Hello everyone! I've just started speculating and investing a little bit in Magic cards and sealed product. Does anyone have some stories on which investments turned out to be good or bad? If you have such details as how many cards you bought for what price and what you sold or traded them for.
Also would like to hear about which sealed booster boxes or other products people may have made or lost money on.
Ultimately, what was your reasoning behind initially choosing your investments? Why did they succeed or fail?
Best:
By straight value investing in Zen Fetchlands at the beginning of modern for less than $10 ea.
By comparative value I got 20 promo phyrexian metamorph promos for $1 ea when they were $5, the store is rather shady and told me he'd sell the promos so I bought them all. They went up a little more but an instant 400% profit was nice.
My 2 boxes of MMA 2015 was a pretty good investment. Box 1 was terrible but box 2 had a foil and a regular goyf, Elesh Norn, Noble Hierarch, Fulminator, Spellskite, Spliter twin, and Wilt-leaf liege.
Worst:
95% of the sealed product I've opened. I have terrible luck when it comes to cracking packs.
Best: I bought 101 assorted Unhinged basics for $160 in late 2009/early 2010, so a shade under $1.60 apiece. Now on average they're about $9-$10 each, so that's about $800 in profit. I was able to unload about 20 on Puca and they went a long way towards the FOW judge foil I received.
From a % increase standpoint, I bought a playset of Mana Reflections in 2009 for 75 cents apiece, now they're ~$17 each, so each of those have gone up about 23-fold.
From a single card perspective, I got a Demonic Tutor judge foil for $25, now it's about $280.
Worst: I haven't done too badly with errant purchases. I bought a playset of Xiahou Dun Judge foils for about $70 apiece. I watched them crash down to about $25 each. They've recovered now to about $38, but I'm still down $125.
It's a much smaller loss, but when I had been playing the game for less than a year, I thought Silence was going to be am amazing card, so I bought 5 of them for $6-7 apiece. Do keep in mind this was before they got reprinted in M11 AND M14, so at the time it was a reasonable purchase. When they saw a reprint in M11 and again in M14 it became a bit of a running joke between my friend and I each time I'd pull one. I've probably got 12 or 13 of 'em now.
I don't invest in paper, but I do a bit online. Best investment: 12 post and affinity cards right at the beginning of modern. Sold the 12 post cards the night of the ban and the affinity cards maybe 6 months ago. Worst investment: a couple dozen foil logic knots. I don't know why I thought they would ever be worth anything.
I bought 125 Guru lands (25 of each) for 2.5k$ Sold few sets over the last two years to recoup my money and I'm still left with 21 of each for free and the few copies I had before have paid for lot of drafts and cards in the last few years.
I also got lot of alpha and beta dual lands just after revised duals jumped in 2009. The older versions lagged quite badly. It was monetarily even to trade a revised Underground Sea for a beta SP- Savannah... To give some details I was moaning that my last alpha nm Ug Sea cost me 550 bucks shipped, more than the first two combined.
During the same time frame I also bought several collections from vintage players and due to work didn't have time to sell the P9 cards. While I started selling bit early I did get a nice 30% value increase from just keeping the cards. The last big collection I bought last year had a decent Ul Black Lotus that was priced at 500 euros by the seller (and it was a fair price at the time). Sold the card for Bazaar of Moxen prize for nearly 1k three weeks later after the P9 prizes went through the roof.
Horrible deals are mostly linked to me needing some cards for my decks and buying a collection which needed lot of work to get any profit out of, as lot of the cards had wear.
For sealed boxes and boosters my worst buy was a sealed 4th edition box in 1998. I paid about 80$ for the box and I still have it. The first time I could have made a profit was last year. Luckily I bought a sealed Alliances box from the same seller few months later, which helped a bit. But mostly booster boxes have been good to me. I'm mostly sitting on older product, altough I liked Return to Ravnica drafts enough to keep one case of that too.
