

Fact #2: When a set rotates in October it is usually a good idea to start selling in March/April, i.e. six months before rotation. That would mean that October 2015 would be the month to start selling Khans of Tarkir and Fate Reforged. That is very close to the time when they should be peaking because of Face #1

Fact #3: Eternally playable cards (such as fetchlands and Siege Rhino) are probably less affected by fact #1 and fact #2.

How will this play out? We don't know. We have no precedent for this. We do not really know which force is the stronger one here - low supply or rotation.

What should we do?
The safe bet is to sit this one out. Sell your Theros stuff before the end of October as you normally would. If anything has the time to spike - nice! Sell for a profit. Otherwise just get out in order to cut your losses.

The other option is to believe that the fall in price due to rotation will be somewhat delayed and that it is safe to own the KTK and FRF cards until December. Do this at your own peril.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. It will set expectations for how to handle Dragons of Tarkir come March/April 2016.

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.