Before you start railing on me for my conspiracy theories read my post
I am only the messenger, passing on what i have discovered.
All this talk of speculators, price gauging, Collecters, Counterfeiters, The reserve list, has brought up the believe that certain companies like SCJ may be buying up all copies of a card based on inside information that has not been publicly leaked yet. I want the following thing to be made clear:
I AM NOT MAKING AN ALLEGATION of any kind of illegal activity.
read the information yourself and make up your own mind. But first, a picture, becaue i heard those are worth like 1000 words and will shorten my post considerably
This is a screenshot apparently showing a member of a card shop buying out all copies below a certain price of "Trostani, Selesnya's Voice" this action was taken before the rest of us were able to see the new G/W god, which apparently makes all creature tokens indestructible. I see another motive as well. can you? There is another card not seeing as much standard play as it is in other more powerful formats. Voice of Resurgence can you imagine how the demand for both of these cards will go up in the following events? I fail to see how (if this is true) it is any different than manipulating the stock market.
Or, the business explanation is:
Yesterday people started to buy up stock on SCG and in order to provide their customers with the card they want they went out and bought them. Their buylist wasn't filling the inventory fast enough to keep up with the demand. Now, hopefully they will be able to give their customers the cards they want - albeit at a higher price. But a higher price is fair since that the demand went up without the supply changing.
Or, the business explanation is:
Yesterday people started to buy up stock on SCG and in order to provide their customers with the card they want they went out and bought them. Their buylist wasn't filling the inventory fast enough to keep up with the demand. Now, hopefully they will be able to give their customers the cards they want - albeit at a higher price. But a higher price is fair since that the demand went up without the supply changing.
that is a reasonable explaination and would be one scenario, but not what i am speculating at.
What if one were to buy all the supply because they knew the demand would increase when EVERYONE ELSE saw the new god.
what if that person also would see tremendous increased value in none of their stock cards if it now was demanded also by standard players
yes, i agree buying up stock to meet demand is one thing, but have you ever seen someone get off a notion thief + windfall combo??
thats what happens when someone buys up stock before the demand hits, then holds out on prices because they have all the cards on hand
I haven't seen it either, but if you are a speculator it's pretty clear that any card in Standard that will give you 4 Devotion is going to be looked at.
Regardless of what it turns out to do, I'm sure there are a ton of people all over the country who know about the cards before the public (I've know about cards before 99% of you guys because of the Rumor Mill... it's just part of the job), but how people act on that is another matter. Does SCG know something you don't? Maybe. Does an person who can buy from SCG know something you don't? 100% yes.
that is a reasonable explaination and would be one scenario, but not what i am speculating at.
What if one were to buy all the supply because they knew the demand would increase when EVERYONE ELSE saw the new god.
what if that person also would see tremendous increased value in none of their stock cards if it now was demanded also by standard players
yes, i agree buying up stock to meet demand is one thing, but have you ever seen someone get off a notion thief + windfall combo??
thats what happens when someone buys up stock before the demand hits, then holds out on prices because they have all the cards on hand
You are speculating in a way that fuels the distrust and paranoia that makes honest discussions really hard though. "Hey, I got these torches and pitchforks here at your castle door... let's all have a little chat."
I have no idea what you are talking about with Notion Thief and Windfall, but those are not horded cards. There is nobody out there smart enough to make enough money to corner those markets and yet dumb enough to try to do that. Multi-billionaires don't see business opportunities on cardboard signs and call the number to make a lot of money at home selling insurance. Am I missing something?
I have seen it. more to the point, though. you havent. If i can find it again i will post pics for you guys. but this grinds my gears a little bit. im going back to mtgo for a few hours. you can discredit me all you want but ask yourself this.
I have seen it. more to the point, though. you havent. If i can find it again i will post pics for you guys. but this grinds my gears a little bit. im going back to mtgo for a few hours. you can discredit me all you want but ask yourself this.
what reason would i have to lie about this?
Yeah, no accusations. It's just not relevant. Regardless of what the creature does, there are only a handful of creatures in Standard with 4 mana symbols in their mana cost.
-I picked up 8 copies of Rubblebelt Raiders 6 months before Xenagos was spoiled And that hasn't turned out to be a good investment.
It's not in SCG's best interests, or anyone else, to do this.