I currently have more money invested in boxes than I have made from selling them, but that's mainly due to choice and me trying to draft some of them (MMa, Original Ravnica, TSP-block, IPA) instead of just selling and me believing that Innistrad hasn't matured quite enough to sell out yet. But there are some issues with boxes, and they involve low demand on the high end boxes and high shipping costs from Finland to Europe. So always make certain that you have some out for your purchases if you decide to go into boxes.
Best: Probably something in my $30-35 MPR Wastelands, $75ish foil Rishadan Ports (acquired piecemeal so they were all different prices, but that's a rough average), or $7 foil Unhinged Mountains, depending on how you look at it. This was literally just done as part of foiling out my Legacy Goblins deck way back in the day when it was a real deck. But in retrospect, it makes sense that those would be the cards that saw the biggest increases of the bunch (though the Darksteel foil Aether Vials went up a fair bit too) because the first two are extremely powerful and not likely to see reprint in large quantities such as Standard-legal sets, while the third is just in relatively low supply compared to how many of a given card people will need (regular cards cap out a 4 for a playset, but basics are as many as you want, which for something like EDH can be quite high), plus they're the foil versions, adding scarcity while also commanding a higher price premium. Also, if you're trying to go this route, don't get cards after they've spiked, because that's just being late to the party.
Worst: The fact that I play Standard. It's fun but hard to justify sometimes, even when I keep deck costs down. Keep out of Standard if you want to make money off this game unless you're just that good at playing.
My best move (when I actually sold the cards instead of just keeping them) was when I bought 64 Hellrider at $2.50 each. I had speculated because I heard that RW Tokens was THE DECK in Block Constructed. Then they banned key parts to the deck. A few weeks later in Standard, they went up to nearly $10 and I sold them for $7 in store credit to my local store.
My worst is an odd one. Near the beginning of Zendikar, I already had a play set of the fetches from preordering. I had won some money playing Magic, so I decided to treat myself to a FOIL playset of the Zendikar fetches. The lowest was Marsh Flats at $64 shipped and the highest was Misty Rainforest at $108 shipped. When they went up to double, I traded them for a Legacy Merfolk deck because I was looking to get into Legacy and had success with the Folk in Standard. Well, the Merfolk deck that I traded for probably has gone up 20% at most while the FOIL fetches went up to even more PER FOIL FETCH than I had paid for the entire play set. So, we're looking at 400% profit at worst... (I sold too early; a common mistake for me.)
Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
But there are some issues with boxes, and they involve low demand on the high end boxes and high shipping costs from Finland to Europe. So always make certain that you have some out for your purchases if you decide to go into boxes.
Not sure what you mean by "have some out for your purchases if you decide to go into boxes." Do you mean extra money to cover shipping costs? I've been paying shipping costs whenever I buy magic cards. Wouldn't people buying boxes from you expect to pay for shipping?
I've got a box of Khans of Tarkir and Conspiracy I'm sitting on. I chose these as they are a self-contained draft environment. Also Khans has fetchlands which will always be desired. I'm thinking perhaps I should have just gone Khans as Conspiracy seems to have almost no high cost cards. On the other hand Conspiracy is a unique set, so perhaps there will be a demand when it stops seeing circulation.
Hopefully my investment into fetchlands will be a success story for me someday. I have been trading and buying them up them in person amongst my play group. The plan is to use pucatrade or forums to sell some cards I currently have to get more fetches soon. I noticed they all have been going up slightly the last 3 weeks. Seems like a good time to buy.
Not sure what you mean by "have some out for your purchases if you decide to go into boxes." Do you mean extra money to cover shipping costs? I've been paying shipping costs whenever I buy magic cards. Wouldn't people buying boxes from you expect to pay for shipping?
I mean that you should always know how to get rid of the boxes when the time comes. The note was more geared towards serious box investors, or borderline serious ones. I have about 60 sealed boxes stashed and don't really have problems, as the pile isn't that big and I'm currently maxing at ten boxes per set. But for somebody who buys a pallet of RTR boxes, it's extremely important to know how they can unload the boxes without having to donate the profits to others. It is very different thing to find a buyer for one box, compared to 60 boxes.
