so, Fatal Push is now $9. Is this the most expensive standard uncommon we've ever had?
The reasoning for the crazy expensive uncommon (relatively speaking) is that the set is terrible from a value standpoint, and the masterpieces just aren't enough to prop it up.
For example, looking at the lower end of tcgplayer prices for aether revolt you have the following overall average valuations:
Mythics: Overall average value: $2.75 (excluding the planewalker deck cards)
Rares: Overall average value: $1
Uncommon set value (which basically may as well be fatal push value, lol...): $10/uncommon/common set (set of 4x each on ebay for $40/4 = $10/set)
Regular Foils: Likelihood of per box value ... : About $3 (Unless you pull one of the top say 5 cards out of the entire set, your foils wont be worth much)
Which gives us an overall average (pre-masterpiece) box value of ..... $65 (Ouch)
Then add to that, that the masterpieces while decent aren't super fantastic in aether revolt, and given the pull odds are about I think 1 in 4 boxes? And you have an additional $10 per box on average for those, bringing it up to only $75 per box on the overall average. This is less than shops pay for the boxes from distributors even.
Anyway, the point of the above was basically that you have a perfect storm of a universally popular uncommon from a generally poor value set, and you end up with a $9ish (or eventually higher) uncommon, Its like Path in standard at its time, except its the modern era and with path you got 2.7 per box on average versus only 1.8 per box on average for these.
As far as it being the highest, its certainly the highest in a while that I can recall, that doesn't mean there haven't been higher in the past though during the cards standard run. The fact that its $9 now, and the set is still going to be in standard for what? Over a year still? Definitely doesn't seem good, hard to say what the card could realistically go to though, and of course if some of the rest of the cards in the set start seeing more play the values could start to increase a bit and the set could start being opened more.
Set Name: Archenemy: Nicol Bolas
Release Date: June 16, 2017
Twitter Hashtag: #MTGARCHENEMY
Languages Available: English
MSRP: $59.99 *Applies to U.S. Only
Excited to see the reprints. So this will retail for $50? Is it going to be one of those super limited print run cardshop-exclusive things like Commander's Arsenal or will you be able to pick it up at, say, Walmart? I'd really like to get this set if I could pick it up for a reasonable price. Don't wanna pay like $200 for it on the secondary market.
Given that it appears to be in a box set like format unlike the old archenemy decks, and according to the wizards site the msrp is going to be $59.99, I have a feeling it may be a card shop only item. How limited it will be, I have no idea though. I doubt it will be as limited as commander arsenal, that was something super special. This is more like archenemy v 2.0. Just in a complete box set versus the old individual deck setup. I imagine it will be somewhat limited though simply for the included commander arsenal looking ratcheting life counter. Whether it will be enough to drive the price up beyond $59.99 its hard to say. A lot depends on the cards in the box set, though at $59.99 I think the price will be low enough to entice buyers, and people who were looking for the commander arsenal life counter anyway will likely use the opportunity to get one on the comparably cheap given everything else it comes with. If the decks turn out to have some decent stuff in them beyond the planeswalkers that could also influence how hard they may be to come by and how quickly they may sell, etc etc. Comes out next month though. I know I'll be picking up a set, just because I have the old archenemy stuff, so figure I may as well get this one too, plus it just looks like a good solid box set for the price anyway. Hopefully its not too limited so people who want it can get it, but I still suspect it will be a shop only item, so we'll just have to wait and see.
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
How much time passed between the purchase and the order cancellation? I'd raise hell to make them honor the price they had it set at.
"Oh, you sold out of these cards immediately after I bought them for a low price? No worries, you can keep my order in the system and send me the cards when you get more copies in stock~"
The trouble with that though, is that its also not really realistic to request that of a store (assuming they didn't just immediately list more at a higher price, which would then suggest that they cancelled the orders to resell at a higher price, rather than it being a program issue with crystal commerce or the like. Put yourself in the shoes of the seller. You use the only decent software available for synchronizing sales across multiple platforms, and when a situation like this occurs, the software gets overwhelmed and isn't able to keep up with multiple orders placed in multiple places at the exact same second, and as a result multiple copies of the same card, the same multiple copies listed on each platform, are sold to several different people, leading to the oversell and inevitable cancellation.
