Got a Japanese Protean Hulk for 6 Euro and Italian one for 3 Euro, both NM.
At least you hope so. I jumped on MCM 2 minutes after the ban announcement and bought 2 Hulks for 1 euro a pop, I'm just waiting for the "Sorry I wont sell to you" message at this point...
MKM explicitly stated that they will not tolerate any cancellations. You don't have to accept any "Sorry, bla bla.." messages.
The problem is that you still won't get your cards even in that case, and right now they're about tenfold of what I paid, so yeah. While it'll certainly discourage the seller it wouldn't help me.
Of course it's only speculation at this point, I'm just waiting for a send confirmation right now.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My Commander decks:
Chandra, Torch of Defiance - Oops! All Chandras.
Prime Speaker Zegana - Draw for Power.
Pir & Toothy - Counterpalooza.
Arcades, the Strategist - Another Brick in the Wall.
Zacama, Primal Calamity - Calamity of Double Mana.
Edgar Markov - Vampires Don't Die.
Child of Alara - Dreamcrusher.
Phew. I can say for sure that the folks at tokyomtg are good people.
I just got a confirm on my order of a $3 Japanese Hulk (and a flash and some other stuff) they had more Hulks but I just grabbed the one I needed for EDH. Maybe they yanked the other two and just sent me mine I dunno.
Picked up 3 Protean Hulks last night at my LGS for $3 each. It was our weekly Commander night too. 10 minutes after I bought them, they sold the rest of their stock for $20 each.
Leovold was a cool Commander, but I think he was too powerful when combined with the oppressive cards like Teferi's Puzzlebox and friends. With that being said, I ran a Leovold deck without these cards (I only used modern-boardered cards; I.e. M15 and beyond). Sure, it had a few cards like Windfall, but I used him mostly to access Sultai colors and play almost a unique version of Edric, Spymaster of Trest.
In regards to the ban list, what my playgroup decided to do for certain banned cards was instead of outright ban them, examine them. Figuring out what cards make the banned cards degenerate and unfair, then ban those cards in conjunction with using the Commander or card that is banned.
This "variant" ban list offers flexibility to the use of some commanders. For those of you who used Leovold as your Elf Commander, this rule, if applicable, could be right for you.
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
How much time passed between the purchase and the order cancellation? I'd raise hell to make them honor the price they had it set at.
"Oh, you sold out of these cards immediately after I bought them for a low price? No worries, you can keep my order in the system and send me the cards when you get more copies in stock~"
The problem with defining this format by what is "fun" is that everyone seems to define fun as what they don't lose to. If you keep losing to easily answered cards, that means you should improve your deck. If you don't want to improve your deck, then you should come to peace with the idea that you are going to lose because you chose to not interact with better strategies.
Took 15 mins to go from $3 to $8, and another 15 mins to go from $8 to $13. Managed to snag 2 from StrikeZoneOnline for $3 apiece.
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
I'm sure it doesn't make you feel any better, but from what I understand talking to some friends who run LGS's and sell through Crystal Commerce (which SZO does iirc), they have very poor inventory coordination mechanisms which causes issues like this to happen with some degree of regularity when things spike. The orders end up canceled automatically later on when Crystal Commerce reconciles the inventory. I know a few owners who get frustrated because they get hate mail from people accusing them of canceling because of the spike.
Not saying no owners do that and not saying it's definitely a Crystal Commerce issue in this case, but knowing that made me more forgiving about this kind of thing.
Using software that you know doesn't take these issues into account, and not paying attention to your inventory on ban day is not an excuse for poor business practices. In fact, those are poor business practices, which they compound by then cancelling orders because of their own poor business practices. They deserve every bit of bad publicity that comes doing this, and no one should understand or feel sorry for them.
You're totally right, every small LGS should write their own distributed transaction system that can synchronize inventory across multiple third parties that have mixed modes of item reservation in real time under heavy load.
Crystal Commerce is the biggest game in town when it comes to this. Also, how many resources do you legitimately expect stores to expend to hedge against ban announcements? Like anyone saw the Hulk unban coming.
It's not poor business practice, it's a small store with limited resources using the major player in the market for their logistics.