The whole idea sounds great on the surface, buy everyone out and then mark up the cards. The problem is eventually, there would be an incorrect guess, and the hoarder would end up taking a major bath on the deal. Do it a couple of times, and you're closing your otherwise healthy business.
As the poster above me says, he was just shoring up his stock. Happens all of the time, look at the various online stores, when they sell out of a box or card, they buy it on Ebay and then increase the price to keep their margin.
I can say this with confidence, because I've shipped sealed product to one or two stores when they won my auctions.
clearing out 128 or more listings singlehandedly=shoring up stock?
i was under the impression that 200-300 copies usually meant "going deep" at these speculation sites. This is far more than shoring up stock, i would bet that he bought closer to 2-3 hundred total either from other sources or in the intervening time period.
I was completely under the impression that they spoiled the GW god, my bad. If you had seen it you would have understood why Trostani and voice would be targets. Ill give you a hint its more than just their mana costs. let me see if i can find it again and i will post
On a side note, i can admit when i am wrong. no one is attacking me. just so used to those 'counterfeiting threads'.
No one will believe you, even if you had a cofession of intent and interest in market cornering thanks to ilegally aquired inside knowledge, of out of the horse's mouth, MTGS is too in love with the idea of SCG being the good guys and players who want to play the damn game instead of playing a watered down and handicapped stocks market being evil trolls who want to ruin the game.
I bet SCG will send their hired muscle to place at the first big tournament post BNG launch and make a bunch of articles how "No one expected Trostani to be the new card to beat!", all while conveniently having 99 in stock.
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128 cards is hardly cornering a market. That doesn't mean he's not cornering the market, but that's thin evidence of it.
If you had people posting "Yeah he bought 3700 from me" and "he bought 450 from me" etc. then it might be a different story.
I think because of this, there will always be doubt. The only way we will know for sure is if a representative of Starcity Games comes out and says, "Yeah, we totally bought out all of the fetchlands and jacked up the prices to $50 per fetch."
No one will believe you, even if you had a cofession of intent and interest in market cornering thanks to ilegally aquired inside knowledge, of out of the horse's mouth, MTGS is too in love with the idea of SCG being the good guys and players who want to play the damn game instead of playing a watered down and handicapped stocks market being evil trolls who want to ruin the game.
I bet SCG will send their hired muscle to place at the first big tournament post BNG launch and make a bunch of articles how "No one expected Trostani to be the new card to beat!", all while conveniently having 99 in stock.
I have actually read this from a couple of different places. I do believe this is what happened at Pro Tour Theros with Master of Waves.
This is what I don't get, there are always cards available to buy. There are millions upon millions of each card printed and no one person can buy enough copies of a card to put a major dent into the price of a card realistically. It just comes down to looking harder instead of just accepting that some one is manipulating the market. I mean if some one buys out TCGplayer, that is what? 80 copies of a card where there are millions printed? People need to be more realistic with these ideas.
Based on what Bleiweiss himself has stated, I can only assume Galspanic's post on page one is entirely correct.
Ben Bleiweiss has not made his motives a secret about card purchases by SCG. If you'll read his posts on THIS forum he's explained why and when SCG has bought stock of cards from other vendors or has dramatically increased their price on a particular single.
Firstly, Do you have evidence that SCG bought out that many of them, all I see from the screen shot is that they bought out a couple stores (its best not to make assumptions, especially negative ones towards individuals or businesses without concrete proof.)
Secondly, and quite likely, people anticipating the release of the G/W god were likely speculating themselves on trostani being the best option for maximum efficiency towards getting the g/w god activated. Oftentimes SCG will get bought out of a card before the rest of the market does (because SCG has such a large customer base due to having some of the best customer service and availability of cards out there.) If they got bought out, or were already very low in stock, it makes perfect sense for them to, in anticipation of increased demand, go out and purchase copies of the card to shore up their stock to make sure they had plenty for their customers. SCG being the largest of the online magic stores, means they sell through and thus need to keep stocked a lot more of potentially hot cards.
Heck, when I owned/ran the magic singles stock for a local shop, I would sell out of a card and have to go online to purchase more myself and buy out a few shops here and there to do so, its just the nature of the business, in that regard SCG was just like me, except 100x the size :p.