Holding boxes with a good draft environment is one key way to make certain you can move them, but in the recent years Future Sight, Worldwake and New Phyrexia have been some of the best investments. None of which are stand-alone sets. I did a few 3x FUT drafts, but the format was not too good. For those sets you need a good channel to sell. It might be a friendly card shop, eBay (Taking 18% of your money), Facebook or whatever. Just make certain that you can unload reasonably easily the amount of product you are holding, as sometimes one can be strapped for cash, unless you are very careful in your investments.
The worst feeling is when you have found a great deal and invested heavily, but then need to sell out before making any profit, just to buy a new washing machine, fridge or a car, when something breaks. Just last week somebody in GB was selling RTR boxes for 55 pounds each. That's below reasonable market price and if that person could have waited six months he would have made some profit. In two years he should have doubled his money. Now he's selling at cost or even below after holding the boxes for up to two years. Similar thing happened about a year back with Innistrad, One guy sold 24 boxes for 80$ each just two months before the prices hit 150$. Even whith eBay fees he donated 40$ per box to buyers, loosing 960 bucks because he had overinvested and needed money so fast he couldn't optimize the sales. Three years ago I bought four italian Future Sight boxes for 68 euros each from somebody who couldn't hold them anymore (and they had to pay some fees too). I would have bought more, but his listed 16 boxes went pretty fast.
I'll get down from my high horse here, but I always see somebody investing money she or he couldn't really afford and have to sell too fast for each set. That's seems to be a law of nature and most of the time those sellers don't have a preplanned way to get rid of the boxes, get desperate and sell way too cheap. Naturally somebody has to be the last person to sell at old price, but try to avoid being that guy.
Worst Investment so far? Being involved in this game.
*snaps*
I feel like this is accurate. It's definitely where too much of my money has gone.
I was going through some of my old papers from college and I came upon some receipts from back in the day. Apparently I bought a Bazaar for $9. I guess that's my best return on investment, although I still have it, so technically my return is zero.
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Best investments - buying into lilianas. snapcasters, shocklands and abrupt decays a few months before rotation. Had around 120 shocklands along with a foil playset. made around $400 when I shortsold the foil shocks last year. Made $60 on each liliana, and still have the snapcasters, which are at around 400% from where I got them. I pretty much had every card in standard at that time so I would trade extra jaces and sphinx's rev into lilianas and snapcaster mages, and I would trade for every shockland I could, mostly just for value.
Worst investments - 40 deathrite shaman. This was before the banning. Still haven't lost value on them yet, but it's close. Also, preordered 10 playsets of empty the pits. It was a cheap spec that could have paid dividends, but is currently in bulkville. I had to make a choice between empty the pits or wingmate roc at the same price, and I chose way wrong on that (though empty is still a good card).
uncertain - I have a lot of loose sealed product. Antiquities, revised, tempest, alliances, urza's saga, and then newer stuff like zendikar and new phyrexia. I have 8 spare draft sets of tempest block for a rainy day, as well as 8 sets of rtr block. Also have a lot of old precons from tempest and urza's block, as well as some random tournament packs. It's not going to be easy to offload some of this stuff so for now the box full of stuff is just sitting in my closet.
Worst Investment so far? Being involved in this game.
Hahaha! Indeed! I'm sure my little investments will never make back the money I've spent playing magic. Instead I've been seeing it as a way to trade up card value. I've had so many cards sitting around not doing anything. When Khans came out trading for as many fetchlands as possible has been a great way for me to turn cheap, unusable cards into a liquid investment.
The stories have been great so far. I feel like Default User had a very important point about not over investing. A Youtube magic investor I watch said he has seen A LOT of people spending money they shouldn't have on "investments" which had to be sold at a loss because rent was due. Step 0 to investing: Already have a savings in place that is not used for investing and a steady income.
We can count those nameless players who spent money they didn't have as worst investment stories.
Best investment: Camping Hasbro's site the past 2 years and getting both SDCC Planeswalker Sets at MSRP.
Worst Investment: Camping Hasbro's site the past 2 years and getting both SDCC Planeswalker Sets at MSRP and still sitting on them and not dumping them during the hype. Now I'm just watching the value drop every month.