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
How much time passed between the purchase and the order cancellation? I'd raise hell to make them honor the price they had it set at.
"Oh, you sold out of these cards immediately after I bought them for a low price? No worries, you can keep my order in the system and send me the cards when you get more copies in stock~"
The trouble with that though, is that its also not really realistic to request that of a store (assuming they didn't just immediately list more at a higher price, which would then suggest that they cancelled the orders to resell at a higher price, rather than it being a program issue with crystal commerce or the like. Put yourself in the shoes of the seller. You use the only decent software available for synchronizing sales across multiple platforms, and when a situation like this occurs, the software gets overwhelmed and isn't able to keep up with multiple orders placed in multiple places at the exact same second, and as a result multiple copies of the same card, the same multiple copies listed on each platform, are sold to several different people, leading to the oversell and inevitable cancellation.
Now then, you as a buyer, purchased the card for $3. The card is now selling for $20+, meaning the online store is unlikely to be getting any new ones in for less than say $12, so they are looking at an automatic significant loss by trying to fulfill those unintentional oversells that were the fault of the software that a LOT of smaller online stores use. Should online stores try to mitigate this sort of issue by as I have suggested in the past keeping separate inventory for selling on different platforms at the like? Sure, but at the same time, in the grand scheme of magic in general, how often do cards get unbanned and cause a frenzy like this, versus the entire rest of the time when everything runs just fine and the software never has an issue? As with most things, there is some potential risk for using such software in the case of a sudden massive spike in demand, but the other 99.99% of the time, the software does its job and allows the seller the visibility of selling on multiple platforms with the same inventory.
What you could do as a buyer though, would be to potentially find out what the seller might be able to bring in the cards at post-spike, and see if they would be willing to fulfill the orders (at cost) under such a scenario, to where the buyer would be able to get the cards for a decent amount less than the current post-spike price, but still unfortunately more than the purchase amount. That sort of request is something that could potentially be agreed to, otherwise the store is likely to just stick with the "if we had the cards at the time of your purchase we would sell them to you, but at the end of the day, we had 5 (or however many) orders for the same 3 cards and still only have those 3 cards to be able to sell, and can only fulfill one of those orders." "When/if we get more back in stock it will be at a much higher purchase price and we wont be able to sell them for the same $3 as they were listed for before." I'm not saying they said or would for any certainty say any of that, I'm just using that as an example of a realistic response to such unfortunate situations.
That said, I have heard of some stores going above and beyond and taking the loss to fulfill the orders, but such really is an unusual sort of thing, and while such stores should be commended, the other stores shouldn't necessarily be bashed for a generally unusual circumstance that happens very rarely, nor should they be lumped into the crowd of people that are intentionally cancelling orders to relist the same inventory at a higher price.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, as I mentioned before, when a card spikes, its important to hedge your bets. As such I usually recommend buying from at least 4 different sources to try to maximize the chance that you get at least the amount you are looking for, and then can always re-sell/trade any extras that aren't cancelled. Its unfortunate that such would have to be done, but until perfect synchronization sales software can be developed and available to be used by the masses, well, one just sort of has to find ways around the issues to still get what you are after.
I managed to get one for 6.50 after the announcement and my order was NOT cancelled. Got an email saying it is on its way with a tracking number and everything. Lucky me?
I literally only bought it to flip though, I have no use for the card. Who wants it? 15 bucks right now
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
How much time passed between the purchase and the order cancellation? I'd raise hell to make them honor the price they had it set at.
"Oh, you sold out of these cards immediately after I bought them for a low price? No worries, you can keep my order in the system and send me the cards when you get more copies in stock~"
The trouble with that though, is that its also not really realistic to request that of a store (assuming they didn't just immediately list more at a higher price, which would then suggest that they cancelled the orders to resell at a higher price, rather than it being a program issue with crystal commerce or the like. Put yourself in the shoes of the seller. You use the only decent software available for synchronizing sales across multiple platforms, and when a situation like this occurs, the software gets overwhelmed and isn't able to keep up with multiple orders placed in multiple places at the exact same second, and as a result multiple copies of the same card, the same multiple copies listed on each platform, are sold to several different people, leading to the oversell and inevitable cancellation.