Now then, you as a buyer, purchased the card for $3. The card is now selling for $20+, meaning the online store is unlikely to be getting any new ones in for less than say $12, so they are looking at an automatic significant loss by trying to fulfill those unintentional oversells that were the fault of the software that a LOT of smaller online stores use. Should online stores try to mitigate this sort of issue by as I have suggested in the past keeping separate inventory for selling on different platforms at the like? Sure, but at the same time, in the grand scheme of magic in general, how often do cards get unbanned and cause a frenzy like this, versus the entire rest of the time when everything runs just fine and the software never has an issue? As with most things, there is some potential risk for using such software in the case of a sudden massive spike in demand, but the other 99.99% of the time, the software does its job and allows the seller the visibility of selling on multiple platforms with the same inventory.
What you could do as a buyer though, would be to potentially find out what the seller might be able to bring in the cards at post-spike, and see if they would be willing to fulfill the orders (at cost) under such a scenario, to where the buyer would be able to get the cards for a decent amount less than the current post-spike price, but still unfortunately more than the purchase amount. That sort of request is something that could potentially be agreed to, otherwise the store is likely to just stick with the "if we had the cards at the time of your purchase we would sell them to you, but at the end of the day, we had 5 (or however many) orders for the same 3 cards and still only have those 3 cards to be able to sell, and can only fulfill one of those orders." "When/if we get more back in stock it will be at a much higher purchase price and we wont be able to sell them for the same $3 as they were listed for before." I'm not saying they said or would for any certainty say any of that, I'm just using that as an example of a realistic response to such unfortunate situations.
That said, I have heard of some stores going above and beyond and taking the loss to fulfill the orders, but such really is an unusual sort of thing, and while such stores should be commended, the other stores shouldn't necessarily be bashed for a generally unusual circumstance that happens very rarely, nor should they be lumped into the crowd of people that are intentionally cancelling orders to relist the same inventory at a higher price.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, as I mentioned before, when a card spikes, its important to hedge your bets. As such I usually recommend buying from at least 4 different sources to try to maximize the chance that you get at least the amount you are looking for, and then can always re-sell/trade any extras that aren't cancelled. Its unfortunate that such would have to be done, but until perfect synchronization sales software can be developed and available to be used by the masses, well, one just sort of has to find ways around the issues to still get what you are after.
Given all the inconsistencies, and given that the asking price is WAY below what the card normally goes for these days (looking at ebay, it looks like closer to $3,000+ for one in such supposedly good condition), I would say its all but assured that the card is fake. I would tell the seller that you are interested, but that you would need the assurance for such a large purchase as a black lotus, that the card is in fact the real deal, and his best bet would be to send it in to BGS or PSA to be graded and put in one of their slabs accordingly and then once he gets it back, with the authenticity confirmed, you would be more than happy to purchase it, and that you would even offer a higher amount than the asking price once he has done so for the extra time and cost to do so.
Took 15 mins to go from $3 to $8, and another 15 mins to go from $8 to $13. Managed to snag 2 from StrikeZoneOnline for $3 apiece.
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
I'm sure it doesn't make you feel any better, but from what I understand talking to some friends who run LGS's and sell through Crystal Commerce (which SZO does iirc), they have very poor inventory coordination mechanisms which causes issues like this to happen with some degree of regularity when things spike. The orders end up canceled automatically later on when Crystal Commerce reconciles the inventory. I know a few owners who get frustrated because they get hate mail from people accusing them of canceling because of the spike.
Not saying no owners do that and not saying it's definitely a Crystal Commerce issue in this case, but knowing that made me more forgiving about this kind of thing.
That's a possibility, although what led me to believe my order was valid was that I was buying through Amazon, SZO had 3 in stock, so I added all 3 and by the time I went to check out it corrected to say that the seller only had 2 in stock. Since it WAS able to correct 3 copies to 2 but not 3 copies to 0, that leads me to believe the store cancelled rather than a true inventory issue (although I will admit I could be wrong).