Even though I'm fairly certain my collection is worth far more than what I've paid or spent, I'm pretty far into the hole as far as "investing" into the game goes. At least 95% of my collection value is in 600 cards.
Pretty much anything legacy foil I bought a while back has doubled or tripled in terms of good.
In terms of bad... I do regret getting rid of a million ZEN fetches at $10 and a set of ports at $40 each.
Best: I've bought many collections for $500-$1000 that turned out to be worth 4 or 5 times what I paid. The RIGHT collections are always a solid return on investment. Heck, just this past weekend I bought "28000 bulk MTG commons" from Craigslist for $120 and ended up finding 348 Zendikar full art lands and a bunch of gitaxian probes and lightning bolts and some nice foils (spell pierce etc) which ended up being worth probably close to a thousand bucks total. I love digging through "bulk".
As far as specific speculations go, I bought somewhere between 500-750 Shadow of Doubt cards about 2-3 years ago for an average of around 50 cents each on a hunch that it could become useful some day. It didn't take long for them to shoot up to $5. Around the same time I invested in about 250 or so Oboro, Palace in the Clouds for $1ish each when Tron decks were getting popular. They've done nothing but gain in value ever since. I've also done well on Ancient Ziggurat, Scars fast lands, Summer Bloom, Squelch (bought 500ish for .25 each), Choke, Kor Spiritdancer, Tectonic Edge and various angels and dragons. I'm also sitting on a pretty large supply of Worldwake man lands (specifically Stirring Wildwood) because I'm convinced that barring a reprint they will go up some day. We'll see.
Worst: Duskmantle Seer, easily. When it was still standard legal and scry was announced as the next big thing, I was convinced it was going to go up. I mean come on, it's a 4/4 flying creature for 4 mana if nothing else. On top of that, it's mythic, it's a vampire, and it has a semi-powerful effect. I'm probably sitting on 250ish of them that I bought for $1-1.50 each. Not a huge loss, but I still wish I hadn't purchased them. Crappy mythics don't tend to be reprinted at least though, so maybe a few more years down the road they will slowly gain some value. Probably wishful thinking.
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Any Puca trades you can send me would be greatly appreciated! Big want list and lots of points available.
Best: I bought 8 Tarmogoyfs for $2.50 each. Worst: I bought the second playset of Flooded Strands and Polluted Deltas about two months before they were announced as reprints in Khans.
Best: investing in a legacy burn deck and legacy affinity deck post-scars but pre-modern. Also, investing in the living end deck pre-modern. I just cashed out of my "budget" modern and legacy collection to refocus on cube foiling. Living end ($1), Fulminators ($5), ensnaring bridges ($4), mox opals ($10), etc, all landed up working out pretty well. Seems like with the continuing popularity of magic as a whole, you can do worse than investing in "budget" tier 2-3 decks, because they sometimes get their moment in the sun.
Worst investment: pack cracking (generally), building budget casual decks that only hit the table < once a year, & building full draft sims (+ sleeves) for expansions I don't think anyone ever wants to play again (AVR, GTC, Dragon's Maze, etc).
Even though I'm fairly certain my collection is worth far more than what I've paid or spent, I'm pretty far into the hole as far as "investing" into the game goes. At least 95% of my collection value is in 600 cards.
Pretty much anything legacy foil I bought a while back has doubled or tripled in terms of good.
In terms of bad... I do regret getting rid of a million ZEN fetches at $10 and a set of ports at $40 each.
I sold 2 Rishadan Port right here on MTGS for $21 each. I had been sitting on them for months with no intent to play them.
Then within the same time period approximately, I sold 2 Judge Vendilion Cliques for around $35 each (I think a bit lower since I tried to move them) right here on MTGS.
Both of these 2 ofs had been won by 4th and 7th at 2 SCG IQs that I attended. The sad part is that I don't get to attend these quite often anymore... (Not to mention, seeing Port spike to $100 and Judge Cliques going to $200 at one time.)