If SCG did buy up 200-300 of them, then sure, I could see where people would be a bit O.o .... at that. However, unless there is other sourcing to show that they were solely responsible for the drop in supply on tcgplayer or the like, then all we have for now, is them buying some amount up to restock their online store due to increased demand from their customers and a real likelihood that such demand would continue for the time being due to the eventual preview/release of the G/W god, et all.
Oftentimes when a bunch of a card get bought up from somewhere, whether its due to a speculator, or a big online store restocking themselves, other players/speculators may follow suit if they fear that the price is about to shoot up on a card. That's simply the nature of the playerbase and secondary market for magic sometimes. But there has to be real and potential demand for a card for such to take place. For all we know, SCG may have bought up 50, or perhaps even 100 (25 playsets can sell out quite quickly from a store like SCG with the huge customer base they have.) And then the rest were bought by speculators/other players who were considering purchasing them but had been holding off, perhaps until the G/W god was previewed, or otherwise, and once stock started to decline and the cheaper stock started to get bought up, they jumped in and grabbed theirs as well.
clearing out 128 or more listings singlehandedly=shoring up stock?
i was under the impression that 200-300 copies usually meant "going deep" at these speculation sites. This is far more than shoring up stock, i would bet that he bought closer to 2-3 hundred total either from other sources or in the intervening time period.
I was completely under the impression that they spoiled the GW god, my bad. If you had seen it you would have understood why Trostani and voice would be targets. Ill give you a hint its more than just their mana costs. let me see if i can find it again and i will post
On a side note, i can admit when i am wrong. no one is attacking me. just so used to those 'counterfeiting threads'.
I don't like going about this as "guilty until proven innocent".
Keep in mind any speculation SCG does is from a much better position than anyone else could come from. Even if trostani does not go up, they can still re-sell for the price they paid because they have enormous market reach. Meaning, he can take a not used on the verge standard card, speculate heavily into it, and even if he is wrong he is out far less than a regular speculator.
He's not selling into buylist prices, he's selling into SCG prices, so it's not quite so bad. Stores in MTG just have a competitive edge and should be the ones speccing if you look at this from a pure economic point. Channel Fireball, SCG, other big stores stand to gain more of a percentage of any spec, from a safer position.
NOW, if there is insider knowledge of upcoming card releases, that's completely different, but finding that out is nearly impossible and would look exactly the same as a simple shot in the dark speculation.
From what I gather in this thread, the general opinion is that no matter how much evidence is shown to the contrary, these card shops do not tamper with the market value of cards for their own personal gain. Very well, the horse is dead and I wont keep beating it. :thumbsdown::thumbsdown::thumbsdown:
Not one bit of evidence has been shown that they are "tampering."
We see them buying cards which are most likely to be sold to their customers for a profit.
My leap of logic is much smaller and more realistic than yours. The burden of proof is on you if you (collectively) want to call someone out for being corrupt.
Remember kids; Because of its status in the magic community, Star City Games is considered a member of MTGS and any criticisms levied towards the site or its staff have been met in the past with moderator action.
This is completely untrue and is blatant baiting. Infraction issued for troll/flame baiting-Xen
There is *nothing* wrong with SCG buying copies of a card because they have or expect enough demand that they feel they need the stock. They're a store, and have the freedom to buy whatever they think they need for their customers. If they were trying to create artificial shortages, it wouldn't be with fringe Standard cards.
Seriously, people.
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I am only the messenger, passing on what i have discovered.
All this talk of speculators, price gauging, Collecters, Counterfeiters, The reserve list, has brought up the believe that certain companies like SCJ may be buying up all copies of a card based on inside information that has not been publicly leaked yet. I want the following thing to be made clear:
I AM NOT MAKING AN ALLEGATION of any kind of illegal activity.
read the information yourself and make up your own mind. But first, a picture, becaue i heard those are worth like 1000 words and will shorten my post considerably
This is a screenshot apparently showing a member of a card shop buying out all copies below a certain price of "Trostani, Selesnya's Voice" this action was taken before the rest of us were able to see the new G/W god, which apparently makes all creature tokens indestructible. I see another motive as well. can you? There is another card not seeing as much standard play as it is in other more powerful formats. Voice of Resurgence can you imagine how the demand for both of these cards will go up in the following events? I fail to see how (if this is true) it is any different than manipulating the stock market.