Ahhh, they sell on amazon too eh? Well, then I can guarantee it was a legitimate case of overselling. As I mentioned in my response a little earlier, a lot of online stores will put the same inventory on a variety of platforms (amazon/crystal commerce through their own website/ebay/etc), using software that will update the inventories on those platforms as their inventory sells. However most of these inventory update softwares have lag time before the inventory will update. In the case of the amazon purchase, Its likely that they had the same 3 listed on amazon/ebay/their own website, and inevitably the instant the unban was announced, people came in on 2 or quite possibly all 3 platforms at the same time and bought up the cards. What you saw was likely someone on amazon buying 1 of the card, leaving 2 being shown on amazon (since amazon's inventory software adjusts the inventory immediately versus some of the other programs), however its also likely that someone else on either ebay or their own website had already purchased the other 2 by that point and the cross-platform inventory adjustment software simply hadn't had the time yet to update the inventory on amazon or otherwise to reflect that. I've known a lot of 100% honest an legitimate online stores that have run into the very same issue over the years, and it honestly does come down to an issue of cross-platform selling, or poor inventory update software for whatever platform they are selling on as people are all trying to buy the same batch of cards from the same seller literally all at the exact same moment (sometimes even the exact same second). 99.99% of the time, none of this is ever an issue, because most card sales don't see such huge demand spikes like that to where you would need to have perfect to the millisecond updating inventory information across platform or otherwise. However when unbannings happen, of course, you suddenly see the mother of all demand spikes and you have 1,000+ people all vying for the same inventory from the platform or platforms of their choice all at the same time.
Part of the reason why when I ran a shop I kept 100% separate inventory between the brick and mortar shop and my ebay sales, and only did online sales through ebay, so no issues like that could ever happen. For larger online businesses though, the cross-platform exposure is necessary for them, so I don't blame them for taking advantage of it when it is available, just as I try to be understanding in instances when unusual circumstances like an unbanning can cause an issue with unintentional overselling, which is why I learned to purchase from a variety of sources on unbanned cards to make sure I got at least as much as I was needing just in case.
Now if strikezone immediately listed more at a much higher price, then that would obviously be an example of potential abuse, however, showing zero inventory for a while after until perhaps they get more in stock (if they get more in stock) and then listing those at a higher price (after having to pay considerably more to be able to get them in stock) isn't unreasonable at all. I try to assume that most buyers and sellers will be honest when it comes down to it. Will there be some bad apples that will let greed take over and intentionally cancel orders or otherwise? Certainly, but I like to think such sellers are in the minority, especially when it comes to more established, well known online stores.
In the end, that doesn't do you or anyone else who's order was cancelled any good, but at least it goes to show what may have happened, why it happened, and that, inevitably, it was likely or at least possibly not an intentional act of cancelling an order to list for more after the spike.
Took 15 mins to go from $3 to $8, and another 15 mins to go from $8 to $13. Managed to snag 2 from StrikeZoneOnline for $3 apiece.
EDIT: well, I HAD purchased 2 copies at $3 from StrikeZoneOnline, before they cancelled on my as "out of stock". Last time I buy from them. Pissed me off too, I didn't buy these to flip, but to use. Also, at the time I could have bought from other sellers at $6 but didn't, now that ship has sailed.
I'm sure it doesn't make you feel any better, but from what I understand talking to some friends who run LGS's and sell through Crystal Commerce (which SZO does iirc), they have very poor inventory coordination mechanisms which causes issues like this to happen with some degree of regularity when things spike. The orders end up canceled automatically later on when Crystal Commerce reconciles the inventory. I know a few owners who get frustrated because they get hate mail from people accusing them of canceling because of the spike.
Not saying no owners do that and not saying it's definitely a Crystal Commerce issue in this case, but knowing that made me more forgiving about this kind of thing.
Part of the issue for a lot of sellers as well, is that a lot of stores also sell in multiple places. Whether from their own website using something like crystal commerce to process the sales, or on ebay, or possibly even other places. When a buyout happens that fast, often times whatever inventory management software they use cannot update the inventory quickly enough, and you end up seeing over-sales. Honestly I've always felt that if a store is selling in multiple locations, then each location should have separate inventory precisely for situations such as this. And, secondarily, if crystal commerce is incapable of handling processing and updating inventory as quick as sales can be made, then they either need to update their software to deal with this issue, or sellers should start using another service that doesn't have this rather large glitch attached to it, that leads to such a large amount of negative customer sentiment when things such as this occur.