Now then, you as a buyer, purchased the card for $3. The card is now selling for $20+, meaning the online store is unlikely to be getting any new ones in for less than say $12, so they are looking at an automatic significant loss by trying to fulfill those unintentional oversells that were the fault of the software that a LOT of smaller online stores use. Should online stores try to mitigate this sort of issue by as I have suggested in the past keeping separate inventory for selling on different platforms at the like? Sure, but at the same time, in the grand scheme of magic in general, how often do cards get unbanned and cause a frenzy like this, versus the entire rest of the time when everything runs just fine and the software never has an issue? As with most things, there is some potential risk for using such software in the case of a sudden massive spike in demand, but the other 99.99% of the time, the software does its job and allows the seller the visibility of selling on multiple platforms with the same inventory.
What you could do as a buyer though, would be to potentially find out what the seller might be able to bring in the cards at post-spike, and see if they would be willing to fulfill the orders (at cost) under such a scenario, to where the buyer would be able to get the cards for a decent amount less than the current post-spike price, but still unfortunately more than the purchase amount. That sort of request is something that could potentially be agreed to, otherwise the store is likely to just stick with the "if we had the cards at the time of your purchase we would sell them to you, but at the end of the day, we had 5 (or however many) orders for the same 3 cards and still only have those 3 cards to be able to sell, and can only fulfill one of those orders." "When/if we get more back in stock it will be at a much higher purchase price and we wont be able to sell them for the same $3 as they were listed for before." I'm not saying they said or would for any certainty say any of that, I'm just using that as an example of a realistic response to such unfortunate situations.
That said, I have heard of some stores going above and beyond and taking the loss to fulfill the orders, but such really is an unusual sort of thing, and while such stores should be commended, the other stores shouldn't necessarily be bashed for a generally unusual circumstance that happens very rarely, nor should they be lumped into the crowd of people that are intentionally cancelling orders to relist the same inventory at a higher price.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, as I mentioned before, when a card spikes, its important to hedge your bets. As such I usually recommend buying from at least 4 different sources to try to maximize the chance that you get at least the amount you are looking for, and then can always re-sell/trade any extras that aren't cancelled. Its unfortunate that such would have to be done, but until perfect synchronization sales software can be developed and available to be used by the masses, well, one just sort of has to find ways around the issues to still get what you are after.
These are all very good points. Thank you for your insight!
I was mostly referring to the online stores that intentionally cancel the pre-spike orders and say they're "out of stock," then immediately list a large quantity of the card at a post-spike price.
But you addressed a lot of issues that I hadn't considered or otherwise didn't know, so thanks for educating me!
The problem with defining this format by what is "fun" is that everyone seems to define fun as what they don't lose to. If you keep losing to easily answered cards, that means you should improve your deck. If you don't want to improve your deck, then you should come to peace with the idea that you are going to lose because you chose to not interact with better strategies.
Leovold was a cool Commander, but I think he was too powerful when combined with the oppressive cards like Teferi's Puzzlebox and friends. With that being said, I ran a Leovold deck without these cards (I only used modern-boardered cards; I.e. M15 and beyond). Sure, it had a few cards like Windfall, but I used him mostly to access Sultai colors and play almost a unique version of Edric, Spymaster of Trest.
In regards to the ban list, what my playgroup decided to do for certain banned cards was instead of outright ban them, examine them. Figuring out what cards make the banned cards degenerate and unfair, then ban those cards in conjunction with using the Commander or card that is banned.
This "variant" ban list offers flexibility to the use of some commanders. For those of you who used Leovold as your Elf Commander, this rule, if applicable, could be right for you.
If I'm understanding correctly, you ban combos rather than individual cards. On the one hand, tracking all the permutations of various effect could make that very unwieldy. On the other hand...that's what databases and websites are for.
Took 15 mins to go from $3 to $8, and another 15 mins to go from $8 to $13. Managed to snag 2 from StrikeZoneOnline for $3 apiece.
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
I'm sure it doesn't make you feel any better, but from what I understand talking to some friends who run LGS's and sell through Crystal Commerce (which SZO does iirc), they have very poor inventory coordination mechanisms which causes issues like this to happen with some degree of regularity when things spike. The orders end up canceled automatically later on when Crystal Commerce reconciles the inventory. I know a few owners who get frustrated because they get hate mail from people accusing them of canceling because of the spike.
