New Tool Alert!

In hindsight, “New Tool Alert” would have been a good name for my very first article on the site. 

Hi nerds, my name is Jason and I’m part of the MTGStocks team. That isn’t just me explaining that I’m part of the writing team on the website where I write articles, although there is no denying that’s true. My point is that if I think of something, I can ask someone to try and help me make it a reality and we can evaluate it. To that end, I asked for a process I was doing both manually and by accident to be automated and customizable. Our owner and head programmer made the tool and I’ve been playing around with it a little bit (grow up) and it… works? That is to say, it does what we want it to do, but at first it wasn’t clear if the thing it was doing was what I wanted.

OK, that’s super vague. I always do that in the first paragraph to build suspense and it sometimes works, and other times I’m writing “the thing did the thing, did the thing do the right thing, though?” Worse, I don’t even know whether the thing did the thing or not. Don’t worry, there’s context, I’ll tell you the thing we made, the thing it does, the thing I want it to do, and whether the thing the thing did was the thing I wanted the thing to do. Thing 1 is the thing we built and Thing 2 is the thing that Thing 1 did. You get it, we’re all caught up.

Dr. Seuss Estate Lawsuit, Forthcoming

The thing I wanted (Thing 2) has to be explained first because you need to know what we want before I tell you about how we tried to automate it (Thing 2 really should have been called Thing 1, I clearly didn’t think this far ahead. Still, switching the names of Thing 1 and Thing 2 at this point would be slightly confusing and I’m doing my best to make this as clear and readable as possible). The thing I wanted is a tool that goes through our database and flags cards where Card Kingdom is cheaper than TCG Player. I’ve talked about why that’s noteworthy in the past if you don’t already know why, and I took the liberty of finding one with a few examples. In very brief - if a card is cheaper on Card Kingdom than it is on TCG Player, that’s suspicious. This makes logical sense if you've already come to the conclusion, but it took me discovering instances accidentally and realizing it is something I should be using to find specs.

Even if you know on an intellectual level that a marketplace is going to be cheaper than a site with only one price and no real incentive to race to the bottom as these cards sell at the price where they’re listed, it may not have occurred to you to look for those instances specifically for that reason. I would be browsing a commander’s page, see the price discrepancy and always check it out. Sometimes you would go to both sites and the reason for the price discrepancy has to do with the version that was scraped, or something selling out on one of the sites, or it being one of 49 variants and one site only had 48 variants listed. 

Figuring out why the prices are different is easy enough if you understand Magic: the Gathering, but it’s hard to figure out what you need to figure out. The solution is to try and flag the instances so you can run down a big list of cards that are all “backward” price-wise rather than looking at every EDHREC page hoping your eye catches it. 

Before we talk more about Thing 1 (the thing we made to do Thing 2, the thing I just explained) we should talk about why those two websites. Put simply, they’re the two prices I used because they are listed side-by-side on EDHREC. I spend most of my time on EDHREC and I notice prices without even checking them, really, and it’s helped me stay on top of price trends and other finance info immeasurably. You don’t really need to go to EDHREC at all if you hadn’t been - I only point it out because I see those two prices together, I think they’re two very solid data concepts to chart together (a site where many sellers race to the bottom to be the cheapest versus a site where it’s one price and there’s always a lot of stock because they can buy so much) and I’m not comfortable using sites too much smaller than these two, otherwise all of the flags will be due to cards being sold out. You don’t have to compare those two prices, but I will tell you that in my experience, seeing those prices “upside down” like they are when Card Kingdom is cheaper, it means TCG Player is selling out at cheaper prices and the price people are willing to pay keeps getting higher. It’s a signal that a price is moving when it’s a true “hit.” How many hits can I find using Thing 1? Also, what is it?

But What If it Works?

This tool is still in Beta mode and not many people have gotten to mess with it yet, but the first thing I wanted to do is make sure it did something. It sure does a great job of finding the instances where CK is cheaper very frequently - ABU stuff, Collector’s Edition stuff, Vanguard stuff (if you know what Vanguard is, remember to take your blood pressure pill), and instances where TCG Player’s link doesn’t work. You aren’t immediately going to get much signal because there’s a ton of noise on the list as well - Card Kingdom versus TCG Player preorder prices. TCG Player is very likely to be more expensive than CK in this instance because the prices aren’t established until the copies start selling out. With all of that noise, it can be hard to find what you’re looking for.