When it comes to sudden price spikes, it has always seemed that well over 50% of sales get cancelled. Some are places that just flat out refuse to sell a now $20 card, for $1 or $5 or whatever, and are willing to take the PR hit to get that extra money, and some places simply have poor inventory management setups that lead to over-sales as such mentioned above. My general sentiment is that if you are going to buy a card that is spiking, you should always buy from multiple sources and hope for the best later on. Worst case, if you get all you ordered, you can always re-sell or trade off the extras, and with any luck at least one of the multiple sources for the purchases will pan out.
For those that had their orders cancelled, unfortunately there is little anyone can do about it, other than leave negative feedback accordingly on whichever platforms the cards were purchased on, go onto the market street area of these forums and in the appropriate thread in the store discussion area add your experience to the others in similar instances that have occurred from cancelled orders so people will know in the future who to avoid purchasing from when a price spike occurs.
But, as before, its important to be somewhat understanding that not all cancellations are meant to be malicious in nature. Some are not 100% the fault of the sellers/stores, little consolation unfortunately for those buyers who missed out, but still something to keep in mind.
What do you do day to day other than attending to customers? In my LGS, they play games when they are free. Sounds like a dream job to me.
One thing to remember about being a business owner, is that you get out of your business what you put into it. The more effort and time you put in to building your business, building your inventory, sales, and customer base, the bigger your business will grow, and the more potential for eventual profits to be gained there will be (after fixed expenses like rent/utilities/employee costs/etc etc). Many people who open up a shop do it because they think it will be easy, and because they view it as a way to be able to casually run a business while having a place for them to be able to enjoy gaming at. The realities are often very different from that though. If you want to be successful you had better be prepared to work hard, work potentially long hours, and only sit down to play games if its for the benefit of the business or if you actually are all caught up on your work. That's the thing though, a properly run gaming store, is typically never "caught up" on work to do. There is always something to be done.
That's not to say that you cant take a day off every now and then, especially if you have employees that can give you that time, but really a properly run gaming store should always have something for their employees to do.
I owned and ran the magic singles and non-standard sealed product for a local game store for 6 years, in addition to significant online sales besides that. The first couple of years as the business was growing, there was certainly times where the work was caught up on, but as business grew, that sort of free time came and went. The last 3 years I was at the shop, I was working constantly, between the shop and my online sales I was working 15 hours a day, 7 days a week 52 weeks a year (no vacations, no time off, save for holidays like thanksgiving and Christmas), and even then I still wasn't able to 100% keep up with everything because of how busy we had gotten.
As for what work an owner or employee of a gaming shop should be doing or would be doing, that could include some or all of the following:
Magic the gathering or other collectible card games: Sorting cards, pricing cards, inventorying cards, constantly re-adjusting prices on cards as the market adjusts, dealing with people wanting to sell the shop cards, dealing with people wanting to trade cards into the shop, dealing with people wanting to straight up buy cards, helping customers determine what they want to purchase or how to improve their decks (whether for the optimal version of the deck, or on a budget as needed), or just generally answering questions. Keeping knowledgeable about the rules and any new keywords/abilities/interactions that could come up if someone has a rules question, Keeping up on new cards, and potential interactions with old cards that could cause them to suddenly spike in value. Restocking inventory as needed. And that's just at the shop. Add to that online sales, where you have to deal with inventory there, pictures, listing things, answering questions, packging up and shipping things daily, adjusting prices, etc etc.
Needless to say, you likely get the idea. There should ALWAYS be something to do, at a shop that is actually interested in making money and providing the sorts of inventory, prices, and customer service that local gamers would be looking for.
Did someone buy out Devoted Druid? I cant find many atm.
Certainly looks that way. Lowest price I could find was $6 now ($24 playset). Ebay has all new listings, so that pretty much tells the story right there.
Could Fluctuator see a spike soon, with anticipation for Amonkhet printing cards that trigger upon cycle? Archfiend of Ifnir doesn't really break Fluctuator, but if it's part of a cycle with a red version... we could potentially see more casual interest in cycling decks.