Not saying no owners do that and not saying it's definitely a Crystal Commerce issue in this case, but knowing that made me more forgiving about this kind of thing.
Using software that you know doesn't take these issues into account, and not paying attention to your inventory on ban day is not an excuse for poor business practices. In fact, those are poor business practices, which they compound by then cancelling orders because of their own poor business practices. They deserve every bit of bad publicity that comes doing this, and no one should understand or feel sorry for them.
You're totally right, every small LGS should write their own distributed transaction system that can synchronize inventory across multiple third parties that have mixed modes of item reservation in real time under heavy load.
Crystal Commerce is the biggest game in town when it comes to this. Also, how many resources do you legitimately expect stores to expend to hedge against ban announcements? Like anyone saw the Hulk unban coming.
It's not poor business practice, it's a small store with limited resources using the major player in the market for their logistics.
See, it's not poor business practice to just use cheap software. You missed the AND part of my post, and the bolded part behind the and. There are 8 ban days a year. It's not that hard to pay attention to your inventory 8 days a year and pull 3-5 cards that will see a spike as a result some unbannings immediately after they are announced. You know its coming weeks/months in advance. You have no excuse. You are either dumb or you are an ass. There's no in between.
(This does not apply to emergency bannings that stores could not see coming)
The problem is that you still won't get your cards even in that case, and right now they're about tenfold of what I paid, so yeah. While it'll certainly discourage the seller it wouldn't help me.
Of course it's only speculation at this point, I'm just waiting for a send confirmation right now.
Chandra, Torch of Defiance - Oops! All Chandras.
Prime Speaker Zegana - Draw for Power.
Pir & Toothy - Counterpalooza.
Arcades, the Strategist - Another Brick in the Wall.
Zacama, Primal Calamity - Calamity of Double Mana.
Edgar Markov - Vampires Don't Die.
Child of Alara - Dreamcrusher.
I just got a confirm on my order of a $3 Japanese Hulk (and a flash and some other stuff) they had more Hulks but I just grabbed the one I needed for EDH. Maybe they yanked the other two and just sent me mine I dunno.
Probably not a good example but another is metalworker getting unbanned.
Dunes of Zairo
SHANDALAR
Innistrad - The Darkest Night
~THE RAVNICAN CONSORTIUM~
A Community Set
Commander: Allies & Adversaries
Well the source did say one of the decks will be completely unexspected and beast fits the bill of it.
I thought the same thing once:
http://www.mtgstocks.com/prints/8679
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
Yea but protean hulkis not as broken as metalworker
Besides metalworker is easier to abuse in edh especially with votanic key
And two the rise of protean hulk stopped at the $20-$27 zone and this is still just the hype zone stock
Protean Hulk is also in much greater supply, is almost a decade more recent and isn't on the reserved list.
In regards to the ban list, what my playgroup decided to do for certain banned cards was instead of outright ban them, examine them. Figuring out what cards make the banned cards degenerate and unfair, then ban those cards in conjunction with using the Commander or card that is banned.
For example, now that Leovold, Emissary of Trest is banned, our group will likely allow him to be played, but not allow cards like Teferi's Puzzlebox to be used inside the 99.
This "variant" ban list offers flexibility to the use of some commanders. For those of you who used Leovold as your Elf Commander, this rule, if applicable, could be right for you.
Dunes of Zairo
SHANDALAR
Innistrad - The Darkest Night
~THE RAVNICAN CONSORTIUM~
A Community Set
Commander: Allies & Adversaries
How much time passed between the purchase and the order cancellation? I'd raise hell to make them honor the price they had it set at.
"Oh, you sold out of these cards immediately after I bought them for a low price? No worries, you can keep my order in the system and send me the cards when you get more copies in stock~"
You're totally right, every small LGS should write their own distributed transaction system that can synchronize inventory across multiple third parties that have mixed modes of item reservation in real time under heavy load.
Crystal Commerce is the biggest game in town when it comes to this. Also, how many resources do you legitimately expect stores to expend to hedge against ban announcements? Like anyone saw the Hulk unban coming.