Mimeoplasm, reanimator
Phelddagrif, superfriend/hugs
Edric, counter-target-player
Child of alara, Gods/Lands-Control
Titania, Timmy-combo
-Tiny Leaders-
Geist <under construction>
-Standard-
Esper Control
Yesterday people started to buy up stock on SCG and in order to provide their customers with the card they want they went out and bought them. Their buylist wasn't filling the inventory fast enough to keep up with the demand. Now, hopefully they will be able to give their customers the cards they want - albeit at a higher price. But a higher price is fair since that the demand went up without the supply changing.
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
The G/W God has not been spoiled yet.
that is a reasonable explaination and would be one scenario, but not what i am speculating at.
What if one were to buy all the supply because they knew the demand would increase when EVERYONE ELSE saw the new god.
what if that person also would see tremendous increased value in none of their stock cards if it now was demanded also by standard players
yes, i agree buying up stock to meet demand is one thing, but have you ever seen someone get off a notion thief + windfall combo??
thats what happens when someone buys up stock before the demand hits, then holds out on prices because they have all the cards on hand
Mimeoplasm, reanimator
Phelddagrif, superfriend/hugs
Edric, counter-target-player
Child of alara, Gods/Lands-Control
Titania, Timmy-combo
-Tiny Leaders-
Geist <under construction>
-Standard-
Esper Control
I haven't seen it either, but if you are a speculator it's pretty clear that any card in Standard that will give you 4 Devotion is going to be looked at.
Regardless of what it turns out to do, I'm sure there are a ton of people all over the country who know about the cards before the public (I've know about cards before 99% of you guys because of the Rumor Mill... it's just part of the job), but how people act on that is another matter. Does SCG know something you don't? Maybe. Does an person who can buy from SCG know something you don't? 100% yes.
You are speculating in a way that fuels the distrust and paranoia that makes honest discussions really hard though. "Hey, I got these torches and pitchforks here at your castle door... let's all have a little chat."
I have no idea what you are talking about with Notion Thief and Windfall, but those are not horded cards. There is nobody out there smart enough to make enough money to corner those markets and yet dumb enough to try to do that. Multi-billionaires don't see business opportunities on cardboard signs and call the number to make a lot of money at home selling insurance. Am I missing something?
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
I have seen it. more to the point, though. you havent. If i can find it again i will post pics for you guys. but this grinds my gears a little bit. im going back to mtgo for a few hours. you can discredit me all you want but ask yourself this.
what reason would i have to lie about this?
Mimeoplasm, reanimator
Phelddagrif, superfriend/hugs
Edric, counter-target-player
Child of alara, Gods/Lands-Control
Titania, Timmy-combo
-Tiny Leaders-
Geist <under construction>
-Standard-
Esper Control
Yeah, no accusations. It's just not relevant. Regardless of what the creature does, there are only a handful of creatures in Standard with 4 mana symbols in their mana cost.
-I picked up 8 copies of Rubblebelt Raiders 6 months before Xenagos was spoiled And that hasn't turned out to be a good investment.
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
The whole idea sounds great on the surface, buy everyone out and then mark up the cards. The problem is eventually, there would be an incorrect guess, and the hoarder would end up taking a major bath on the deal. Do it a couple of times, and you're closing your otherwise healthy business.
As the poster above me says, he was just shoring up his stock. Happens all of the time, look at the various online stores, when they sell out of a box or card, they buy it on Ebay and then increase the price to keep their margin.
I can say this with confidence, because I've shipped sealed product to one or two stores when they won my auctions.
i was under the impression that 200-300 copies usually meant "going deep" at these speculation sites. This is far more than shoring up stock, i would bet that he bought closer to 2-3 hundred total either from other sources or in the intervening time period.
I was completely under the impression that they spoiled the GW god, my bad. If you had seen it you would have understood why Trostani and voice would be targets. Ill give you a hint its more than just their mana costs. let me see if i can find it again and i will post
On a side note, i can admit when i am wrong. no one is attacking me. just so used to those 'counterfeiting threads'.
Mimeoplasm, reanimator
Phelddagrif, superfriend/hugs
Edric, counter-target-player
Child of alara, Gods/Lands-Control
Titania, Timmy-combo
-Tiny Leaders-
Geist <under construction>
-Standard-
Esper Control
If you had people posting "Yeah he bought 3700 from me" and "he bought 450 from me" etc. then it might be a different story.
