Holy crap, you aren't kidding, card (scapeshift) just shot up to $50 for NM copies O.o... Cheapest copies of NM on tcgplayer are up to $55 now, and on ebay there are 3 copies left for about $42 shipped each, and then a playset from Singapore for $160, after that it jumps to $50+ per card, will be interesting to see what it looks like in the morning. All these recent spikes are certainly getting me to accelerate my digging out and listing of some of these older cards.
Seeing Eye of Ugin spike again is pretty crazy, looks like its up to about $35 each now on the low end of NM, with urborg jumping up to around $17 now NM. And looks like Kiki-Jiki is just about up to $20 now on the low end of NM.
I have a feeling such spikes have likely just begun as the ripple effect of the two modern bannings (splinter twin, and summer bloom) continues to work its way through the format and deck/card demand.
Modern is becoming pricier and pricier by the second.
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Modern is becoming pricier and pricier by the second.
Wow, Voice is $40!
Thought Knot Seer is pre-ordering for $14 right now, way up from the initial price of $4. Is this modern hype and standard hype together? Is this sustainable for a rare?
I'm wondering this as well, as someone who realizes that I need this for my BW Processors.
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I have a feeling such spikes have likely just begun as the ripple effect of the two modern bannings (splinter twin, and summer bloom) continues to work its way through the format and deck/card demand.
I think it's much more than just that. These buyouts have been rapidly increasing in frequency because more players are losing faith in Wizards' ability to reprint cards for Modern like they promised to do. So that means there is much more panic buying for fear of missing the boat on anything that could have value. The MM printings in retrospect have been laughable in terms of injecting supply. Wizards seriously underestimated just how huge the demand would be for Magic because the game keeps growing like crazy.
I think the problem is that the buyouts just work, to the point where it's an easy way to make 20% if you are willing to put in the time to resell afterwards.
Unfortunately I don't think people will stop buying at the inflated prices so this will continue for a long time.
I think the problem is that the buyouts just work, to the point where it's an easy way to make 20% if you are willing to put in the time to resell afterwards.
Unfortunately I don't think people will stop buying at the inflated prices so this will continue for a long time.
The loss of faith in Wizards' ability to reprint cards is why people are buying cards at inflated prices. The mentality is basically, "****, this card isn't going to be reprinted at all in Standard because of *insert reason here* and if it's in the next MM it will have no supply at all to satisfy the demand. Better buy this card while it's at $50 before it spikes to $80." Unfortunately that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the worry of cards spiking in price causes them to spike in the end.
I honestly believe at some point in the future the loss of faith is going to reach a critical mass and trigger the equivalent of a bank run in Magic, where virtually every card is bought out in a mass panic. It will make these current buyouts look like child's play.
The RoE common is a quarter. I love Magic for oddities like this.
That sort of thing is mostly that most people and even shops often skip bothering to list commons unless they are worth enough to bother. Plus they tend to avoid opening duel decks and selling the singles unlike they would do for a normal magic set, and most shops aren't looking to buy .25 commons to re-sell for any particular reason, so yeah, low supply basically just took a couple people to grab some and the cheap supply went poof and now those ones are $2 each temporarily
Don't know if it belongs here because I have no idea whether it's played here (or anywhere else for that matter, maybe commander as a griefer card) but Mindslicer got bought out on tcgplayer. MKM is still full of them (at dime to dollar worth) as well as ebay. Seems very random.
Any ideas?
Looks like ebay got bought out too, only a few single copies left at about $4-$5 shipped each, all the playsets gone. I noticed one of the listings included Eldrazi in the title of the listing, so perhaps one of the new modern eldrazi decks have something to do with it? Otherwise no idea.
Wall of Omens is clearly spiking right now. For example: MCM has only five german copies left (2 of them are foils). In which decks are WoO played? And where could be a possible end of the spike? Is this card still easy and cheap to get in the US?
Looks like TCGplayer is 100% sold out of non-foil NM copies, and while ebay seems to have a decent supply left, playsets are around $20 shipped for NM copies now, and single NM copies are around $4-$5 now. I think someone mentioned something about wall of omens before whether in this thread or elsewhere so that might explain more why it spiked, but I cant speak for why specifically at the moment.