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Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
Got into the game around the Urza Block. As a kid I was more interested in the art and primarily dumped my allowance into packs and singles that I thought were stunning.
About a year ago I found my old collection and pulled them out - To my surprise alot of the cards I found beautiful, were worthless Ex Lightning Dragon
While the those rares that use to infuriate me as a kid such as Gaea's Cradle and the onslaught fetchlands (Come on! The rare is a land, what a waste :O) are worth a fortune.
Worst Investment: Selling most of my old cards and then gettin back into the game and realizing I can't stand modern or standard and legacy is my only love but I have to re-purchase much of what I once sold :X
Best one I purchased with intent: Buying heavily into Shadowmoor singles that I knew would be good long-term. I'm still sitting on playsets of Prismatic Omen and Mana Reflection that I bought for about $1 each. Now if only I could get more of those lands and Lieges...
Best one I lucksacked into: I'm down in Australia, and had a good relationship with the LGS owner at the time... and he handed me one of each of the sealed packs of APAC lands that he had left sitting around. The set of 15 is now sitting at $200+, and is nice and snug in my binder for a rainy day.
Best: I've bought many collections for $500-$1000 that turned out to be worth 4 or 5 times what I paid. The RIGHT collections are always a solid return on investment. Heck, just this past weekend I bought "28000 bulk MTG commons" from Craigslist for $120 and ended up finding 348 Zendikar full art lands and a bunch of gitaxian probes and lightning bolts and some nice foils (spell pierce etc) which ended up being worth probably close to a thousand bucks total. I love digging through "bulk".
When you say collections, you mean when someone's dumping all of their cards? Do you buy bulk collections online? It seems like a gamble as many people just sell off complete junk. What makes you lean toward buying a collection?
Bought a playset of Liliana of the Veil for $20-35 each. I also traded a Xenagos, the Reveler for a Liliana of the Veil at Theros prerelease. Coming back into the game, I thought Liliana was a house of a card and I'm glad I got them while they were cheap.
Worst:
Not getting into the Goblin Rabblemaster hype. Rabblemaster was a card I completely missed over when I was looking over the set. I only realized Rabblemaster was in the set (and its power) when I saw a young kid open a foil Rabblemaster and also got passed one in an M15 draft. He proceeded to take down the entire draft. However that was 1-2 months before the spike from like $1-2 to $15. I hesitated on Rabblemaster after I was convinced on how good it would be.
Also would like to hear about which sealed booster boxes or other products people may have made or lost money on.
Ultimately, what was your reasoning behind initially choosing your investments? Why did they succeed or fail?
Thanks in advance!
By straight value investing in Zen Fetchlands at the beginning of modern for less than $10 ea.
By comparative value I got 20 promo phyrexian metamorph promos for $1 ea when they were $5, the store is rather shady and told me he'd sell the promos so I bought them all. They went up a little more but an instant 400% profit was nice.
My 2 boxes of MMA 2015 was a pretty good investment. Box 1 was terrible but box 2 had a foil and a regular goyf, Elesh Norn, Noble Hierarch, Fulminator, Spellskite, Spliter twin, and Wilt-leaf liege.
Worst:
95% of the sealed product I've opened. I have terrible luck when it comes to cracking packs.
XXXX
Modern
URTwinRU R.I.P.
EDH
WUGRoon of the Hidden RealmWUG
From a % increase standpoint, I bought a playset of Mana Reflections in 2009 for 75 cents apiece, now they're ~$17 each, so each of those have gone up about 23-fold.
From a single card perspective, I got a Demonic Tutor judge foil for $25, now it's about $280.
Worst: I haven't done too badly with errant purchases. I bought a playset of Xiahou Dun Judge foils for about $70 apiece. I watched them crash down to about $25 each. They've recovered now to about $38, but I'm still down $125.
It's a much smaller loss, but when I had been playing the game for less than a year, I thought Silence was going to be am amazing card, so I bought 5 of them for $6-7 apiece. Do keep in mind this was before they got reprinted in M11 AND M14, so at the time it was a reasonable purchase. When they saw a reprint in M11 and again in M14 it became a bit of a running joke between my friend and I each time I'd pull one. I've probably got 12 or 13 of 'em now.