Luckily, we have knobs to turn, but it turns out we want to refine the data less, not more. 

The two knobs we currently have to turn are how much absolute USD cash difference should be our minimum and what percentage difference between the two prices should be our minimum. If you keep it too high, you’re only going to select for weird, expensive stuff. Once I turned the filters down and got more cards to look through, I found some stuff I would likely not have by chance the way I used to find stuff before, and I think we may be onto something here. I think we did the thing. Here are a couple of examples to help you become a pro at using this tool when it goes live. 

Kenrith, the Returned King

Kenrith is about half the price on CK that it is on TCG Player, and that warrants verification. I’ll walk you through this one, but assume I did it for the rest of the examples unless I state otherwise. 

I checked Card Kingdom first and there were quite a few versions. The most expensive version is probably being compared, but I bet Card Kingdom has a version that’s more than it is on TCG Player, right? 

In fact, the most expensive version of Kenrith on Card Kingdom is $3.49 for the Multiverse Legends version, with at least eight copies in stock. TCG Player has them listed for about $2.50 for the near mint. This was a new hiccup I’m not used to seeing, one reason TCG Player was reported higher was because of a dead link in their API. That happens rarely enough that it’s worth checking it out. I didn’t write a whole article because none of the ones I found to talk about are hits, however, so let’s look at an opportunity. 

Zodiac Monkey

When you first look at the list and see the sets the cards are in, there are a lot of usual suspects. One of those suspects is Portal Three Kingdoms. It seems like meme cards sell for more on TCG Player, or there is a pricing error. What’s going on? Since 2023 is the year of the rabbit, let’s look at Zodiac Monkey anyway, because that’s the one I pulled up. 

If Card Kingdom is to be believed, this is an $8 card with a decent amount of stock for such a rare card. However, if you’ll notice it says “11 available” rather than eight. When CK lists eight copies, either they have exactly eight copies, or they only list eight at a time so someone (me, also you) doesn’t buy every copy when the price spikes. They sell eight, look at the transaction and see why some nut bought eight, then reprice as necessary. If they’re willing to sell all 11 for $8 each, it’s gotta be way cheaper on TCG Player. 

 Except it’s not? The TCG Player price is weirdly kind of high, and they’re selling. 

Not only is an LP copy highlighted at like $19, someone sold a copy for that much five days ago. I’m not saying buy CK out, but if these Monkeys are moving at $18, buying a fistful for 88 bucks seems like the kind of risk I’ll take sometimes. Who knows how many other P3K cards are like this? If you can practically arbitrage them, it’s worth a shot, provided there isn’t some weird reason these sometimes sell for $19 I don’t know about. 

Cyclonic Rift (Showcase)

I set the difference threshold to $0 and cranked it up dollar by dollar to see if it made anything stand out, because it’s funny to drag the slider back and forth and watch the screen change, and playing around worked out because something stuck way out.

We’re looking at about a $10 difference here. Can it be right? 

 According to the CK website, $45 is correct. 

And this shot from TCG Player shows that a bunch sold today for $60. This is legit, and there are eight copies, and you could get one for like 25% off, or eight. I think this tool we made is doing the thing. 

Grim Haruspex

Rare cards like the Ugin’s Fate printing of a very playable card like Grim Haruspex seem legit, also. 

My knee-jerk reaction to this was “oh, well no wonder, the NM copies all sold out and CK’s price is based on their one copy at $5.19” and then I realized “Wait, NM is sold out and the only copy they have is EX for $4.19? How many copies does TCG have?”

24 of them.

These are routinely selling for $7-$8 on TCG, stock is way low both places and Haruspex gets a ton of play. 

I’d say 80k decks is pretty good for Haruspex, and it deserves our Haruspect. I think CK has these too cheap and also only one left and this price is a little organic demand or even less inorganic demand away from being repriced. 

I think our little tool managed to snag a few hits. When it’s ready for public consumption, I'll be sure to use it in future articles where it’s relevant. On a bad day, you’ll spend two minutes scanning the list and find nothing. On a good day, you will find as many hits as I did. Is this something you would find useful or should we just go back to doing this by accident? Come chat with us about it in the MTGStocks Discord. It's only going to be available for Premium members, so go check out everything that membership has to offer before the tool goes live. Until next time! 

Check out these other articles:

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Where Are They Now? - July 2023 by Ryan Cole

History, Restapled - Un- For the Money by Steve Heisler