After Bloom and Twin, people are moving to predict the next big decks. People seem to believe Affinity, Tron, and maybe even Infect. I bet those Inkmoth Nexus, Blinkmoth Nexus and Ugin are going to spike soon.
I think the problem is that the buyouts just work, to the point where it's an easy way to make 20% if you are willing to put in the time to resell afterwards.
Unfortunately I don't think people will stop buying at the inflated prices so this will continue for a long time.
The loss of faith in Wizards' ability to reprint cards is why people are buying cards at inflated prices. The mentality is basically, "****, this card isn't going to be reprinted at all in Standard because of *insert reason here* and if it's in the next MM it will have no supply at all to satisfy the demand. Better buy this card while it's at $50 before it spikes to $80." Unfortunately that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the worry of cards spiking in price causes them to spike in the end.
I honestly believe at some point in the future the loss of faith is going to reach a critical mass and trigger the equivalent of a bank run in Magic, where virtually every card is bought out in a mass panic. It will make these current buyouts look like child's play.
QFT. I brought this up with some friends and they all shot me down, insistent that basic economic theory would reign it in - that the market won't buy $100 blood moons and force the prices to drop to whatever level the market deems acceptable. The problem is it doesn't work that way and we know it. If blood moon is $100, people will buy it because they don't want to wait for it to hit 150, and then since everyone EXPECTS it to hit 150 it will, and everyone will buy because if they don't get it NOW it'll be 200. The fear that it'll always go higher means there is no point where people will just say "this is no longer reasonable".
And in all honesty, it's not the run or the spiking prices that has me worried: it's when the market stagnates, demand shrinks and people start seeing prices drop. the flurry of everyone trying to sell off everything while it still has value, the market systematically implodes on itself as whoever's stuck holding the bag watches $10,000 worth of cards become $20 worth.
Magic is on the verge of a price bubble that it simply will not be able to recover from. It's not the fall that'll kill things though - it's the crash landing.
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Anyone who didn't jump on VoR when it hit $15 was, with apologies, an idiot. Edit: Don't make me say this again in a few months, folks.
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Thought Knot Seer is pre-ordering for $14 right now, way up from the initial price of $4. Is this modern hype and standard hype together? Is this sustainable for a rare?
Yeah, that one has B/W Eldrazi processor written all over it; it curves too perfectly between Wasteland Strangler & Blight Herder. I don't think there's any way it will stay north of $15 for too long but it will not come down below $5 again either until rotation or unless it just completely fails to perform, which I don't really see happening.. However, a lot of folks are going to try and jam these new eldrazi into everything (treating them like artifacts, basically) only to learn their mana bases take a noticeable hit. They'll cool off but it's gonna take some time. With Eye of Ugin & Eldrazi Temple making such bonkers decks, it might be a slow process. I mean, who doesn't enjoy playing that Eternal-level acceleration in Modern format? Besides being really good to play, cheating on mana also really FUN.
I think the problem is that the buyouts just work, to the point where it's an easy way to make 20% if you are willing to put in the time to resell afterwards.
Unfortunately I don't think people will stop buying at the inflated prices so this will continue for a long time.
The loss of faith in Wizards' ability to reprint cards is why people are buying cards at inflated prices. The mentality is basically, "****, this card isn't going to be reprinted at all in Standard because of *insert reason here* and if it's in the next MM it will have no supply at all to satisfy the demand. Better buy this card while it's at $50 before it spikes to $80." Unfortunately that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the worry of cards spiking in price causes them to spike in the end.
I honestly believe at some point in the future the loss of faith is going to reach a critical mass and trigger the equivalent of a bank run in Magic, where virtually every card is bought out in a mass panic. It will make these current buyouts look like child's play.