I bought 125 Guru lands (25 of each) for 2.5k$ Sold few sets over the last two years to recoup my money and I'm still left with 21 of each for free and the few copies I had before have paid for lot of drafts and cards in the last few years.
I also got lot of alpha and beta dual lands just after revised duals jumped in 2009. The older versions lagged quite badly. It was monetarily even to trade a revised Underground Sea for a beta SP- Savannah... To give some details I was moaning that my last alpha nm Ug Sea cost me 550 bucks shipped, more than the first two combined.
During the same time frame I also bought several collections from vintage players and due to work didn't have time to sell the P9 cards. While I started selling bit early I did get a nice 30% value increase from just keeping the cards. The last big collection I bought last year had a decent Ul Black Lotus that was priced at 500 euros by the seller (and it was a fair price at the time). Sold the card for Bazaar of Moxen prize for nearly 1k three weeks later after the P9 prizes went through the roof.
Horrible deals are mostly linked to me needing some cards for my decks and buying a collection which needed lot of work to get any profit out of, as lot of the cards had wear.
For sealed boxes and boosters my worst buy was a sealed 4th edition box in 1998. I paid about 80$ for the box and I still have it. The first time I could have made a profit was last year. Luckily I bought a sealed Alliances box from the same seller few months later, which helped a bit. But mostly booster boxes have been good to me. I'm mostly sitting on older product, altough I liked Return to Ravnica drafts enough to keep one case of that too.
I currently have more money invested in boxes than I have made from selling them, but that's mainly due to choice and me trying to draft some of them (MMa, Original Ravnica, TSP-block, IPA) instead of just selling and me believing that Innistrad hasn't matured quite enough to sell out yet. But there are some issues with boxes, and they involve low demand on the high end boxes and high shipping costs from Finland to Europe. So always make certain that you have some out for your purchases if you decide to go into boxes.
Set to default
Worst: The fact that I play Standard. It's fun but hard to justify sometimes, even when I keep deck costs down. Keep out of Standard if you want to make money off this game unless you're just that good at playing.
My worst is an odd one. Near the beginning of Zendikar, I already had a play set of the fetches from preordering. I had won some money playing Magic, so I decided to treat myself to a FOIL playset of the Zendikar fetches. The lowest was Marsh Flats at $64 shipped and the highest was Misty Rainforest at $108 shipped. When they went up to double, I traded them for a Legacy Merfolk deck because I was looking to get into Legacy and had success with the Folk in Standard. Well, the Merfolk deck that I traded for probably has gone up 20% at most while the FOIL fetches went up to even more PER FOIL FETCH than I had paid for the entire play set. So, we're looking at 400% profit at worst... (I sold too early; a common mistake for me.)
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)Not sure what you mean by "have some out for your purchases if you decide to go into boxes." Do you mean extra money to cover shipping costs? I've been paying shipping costs whenever I buy magic cards. Wouldn't people buying boxes from you expect to pay for shipping?
I've got a box of Khans of Tarkir and Conspiracy I'm sitting on. I chose these as they are a self-contained draft environment. Also Khans has fetchlands which will always be desired. I'm thinking perhaps I should have just gone Khans as Conspiracy seems to have almost no high cost cards. On the other hand Conspiracy is a unique set, so perhaps there will be a demand when it stops seeing circulation.
Hopefully my investment into fetchlands will be a success story for me someday. I have been trading and buying them up them in person amongst my play group. The plan is to use pucatrade or forums to sell some cards I currently have to get more fetches soon. I noticed they all have been going up slightly the last 3 weeks. Seems like a good time to buy.
Thanks for the stories and ideas everyone!
I mean that you should always know how to get rid of the boxes when the time comes. The note was more geared towards serious box investors, or borderline serious ones. I have about 60 sealed boxes stashed and don't really have problems, as the pile isn't that big and I'm currently maxing at ten boxes per set. But for somebody who buys a pallet of RTR boxes, it's extremely important to know how they can unload the boxes without having to donate the profits to others. It is very different thing to find a buyer for one box, compared to 60 boxes.