I bet SCG will send their hired muscle to place at the first big tournament post BNG launch and make a bunch of articles how "No one expected Trostani to be the new card to beat!", all while conveniently having 99 in stock.
I think because of this, there will always be doubt. The only way we will know for sure is if a representative of Starcity Games comes out and says, "Yeah, we totally bought out all of the fetchlands and jacked up the prices to $50 per fetch."
I have actually read this from a couple of different places. I do believe this is what happened at Pro Tour Theros with Master of Waves.
I'm sitting on about 200 of them & no Nightveil Specters. God, what an idiot I've been...
https://twitch.tv/annorax10 (classic retro speedruns & occasional MTGO/MTGA screwaround streams)
https://twitch.tv/SwiftorCasino (yes, my team and I run live dealer games for the baldman using his channel points as chips)
Ben Bleiweiss has not made his motives a secret about card purchases by SCG. If you'll read his posts on THIS forum he's explained why and when SCG has bought stock of cards from other vendors or has dramatically increased their price on a particular single.
Secondly, and quite likely, people anticipating the release of the G/W god were likely speculating themselves on trostani being the best option for maximum efficiency towards getting the g/w god activated. Oftentimes SCG will get bought out of a card before the rest of the market does (because SCG has such a large customer base due to having some of the best customer service and availability of cards out there.) If they got bought out, or were already very low in stock, it makes perfect sense for them to, in anticipation of increased demand, go out and purchase copies of the card to shore up their stock to make sure they had plenty for their customers. SCG being the largest of the online magic stores, means they sell through and thus need to keep stocked a lot more of potentially hot cards.
Heck, when I owned/ran the magic singles stock for a local shop, I would sell out of a card and have to go online to purchase more myself and buy out a few shops here and there to do so, its just the nature of the business, in that regard SCG was just like me, except 100x the size :p.
If SCG did buy up 200-300 of them, then sure, I could see where people would be a bit O.o .... at that. However, unless there is other sourcing to show that they were solely responsible for the drop in supply on tcgplayer or the like, then all we have for now, is them buying some amount up to restock their online store due to increased demand from their customers and a real likelihood that such demand would continue for the time being due to the eventual preview/release of the G/W god, et all.
Oftentimes when a bunch of a card get bought up from somewhere, whether its due to a speculator, or a big online store restocking themselves, other players/speculators may follow suit if they fear that the price is about to shoot up on a card. That's simply the nature of the playerbase and secondary market for magic sometimes. But there has to be real and potential demand for a card for such to take place. For all we know, SCG may have bought up 50, or perhaps even 100 (25 playsets can sell out quite quickly from a store like SCG with the huge customer base they have.) And then the rest were bought by speculators/other players who were considering purchasing them but had been holding off, perhaps until the G/W god was previewed, or otherwise, and once stock started to decline and the cheaper stock started to get bought up, they jumped in and grabbed theirs as well.
Just my thoughts on the subject at least.
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
Keep in mind any speculation SCG does is from a much better position than anyone else could come from. Even if trostani does not go up, they can still re-sell for the price they paid because they have enormous market reach. Meaning, he can take a not used on the verge standard card, speculate heavily into it, and even if he is wrong he is out far less than a regular speculator.
He's not selling into buylist prices, he's selling into SCG prices, so it's not quite so bad. Stores in MTG just have a competitive edge and should be the ones speccing if you look at this from a pure economic point. Channel Fireball, SCG, other big stores stand to gain more of a percentage of any spec, from a safer position.
NOW, if there is insider knowledge of upcoming card releases, that's completely different, but finding that out is nearly impossible and would look exactly the same as a simple shot in the dark speculation.
Mimeoplasm, reanimator
Phelddagrif, superfriend/hugs
Edric, counter-target-player
Child of alara, Gods/Lands-Control
Titania, Timmy-combo
-Tiny Leaders-
Geist <under construction>
-Standard-
Esper Control
We see them buying cards which are most likely to be sold to their customers for a profit.
My leap of logic is much smaller and more realistic than yours. The burden of proof is on you if you (collectively) want to call someone out for being corrupt.
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
This is completely untrue and is blatant baiting. Infraction issued for troll/flame baiting-Xen
Seriously, people.