QFT. I brought this up with some friends and they all shot me down, insistent that basic economic theory would reign it in - that the market won't buy $100 blood moons and force the prices to drop to whatever level the market deems acceptable. The problem is it doesn't work that way and we know it. If blood moon is $100, people will buy it because they don't want to wait for it to hit 150, and then since everyone EXPECTS it to hit 150 it will, and everyone will buy because if they don't get it NOW it'll be 200. The fear that it'll always go higher means there is no point where people will just say "this is no longer reasonable".
And in all honesty, it's not the run or the spiking prices that has me worried: it's when the market stagnates, demand shrinks and people start seeing prices drop. the flurry of everyone trying to sell off everything while it still has value, the market systematically implodes on itself as whoever's stuck holding the bag watches $10,000 worth of cards become $20 worth.
Magic is on the verge of a price bubble that it simply will not be able to recover from. It's not the fall that'll kill things though - it's the crash landing.
While price spikes and price declines do happen with magic singles fairly regularly. As does the ebb and flow of prices depending upon the time of year and whether we are in modern season or entering it or not .... I wouldn't go so far as you have suggested in that cards will just spiral out of control upward above and beyond a reasonable supply/demand pricing system. One thing I would ask though, if things truly were getting out of control... How many cards in the modern format are currently over $100? How many are even over $50 for that matter? If we start getting to a point where there are a ton of cards over $50 and more than a few in the format above $100, then sure, I could certainly understand that being a significant cause of concern. I will also agree that panic buying does happen as cards that had been stable or only showing a very slow rise suddenly begin to spike and people who were waiting on the sidelines decide to jump in and grab there's before the price spikes any higher. However the counterbalance to that, is that as prices rise, there inevitably are more people and other entities that will then choose to offload their cards that they had been keeping in their collections that they feel the new price is worth selling them at to get money or other cards they are looking for. This helps to keep the price from simply spiraling out of control. In the meantime sets like modern masters helps to add supply to the mix and bring down the card prices (even if its just for a year or two) to help keep things from getting too out of hand. Wizards doesn't want to crash the magic economy by overprinting such sets, though I wouldn't be surprised to see the next one printed even larger than the one before, which was printed in much larger amounts than the 2013 one (which only makes sense as the popularity of the game continues to grow.)
The only time we would see a collapse on the sort of scale you are suggesting is if the game itself was suddenly on the verge of dying, or if wizards suddenly ceased all support for and ceased producing the game, then card prices would crash down to 10% or less of their current value. Until that time comes, prices will ebb and flow, but significant crashes in individual prices will really only happen from bannings or from decks falling out of favor as time goes on, or of course from reprintings (the largest price declines coming from cards printed in standard-legal sets and thus in significant enough quantities to end up causing the price to crash down to earth again, even if they may inevitably rise back up in the future as demand vs supply warrants it.
And in all honesty, it's not the run or the spiking prices that has me worried: it's when the market stagnates, demand shrinks and people start seeing prices drop. the flurry of everyone trying to sell off everything while it still has value, the market systematically implodes on itself as whoever's stuck holding the bag watches $10,000 worth of cards become $20 worth.
Magic is on the verge of a price bubble that it simply will not be able to recover from. It's not the fall that'll kill things though - it's the crash landing.
Geez. I'm as cynical as the next guy, but predicting the end of days because of an expensive format seems a bit much to me.
And in all honesty, it's not the run or the spiking prices that has me worried: it's when the market stagnates, demand shrinks and people start seeing prices drop. the flurry of everyone trying to sell off everything while it still has value, the market systematically implodes on itself as whoever's stuck holding the bag watches $10,000 worth of cards become $20 worth.
Magic is on the verge of a price bubble that it simply will not be able to recover from. It's not the fall that'll kill things though - it's the crash landing.
Geez. I'm as cynical as the next guy, but predicting the end of days because of an expensive format seems a bit much to me.
I don't know how old you are or how long you have been playing Magic. But if you are old enough to remember the crash of Baseball cards in the early 90's and the reason why the prices crashed, you will see similarities with what is going on with the secondary market of Magic right now. The only thing that is keeping things afloat is that people actually have a use for Magic cards (to play with) as compared with Sports trading cards.