Holding boxes with a good draft environment is one key way to make certain you can move them, but in the recent years Future Sight, Worldwake and New Phyrexia have been some of the best investments. None of which are stand-alone sets. I did a few 3x FUT drafts, but the format was not too good. For those sets you need a good channel to sell. It might be a friendly card shop, eBay (Taking 18% of your money), Facebook or whatever. Just make certain that you can unload reasonably easily the amount of product you are holding, as sometimes one can be strapped for cash, unless you are very careful in your investments.
The worst feeling is when you have found a great deal and invested heavily, but then need to sell out before making any profit, just to buy a new washing machine, fridge or a car, when something breaks. Just last week somebody in GB was selling RTR boxes for 55 pounds each. That's below reasonable market price and if that person could have waited six months he would have made some profit. In two years he should have doubled his money. Now he's selling at cost or even below after holding the boxes for up to two years. Similar thing happened about a year back with Innistrad, One guy sold 24 boxes for 80$ each just two months before the prices hit 150$. Even whith eBay fees he donated 40$ per box to buyers, loosing 960 bucks because he had overinvested and needed money so fast he couldn't optimize the sales. Three years ago I bought four italian Future Sight boxes for 68 euros each from somebody who couldn't hold them anymore (and they had to pay some fees too). I would have bought more, but his listed 16 boxes went pretty fast.
I'll get down from my high horse here, but I always see somebody investing money she or he couldn't really afford and have to sell too fast for each set. That's seems to be a law of nature and most of the time those sellers don't have a preplanned way to get rid of the boxes, get desperate and sell way too cheap. Naturally somebody has to be the last person to sell at old price, but try to avoid being that guy.
Set to default
Worst Investment so far? Being involved in this game.
*snaps*
I feel like this is accurate. It's definitely where too much of my money has gone.
I was going through some of my old papers from college and I came upon some receipts from back in the day. Apparently I bought a Bazaar for $9. I guess that's my best return on investment, although I still have it, so technically my return is zero.
Worst investments - 40 deathrite shaman. This was before the banning. Still haven't lost value on them yet, but it's close. Also, preordered 10 playsets of empty the pits. It was a cheap spec that could have paid dividends, but is currently in bulkville. I had to make a choice between empty the pits or wingmate roc at the same price, and I chose way wrong on that (though empty is still a good card).
uncertain - I have a lot of loose sealed product. Antiquities, revised, tempest, alliances, urza's saga, and then newer stuff like zendikar and new phyrexia. I have 8 spare draft sets of tempest block for a rainy day, as well as 8 sets of rtr block. Also have a lot of old precons from tempest and urza's block, as well as some random tournament packs. It's not going to be easy to offload some of this stuff so for now the box full of stuff is just sitting in my closet.
Hahaha! Indeed! I'm sure my little investments will never make back the money I've spent playing magic. Instead I've been seeing it as a way to trade up card value. I've had so many cards sitting around not doing anything. When Khans came out trading for as many fetchlands as possible has been a great way for me to turn cheap, unusable cards into a liquid investment.
The stories have been great so far. I feel like Default User had a very important point about not over investing. A Youtube magic investor I watch said he has seen A LOT of people spending money they shouldn't have on "investments" which had to be sold at a loss because rent was due. Step 0 to investing: Already have a savings in place that is not used for investing and a steady income.
We can count those nameless players who spent money they didn't have as worst investment stories.
Worst Investment: Camping Hasbro's site the past 2 years and getting both SDCC Planeswalker Sets at MSRP and still sitting on them and not dumping them during the hype. Now I'm just watching the value drop every month.
Pretty much anything legacy foil I bought a while back has doubled or tripled in terms of good.
In terms of bad... I do regret getting rid of a million ZEN fetches at $10 and a set of ports at $40 each.
