Reinventions

Readers,

I am likely to regret not saving “Reinventions” for an article where I could spell it “re: inventions” and do an article about inventions. That would be a cool pun for me to make my job fun, and it could be just the chuckle you needed to face another day of constant previews.

“Start each article with a lament” - EB White, probably

Readers, I realize that I have forgotten to introduce myself. That’s a reflex I developed in 10 years of writing for the same two websites after starting my career by writing for six different outfits before I settled down. Not introducing yourself becomes a bit of a habit. Let’s do this properly or I’ll have to find another new site to write for.

 

Introductions

Hi, everyone!

My name is Jason Alt and it’s my fault there is a subreddit called /r/mtgfinance. All of the other things I have done in the community have had fewer mixed results than that one, so I figured I’d run that one up the flagpole and see who salutes. I realize that this readership has the lowest density of people who would be upset by that of any subset of the Magic population, but in the name of transparency, yeah, that was me.

I also did some other stuff - I used to write three articles a week so I could use the money to pay people to write articles on the Brainstorm Brewery website. A lot of finance writers got their start there, and the fact that I am not naming any of them because all of them have outgrown MtG finance except DJ Johnson should tell you I have been at this for way too long. I helped make a podcast, I helped start hosting articles on EDHREC, started Commander’s Herald, and gave an interview to a journalist who wanted to write an article calling a politician an elitist for having an uncut sheet of Revised. I have done just about everything a person can do in this community without also achieving some sort of acclaim and notoriety. I have been pretty OK at this for long enough to know when it’s time to pivot, and it got to be time. Here I am, trying to figure out what my new series is going to be about.

I’ve been trying to make Magic: the Gathering finance accessible to people for over a decade, and it’s going OK. The issue is that writing articles trying to teach MtG finance to people who already like MtG finance is sort of fraught because I am telling people information they already have, and that’s wasting everyone’s time. I’m not going to teach MtG finance in this column, because on the other side of the equation you have people who don’t care about MtG finance and who just want to know when to buy and sell their EDH cards so they can spend a little less. That said, I don’t want to spend each week slaving over a piece that is less helpful than going to the Interests page, and I’ve had enough people tell me “Why do you podcast for an hour when it takes 30 seconds to tell me a card to buy?” that I am sort of burnt out on being seen as a jukebox that only plays the name of specs. I want this to be fun to write and useful to read. I want people to read my column so they don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on in the world of EDH prices. I am going to write almost exclusively about EDH because that’s the format that matters for now. I have one foot planted, though, ready to pivot.

The Plan

I’ve come up with a few premises, and they are the foundational beliefs upon which the work I do is predicated.

EDH is the most important format for finance

Everything is reprintable

Ignore new cards, focus on old cards that are seeing more play because of new cards

I have a lot of little observations like “foils are worth less than non-foils now” and “you can make money off of once a year,” but the main ones have served me pretty well over the years. That said, if I’m going to talk about pivoting, I should actually pivot. How I used to do things was fun at the time, but one thing I didn’t avail myself of before was MTGStocks’ superlative data reporting.

 

My goal for this series isn’t to teach you MtG finance or to regurgitate specs. It’s to highlight the various ways I identify cards that are mispriced.

I’ll pay attention so you don’t have to. You could, this isn’t impenetrable. If I am better at it, it’s because I do it every week. People are busy and they don’t want to invest time in getting good at something I’ll do for them for money. It’s a fine arrangement; I’m into it.

I’m going to talk about EDHREC every week. It’s a useful tool and it revolutionized how I thought about MtG finance data. I don’t write about using EDHREC because I work for EDHREC. I work for EDHREC because I wrote about EDHREC back when it was just a Reddit bot. With a combination of EDHREC and the tools on MTGStocks, we’re going to figure out what we should spend our money on, whether the cards are for specs or decks. I hope this series will be valuable to all types of players.

That was so much preamble, let’s cleanse the palette with some visuals.

The One Ring

 

This is the EDHREC set page for The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. Some of the legendary creatures have been revealed, but people don’t have these cards yet. And somehow there are lots and lots of decks registered on sites like Archidekt. People who are nerds and make decks online are not waiting for the product to be available for purchase to finish their decklist - they didn’t even wait for the full set to be revealed.

Whether or not the effect that EDHREC has on the homogenization of the format is a good thing doesn’t change the fact that it has an impact, and understanding it is money in your account. No one puts money in their pocket anymore. When a confident nerd wants to build Tom Bombadil, they make a spreadsheet of their favorite Sagas, give the deck a name you won’t get unless you read the Silmarillion in its original Elvish, and slap it up on Archidekt like a rap battler dropping the mic. Less confident nerds will go to EDHREC and use the confident nerd’s deck as a template, whether they realize it or not. The confident nerds are making these decks now, and one thing you’d think they would do, but aren’t, is buying the cards.

 

We have a unique opportunity at a time when there is a new card revealed every day because Chris Cocks went to a TED talk where they said every company has to be on Gizmodo every single day or they go out of business, to predict buying behavior before it happens. When this set comes out, we will expect that Tom Bombadil will be the first or second most popular commander, and that the new builders who are thinking about the deck for the first time will see the average of 631 confident nerds and get building, some of them registering their own lists, influenced by the nerds’ decks, creating a cyclical effect. The more popular cards become more popular. Every new legendary creature can have some impact on some prices, but to move the needle in today’s world of overprinting, the card needs to be old or the effect needs to be spread across a ton of different decks. The real heavy hitters in the set, though, are the ones to pay attention to, because even if they don’t happen the biggest, they will happen the soonest, and those are the cards you want to have in stock when everyone else sells out, because you dictate the new price for a bit if you do.

 

Don’t worry about reading the numbers on here, you can just navigate to the page yourself in a second - I just want you to appreciate the layout here. The High Synergy cards here are the ones that are in very few decks outside of Tom Bombadil and the Top Cards are the cards in the highest percentage of decks irrespective of how popular they are in the format at large. These are both incredibly useful pieces of information, and they’re free, and they’re on a website you’re hopefully using anyway.

Is every card in the High Synergy cards a spec? Certainly not, but what has been done for you is to organize a batch of cards that you can examine. We have a unique opportunity with these Lord of the Rings cards - we can watch these prices in real time. I have been for two weeks, but I couldn’t tell you about it until now. Not everything is poised to do anything, but if you start clicking around, you notice a trend.

 

 

Maybe you see if that trend repeats anywhere else.

 

Is this card on the move? A little bit in foil, but fluctuations under a buck on TCG Player are noise. Still, we’re seeing some moves in the right direction, foils from the precons only came in a few kinds of booster packs and it might not take that large a nudge here.

 

Not a very large one at all.

The Future

The only question now is “Do you want to gamble on a card that hasn’t come out yet, bumping the price of only foil copies of a card that only synergizes with a small subset of Magic’s total card pool?” A subset of you do, and that’s great. For everyone else, though, I’m going to make sure this series has value to you. If you collect, play, alter, or do anything with Magic cards, it is better to buy when they’re cheap, and better to overbuy when they’re cheap so you have cards to trade or trade in for way more than you paid. That’s free cards, and all you have to do is buy stuff you already liked. I want to make a column that appeals to everyone, but I don’t think I’ll be able to stop pointing out a potential spec when I see it. I’m reinventing this column, not the wheel.

Check out these other articles:  

Modern Times - Ragavan, Yawgmoth, Aether Vial by Corey Williams  

History, Restapled: A Mother’s Love and a Land Reborn by Steve Heisler  

New Horizons: March of the Machine Commander by Matt Grzechnik