And in all honesty, it's not the run or the spiking prices that has me worried: it's when the market stagnates, demand shrinks and people start seeing prices drop. the flurry of everyone trying to sell off everything while it still has value, the market systematically implodes on itself as whoever's stuck holding the bag watches $10,000 worth of cards become $20 worth.
Magic is on the verge of a price bubble that it simply will not be able to recover from. It's not the fall that'll kill things though - it's the crash landing.
Geez. I'm as cynical as the next guy, but predicting the end of days because of an expensive format seems a bit much to me.
I don't know how old you are or how long you have been playing Magic. But if you are old enough to remember the crash of Baseball cards in the early 90's and the reason why the prices crashed, you will see similarities with what is going on with the secondary market of Magic right now. The only thing that is keeping things afloat is that people actually have a use for Magic cards (to play with) as compared with Sports trading cards.
That's the thing, collectible card games are significantly different than sports cards in that regard. While both types of cards have the collector portion, the difference is, for sports cards, the collector portion is 100%, for magic cards is a much smaller percentage, say 20% pure collector, whereas the rest have the cards and collections to build decks and actually use to play with. The one similarity though is that for both, people were perceiving it as an investment and so everyone was flooding money into it thinking that for the long-term the value would only ever go up, when in fact for sports cards, the cards were printed at such an insane rate during the late 80's and early 90's that the market simply couldn't absorb that much supply and people eventually realized how out of whack things were and the market collapsed down to the current much more minimal market you see now. For magic cards while you have the collectors and you have people who buy for investment purposes, many are aware that reprints, ebb and flow of deck/card popularity and such can happen which can potentially sour their investment. The difference is, wizards isn't printing the heck out of each new set compared to actual real demand which would be much more likely to lead to such an eventual crash. Wizards knows better than to overprint a product that might not sell as well, or even ones that do sell well, so as not to cause the same sort of market flood issues that existed with, say fallen empires or similar sets that were overprinted.
The other difference is that the playerbase for magic the gathering has continued to grow at a torrid pace. And these are actual people primarily buying the cards to build decks and play with (for the most part). Having a use for the cards is the largest and most important difference that makes comparing the two largely impossible in a lot of ways, but also in addition to the other points made, doesn't really make me worry as much about an eventual crash unless wizards starts shifting away from how they have been handling things.
I would pick up your copies of Fulminator Mage while they are still somewhat cheap if you need them. I think we will see a spike very soon after the ban announcement. Fulminators have went up around $2 since then.
And in all honesty, it's not the run or the spiking prices that has me worried: it's when the market stagnates, demand shrinks and people start seeing prices drop. the flurry of everyone trying to sell off everything while it still has value, the market systematically implodes on itself as whoever's stuck holding the bag watches $10,000 worth of cards become $20 worth.
Magic is on the verge of a price bubble that it simply will not be able to recover from. It's not the fall that'll kill things though - it's the crash landing.
Geez. I'm as cynical as the next guy, but predicting the end of days because of an expensive format seems a bit much to me.
I don't know how old you are or how long you have been playing Magic. But if you are old enough to remember the crash of Baseball cards in the early 90's and the reason why the prices crashed, you will see similarities with what is going on with the secondary market of Magic right now. The only thing that is keeping things afloat is that people actually have a use for Magic cards (to play with) as compared with Sports trading cards.
While I was only a teenager when that happened, I do recall enough to feel like this is a completely different beast at hand here.
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Holy crap, you aren't kidding, card (scapeshift) just shot up to $50 for NM copies O.o... Cheapest copies of NM on tcgplayer are up to $55 now, and on ebay there are 3 copies left for about $42 shipped each, and then a playset from Singapore for $160, after that it jumps to $50+ per card, will be interesting to see what it looks like in the morning. All these recent spikes are certainly getting me to accelerate my digging out and listing of some of these older cards.
Seeing Eye of Ugin spike again is pretty crazy, looks like its up to about $35 each now on the low end of NM, with urborg jumping up to around $17 now NM. And looks like Kiki-Jiki is just about up to $20 now on the low end of NM.