WGURBLands!WGURB
WGUInfectWGU
Legacy Lands Primer
Top 8 SCG Oakland 2014
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My Cube on CubeTutor
As far as specific speculations go, I bought somewhere between 500-750 Shadow of Doubt cards about 2-3 years ago for an average of around 50 cents each on a hunch that it could become useful some day. It didn't take long for them to shoot up to $5. Around the same time I invested in about 250 or so Oboro, Palace in the Clouds for $1ish each when Tron decks were getting popular. They've done nothing but gain in value ever since. I've also done well on Ancient Ziggurat, Scars fast lands, Summer Bloom, Squelch (bought 500ish for .25 each), Choke, Kor Spiritdancer, Tectonic Edge and various angels and dragons. I'm also sitting on a pretty large supply of Worldwake man lands (specifically Stirring Wildwood) because I'm convinced that barring a reprint they will go up some day. We'll see.
Worst: Duskmantle Seer, easily. When it was still standard legal and scry was announced as the next big thing, I was convinced it was going to go up. I mean come on, it's a 4/4 flying creature for 4 mana if nothing else. On top of that, it's mythic, it's a vampire, and it has a semi-powerful effect. I'm probably sitting on 250ish of them that I bought for $1-1.50 each. Not a huge loss, but I still wish I hadn't purchased them. Crappy mythics don't tend to be reprinted at least though, so maybe a few more years down the road they will slowly gain some value. Probably wishful thinking.
https://pucatrade.com/profiles/show/23875
Worst investment: pack cracking (generally), building budget casual decks that only hit the table < once a year, & building full draft sims (+ sleeves) for expansions I don't think anyone ever wants to play again (AVR, GTC, Dragon's Maze, etc).
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."
I sold 2 Rishadan Port right here on MTGS for $21 each. I had been sitting on them for months with no intent to play them.
Then within the same time period approximately, I sold 2 Judge Vendilion Cliques for around $35 each (I think a bit lower since I tried to move them) right here on MTGS.
Both of these 2 ofs had been won by 4th and 7th at 2 SCG IQs that I attended. The sad part is that I don't get to attend these quite often anymore... (Not to mention, seeing Port spike to $100 and Judge Cliques going to $200 at one time.)
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)About a year ago I found my old collection and pulled them out - To my surprise alot of the cards I found beautiful, were worthless Ex Lightning Dragon
While the those rares that use to infuriate me as a kid such as Gaea's Cradle and the onslaught fetchlands (Come on! The rare is a land, what a waste :O) are worth a fortune.
Worst Investment: Selling most of my old cards and then gettin back into the game and realizing I can't stand modern or standard and legacy is my only love but I have to re-purchase much of what I once sold :X
thanks to DNC of Heroes of the Plane Studios for the coolest sig
vintage-WBdark timesBW
legacy-BGRJund-51/60BGR
RBBob Sligh 48/60BR
GRone land belcherRG
URBTES-54/60URB
Fun deck-BBBBKobolds stormBBBB
Best one I lucksacked into: I'm down in Australia, and had a good relationship with the LGS owner at the time... and he handed me one of each of the sealed packs of APAC lands that he had left sitting around. The set of 15 is now sitting at $200+, and is nice and snug in my binder for a rainy day.
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
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The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
When you say collections, you mean when someone's dumping all of their cards? Do you buy bulk collections online? It seems like a gamble as many people just sell off complete junk. What makes you lean toward buying a collection?
Bought a playset of Liliana of the Veil for $20-35 each. I also traded a Xenagos, the Reveler for a Liliana of the Veil at Theros prerelease. Coming back into the game, I thought Liliana was a house of a card and I'm glad I got them while they were cheap.
Worst:
Not getting into the Goblin Rabblemaster hype. Rabblemaster was a card I completely missed over when I was looking over the set. I only realized Rabblemaster was in the set (and its power) when I saw a young kid open a foil Rabblemaster and also got passed one in an M15 draft. He proceeded to take down the entire draft. However that was 1-2 months before the spike from like $1-2 to $15. I hesitated on Rabblemaster after I was convinced on how good it would be.
Credit to Heroes of the Plane Studios for the Avatar & Miraculous Recovery for the Banner.
My 540 Card Cube (WIP)