Looks like someone or multiple someones just bought out fluctuator from just about everywhere (all ebay buy it nows gone and all copies on tcgplayer gone) all bought up today, likely after the announcement of cycling returning. I suppose we will see where the card settles depending upon what ends up actually being in the set as far as cycling goes.
The benefit to the spoiler effect in elections is that it shows the majority party that they need to do better if they want to be able to draw in those voters the next election, thus causing that majority party to have to take those concerns of that third party into consideration else they risk the same thing happening again by those who are voting based on their ideology and are unhappy with the majority party that they are being ignored. One could argue that such voters do more harm than good to their cause by allowing the opposite majority party to potentially win as a result, however at the same time I still strongly believe that the spoiler effect does in fact give more power overall to those third party candidates and their message as even though they may never get a significant percentage of the overall vote, it can force, especially in such a significantly evenly split voter base (as exists now) the major parties to pay attention or risk losing out in the end. This can be as simple as running better candidates in general, or it can be as significant as having to change their platform in some ways in order to give those third parties what they want in order to get them to bring in their votes to the major party as they work to defeat the other majority party. It forces the majority parties to compromise with the other groups on their side of the ideological voting line.
Those who support the "beat the other major party at all costs" viewpoint of course are going to be opposed to the ability for those third parties to be a spoiler as from the majority parties viewpoint, it should be the third party that should have to compromise in order to accomplish the greater good of defeating the other major party. It is complicated to be sure, and there are obviously benefits to both the current system and the proposed (or similar) systems that essentially remove the spoiler effect.
I wonder if a compromise that would encompass both the existing system within the US as well as the proposed system could potentially work. Basically a system that would give the option of the ranked voting system, while at the same time not removing the ability to only vote for one candidate but not have that vote lose its power as the minority party candidates are removed one by one to eventually get to the final two majority parties. The goal with that not being to try to get one final candidate above 50% of all votes cast, but rather ending up with the final two candidates and then looking at the majority of votes accordingly. So the people who want their vote to go to that third party candidate only and the votes effect not to be lost as the candidates get whittled down under a pseudo-ranked system will have the option of doing just that. But at the same time giving those people who aren't as concerned with the spoiler effect or pure ideology can vote for their 2nd or 3rd ranked candidates if they so choose to allow those votes to go where they want in the end. Just throwing out some thoughts on the subject anyway.
How in the hell is her price rebounding so fast? MM17 has only been out a week and it's already going back up. She managed to get down to the $60's for a bit but as of this posting she's already back up to $80. At this rate she'll overtake Goyf What's going on?
Looking at ebay, I see a slight trend back up, but that's normal after the initial flood gets bought up and supply begins to stabilize a bit more. I saw prices bottom at around $68 for NM copies (outside of a couple of lowball listings), and now I see (other than another lowball listing) the bottom seems around $75, which is about a 10% increase from where it was, which can certainly be how popular mythics from a modern masters set can trend after the initial decent price drop.
We'll have to wait and see how things shape out in the long-term but for now a stabilization between $75 and $80 seems about right.
One thing people often fail to take into consideration with modern masters sets, is that in general while the rares may certainly drop by 50% (or more) except for the most popular tournament staples which will drop closer to 33% before stabilizing, mythics from the sets tend to drop closer to 25% for the tournament staples before stabilizing. The more demand for the cards from those willing to spend the money on them there is, the more likely you will see significant pent up demand stepping in to pick up the additional supply of cards as the price drops that will effectively put a floor under the price of the card by keeping supply from exceeding demand below that level.
As a bit of a showing of the different markets between the EU and the US, I just checked on ebay and tcgplayer and the lowest singles price for Damnation is still $21 shipped. Checking the link, it looks like on MKM that there is 1 copy available for 12 euros, 3 copies available at 13 euros and then the rest are all 14 euros or higher. I suspect the likely bottom given we are just about a week out from the release so the initial frenzy of box openings should begin to slow a bit, might be around 10 euros depending upon how desperate people are to sell. Any lower than that and I would be legitimately surprised.
The whole point of the ranked-choice voting system is to eliminate voting out of fear. Which, to be honest, drives a substantial amount of the vote. A lot of people voted for Trump not because they liked Trump, but simply because they feared Clinton, and vice versa.