It's not poor business practice, it's a small store with limited resources using the major player in the market for their logistics.
Want to be a better Magic player? Read the rulings forum and check out the comprehensive rules!
The trouble with that though, is that its also not really realistic to request that of a store (assuming they didn't just immediately list more at a higher price, which would then suggest that they cancelled the orders to resell at a higher price, rather than it being a program issue with crystal commerce or the like. Put yourself in the shoes of the seller. You use the only decent software available for synchronizing sales across multiple platforms, and when a situation like this occurs, the software gets overwhelmed and isn't able to keep up with multiple orders placed in multiple places at the exact same second, and as a result multiple copies of the same card, the same multiple copies listed on each platform, are sold to several different people, leading to the oversell and inevitable cancellation.
Now then, you as a buyer, purchased the card for $3. The card is now selling for $20+, meaning the online store is unlikely to be getting any new ones in for less than say $12, so they are looking at an automatic significant loss by trying to fulfill those unintentional oversells that were the fault of the software that a LOT of smaller online stores use. Should online stores try to mitigate this sort of issue by as I have suggested in the past keeping separate inventory for selling on different platforms at the like? Sure, but at the same time, in the grand scheme of magic in general, how often do cards get unbanned and cause a frenzy like this, versus the entire rest of the time when everything runs just fine and the software never has an issue? As with most things, there is some potential risk for using such software in the case of a sudden massive spike in demand, but the other 99.99% of the time, the software does its job and allows the seller the visibility of selling on multiple platforms with the same inventory.
What you could do as a buyer though, would be to potentially find out what the seller might be able to bring in the cards at post-spike, and see if they would be willing to fulfill the orders (at cost) under such a scenario, to where the buyer would be able to get the cards for a decent amount less than the current post-spike price, but still unfortunately more than the purchase amount. That sort of request is something that could potentially be agreed to, otherwise the store is likely to just stick with the "if we had the cards at the time of your purchase we would sell them to you, but at the end of the day, we had 5 (or however many) orders for the same 3 cards and still only have those 3 cards to be able to sell, and can only fulfill one of those orders." "When/if we get more back in stock it will be at a much higher purchase price and we wont be able to sell them for the same $3 as they were listed for before." I'm not saying they said or would for any certainty say any of that, I'm just using that as an example of a realistic response to such unfortunate situations.
That said, I have heard of some stores going above and beyond and taking the loss to fulfill the orders, but such really is an unusual sort of thing, and while such stores should be commended, the other stores shouldn't necessarily be bashed for a generally unusual circumstance that happens very rarely, nor should they be lumped into the crowd of people that are intentionally cancelling orders to relist the same inventory at a higher price.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, as I mentioned before, when a card spikes, its important to hedge your bets. As such I usually recommend buying from at least 4 different sources to try to maximize the chance that you get at least the amount you are looking for, and then can always re-sell/trade any extras that aren't cancelled. Its unfortunate that such would have to be done, but until perfect synchronization sales software can be developed and available to be used by the masses, well, one just sort of has to find ways around the issues to still get what you are after.
I literally only bought it to flip though, I have no use for the card. Who wants it? 15 bucks right now
These are all very good points. Thank you for your insight!
I was mostly referring to the online stores that intentionally cancel the pre-spike orders and say they're "out of stock," then immediately list a large quantity of the card at a post-spike price.
But you addressed a lot of issues that I hadn't considered or otherwise didn't know, so thanks for educating me!
If I'm misunderstanding though, I think Grenzo, Dungeon Warden would very much miss his Puzzle Box.
See, it's not poor business practice to just use cheap software. You missed the AND part of my post, and the bolded part behind the and. There are 8 ban days a year. It's not that hard to pay attention to your inventory 8 days a year and pull 3-5 cards that will see a spike as a result some unbannings immediately after they are announced. You know its coming weeks/months in advance. You have no excuse. You are either dumb or you are an ass. There's no in between.
(This does not apply to emergency bannings that stores could not see coming)
Check out http://www.mtgbrodeals.com/author/john-murphy/ for my EDH articles!
Just picture it being 1,000,000% impossible to draw a card.
yeah I can see people building a Leovold deck to do that