I have a feeling such spikes have likely just begun as the ripple effect of the two modern bannings (splinter twin, and summer bloom) continues to work its way through the format and deck/card demand.
Modern is becoming pricier and pricier by the second.
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Wow, Voice is $40!
Thought Knot Seer is pre-ordering for $14 right now, way up from the initial price of $4. Is this modern hype and standard hype together? Is this sustainable for a rare?
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Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)I think it's much more than just that. These buyouts have been rapidly increasing in frequency because more players are losing faith in Wizards' ability to reprint cards for Modern like they promised to do. So that means there is much more panic buying for fear of missing the boat on anything that could have value. The MM printings in retrospect have been laughable in terms of injecting supply. Wizards seriously underestimated just how huge the demand would be for Magic because the game keeps growing like crazy.
Unfortunately I don't think people will stop buying at the inflated prices so this will continue for a long time.
The loss of faith in Wizards' ability to reprint cards is why people are buying cards at inflated prices. The mentality is basically, "****, this card isn't going to be reprinted at all in Standard because of *insert reason here* and if it's in the next MM it will have no supply at all to satisfy the demand. Better buy this card while it's at $50 before it spikes to $80." Unfortunately that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the worry of cards spiking in price causes them to spike in the end.
I honestly believe at some point in the future the loss of faith is going to reach a critical mass and trigger the equivalent of a bank run in Magic, where virtually every card is bought out in a mass panic. It will make these current buyouts look like child's play.
The RoE common is a quarter. I love Magic for oddities like this.
That sort of thing is mostly that most people and even shops often skip bothering to list commons unless they are worth enough to bother. Plus they tend to avoid opening duel decks and selling the singles unlike they would do for a normal magic set, and most shops aren't looking to buy .25 commons to re-sell for any particular reason, so yeah, low supply basically just took a couple people to grab some and the cheap supply went poof and now those ones are $2 each temporarily
Looks like ebay got bought out too, only a few single copies left at about $4-$5 shipped each, all the playsets gone. I noticed one of the listings included Eldrazi in the title of the listing, so perhaps one of the new modern eldrazi decks have something to do with it? Otherwise no idea.
Looks like TCGplayer is 100% sold out of non-foil NM copies, and while ebay seems to have a decent supply left, playsets are around $20 shipped for NM copies now, and single NM copies are around $4-$5 now. I think someone mentioned something about wall of omens before whether in this thread or elsewhere so that might explain more why it spiked, but I cant speak for why specifically at the moment.
QFT. I brought this up with some friends and they all shot me down, insistent that basic economic theory would reign it in - that the market won't buy $100 blood moons and force the prices to drop to whatever level the market deems acceptable. The problem is it doesn't work that way and we know it. If blood moon is $100, people will buy it because they don't want to wait for it to hit 150, and then since everyone EXPECTS it to hit 150 it will, and everyone will buy because if they don't get it NOW it'll be 200. The fear that it'll always go higher means there is no point where people will just say "this is no longer reasonable".
And in all honesty, it's not the run or the spiking prices that has me worried: it's when the market stagnates, demand shrinks and people start seeing prices drop. the flurry of everyone trying to sell off everything while it still has value, the market systematically implodes on itself as whoever's stuck holding the bag watches $10,000 worth of cards become $20 worth.
Magic is on the verge of a price bubble that it simply will not be able to recover from. It's not the fall that'll kill things though - it's the crash landing.
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Anyone who didn't jump on VoR when it hit $15 was, with apologies, an idiot. Edit: Don't make me say this again in a few months, folks.
Yeah, that one has B/W Eldrazi processor written all over it; it curves too perfectly between Wasteland Strangler & Blight Herder. I don't think there's any way it will stay north of $15 for too long but it will not come down below $5 again either until rotation or unless it just completely fails to perform, which I don't really see happening.. However, a lot of folks are going to try and jam these new eldrazi into everything (treating them like artifacts, basically) only to learn their mana bases take a noticeable hit. They'll cool off but it's gonna take some time. With Eye of Ugin & Eldrazi Temple making such bonkers decks, it might be a slow process. I mean, who doesn't enjoy playing that Eternal-level acceleration in Modern format? Besides being really good to play, cheating on mana also really FUN.
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While price spikes and price declines do happen with magic singles fairly regularly. As does the ebb and flow of prices depending upon the time of year and whether we are in modern season or entering it or not .... I wouldn't go so far as you have suggested in that cards will just spiral out of control upward above and beyond a reasonable supply/demand pricing system. One thing I would ask though, if things truly were getting out of control... How many cards in the modern format are currently over $100? How many are even over $50 for that matter? If we start getting to a point where there are a ton of cards over $50 and more than a few in the format above $100, then sure, I could certainly understand that being a significant cause of concern. I will also agree that panic buying does happen as cards that had been stable or only showing a very slow rise suddenly begin to spike and people who were waiting on the sidelines decide to jump in and grab there's before the price spikes any higher. However the counterbalance to that, is that as prices rise, there inevitably are more people and other entities that will then choose to offload their cards that they had been keeping in their collections that they feel the new price is worth selling them at to get money or other cards they are looking for. This helps to keep the price from simply spiraling out of control. In the meantime sets like modern masters helps to add supply to the mix and bring down the card prices (even if its just for a year or two) to help keep things from getting too out of hand. Wizards doesn't want to crash the magic economy by overprinting such sets, though I wouldn't be surprised to see the next one printed even larger than the one before, which was printed in much larger amounts than the 2013 one (which only makes sense as the popularity of the game continues to grow.)
The only time we would see a collapse on the sort of scale you are suggesting is if the game itself was suddenly on the verge of dying, or if wizards suddenly ceased all support for and ceased producing the game, then card prices would crash down to 10% or less of their current value. Until that time comes, prices will ebb and flow, but significant crashes in individual prices will really only happen from bannings or from decks falling out of favor as time goes on, or of course from reprintings (the largest price declines coming from cards printed in standard-legal sets and thus in significant enough quantities to end up causing the price to crash down to earth again, even if they may inevitably rise back up in the future as demand vs supply warrants it.
Just some things to consider.
Geez. I'm as cynical as the next guy, but predicting the end of days because of an expensive format seems a bit much to me.
I don't know how old you are or how long you have been playing Magic. But if you are old enough to remember the crash of Baseball cards in the early 90's and the reason why the prices crashed, you will see similarities with what is going on with the secondary market of Magic right now. The only thing that is keeping things afloat is that people actually have a use for Magic cards (to play with) as compared with Sports trading cards.
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That's the thing, collectible card games are significantly different than sports cards in that regard. While both types of cards have the collector portion, the difference is, for sports cards, the collector portion is 100%, for magic cards is a much smaller percentage, say 20% pure collector, whereas the rest have the cards and collections to build decks and actually use to play with. The one similarity though is that for both, people were perceiving it as an investment and so everyone was flooding money into it thinking that for the long-term the value would only ever go up, when in fact for sports cards, the cards were printed at such an insane rate during the late 80's and early 90's that the market simply couldn't absorb that much supply and people eventually realized how out of whack things were and the market collapsed down to the current much more minimal market you see now. For magic cards while you have the collectors and you have people who buy for investment purposes, many are aware that reprints, ebb and flow of deck/card popularity and such can happen which can potentially sour their investment. The difference is, wizards isn't printing the heck out of each new set compared to actual real demand which would be much more likely to lead to such an eventual crash. Wizards knows better than to overprint a product that might not sell as well, or even ones that do sell well, so as not to cause the same sort of market flood issues that existed with, say fallen empires or similar sets that were overprinted.
The other difference is that the playerbase for magic the gathering has continued to grow at a torrid pace. And these are actual people primarily buying the cards to build decks and play with (for the most part). Having a use for the cards is the largest and most important difference that makes comparing the two largely impossible in a lot of ways, but also in addition to the other points made, doesn't really make me worry as much about an eventual crash unless wizards starts shifting away from how they have been handling things.
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While I was only a teenager when that happened, I do recall enough to feel like this is a completely different beast at hand here.