This game theory incentivizes the major parties to run subpar candidates instead of good ones, knowing that people are going to hold their nose and vote for the bad candidate.
That's something that has been bothering me for a while with a lot of elections, not all, but quite a lot of them. It really shouldn't come down to the lesser of two evils as it were when it comes to political voting. As you said though, the current system doesn't really hold the major parties feet to the fire as it were enough to get them to put out better candidates. I wish it did, and I wish I could see elections on a more regular basis that were more about the best of the best, rather than the less worse of the worst. I hope this last election will get both major parties to realize something needs to change, and I hope that the third party candidates can step it up given what happened and start giving the major parties even more reason to do better if they want to be able to win in the end (with the current system we have anyway). And who knows perhaps this last election could be the beginning of a push that will start getting those third party candidates some more coverage and attention and we might actually see some Perot-like numbers again for a third party candidate to really get things going.
I do think it would be interesting to find out how people would have voted if they voted only based on ideology and who they honestly felt the best candidate would be for the political position being voted on, I agree with the OP and others in that area that inevitably with that in mind I think you would certainly see the numbers for the third party candidates rise as a result of that, but how much it actually would rise is the question, and I'm just not sure we've seen the right person come along for that in the third party ranks to be able to give the other two parties a run for their money even in such a situation.
I'm not deliberately ignoring evidence to the contrary, but most people will cite the numbers argument against me and I don't know how to respond. Or they say you are just deliberately tuning out the negatives of life and not being realistic.
Ok, so, you're on the real life advice thread. You asked if relationships are all horrible. The answer is no. Every reply to this thread has said no.
Yet you keep arguing against them. So are you here for advice, or something else?
My minds works differently. Like I said, I see number of views and look at the channel (which says it's based in philosophy) and think they are right.
They say that being in a relationship is choosing a familiar kind of unhappiness over a new and uncertain one (in other words being single). I know that relationships aren't like they are in the media. There isn't a "one" or a happily ever after. But I also don't think they are as bad as they say, based on other people I know.
But for some reason I just think they know better than me and my evaluations don't mattter because I don't "get it".
As a commentary to the videos themselves on youtube, honestly you should be looking more at the amount of thumbs up to the video rather than the number of views towards whether people are actually agreeing with what the videos are talking about.
In the first link provided, it has 222,000 views, but only 6,100 upvotes.
In the second link provided, it has 383,000 views, with 10,000 upvotes.
And in the third link provided, it has 301,000 views and 14,000 upvotes.
Total of approximately 900,000 views but only 25,000 upvotes.
When I see something like that, from an objective viewpoint of overall support for the videos and what they represent, 900,000 views isn't anything to sneeze at, though in the grand scheme of youtube, an average of 300,000 views per video while decent, isn't really anything all that spectacular, I imagine quite a few of those views are simply out of curiosity, rather than showing any kind of real support. The upvotes however are, presumably showing actual support, but those are only a tiny fraction of the amount of views, as mentioned above. Less than 3% of the views actually gave it an upvote, not exactly a rousing show of support.
The reasoning for the crazy expensive uncommon (relatively speaking) is that the set is terrible from a value standpoint, and the masterpieces just aren't enough to prop it up.
For example, looking at the lower end of tcgplayer prices for aether revolt you have the following overall average valuations:
Mythics: Overall average value: $2.75 (excluding the planewalker deck cards)
Rares: Overall average value: $1
Uncommon set value (which basically may as well be fatal push value, lol...): $10/uncommon/common set (set of 4x each on ebay for $40/4 = $10/set)
Regular Foils: Likelihood of per box value ... : About $3 (Unless you pull one of the top say 5 cards out of the entire set, your foils wont be worth much)
Which gives us an overall average (pre-masterpiece) box value of ..... $65 (Ouch)
Then add to that, that the masterpieces while decent aren't super fantastic in aether revolt, and given the pull odds are about I think 1 in 4 boxes? And you have an additional $10 per box on average for those, bringing it up to only $75 per box on the overall average. This is less than shops pay for the boxes from distributors even.
Anyway, the point of the above was basically that you have a perfect storm of a universally popular uncommon from a generally poor value set, and you end up with a $9ish (or eventually higher) uncommon, Its like Path in standard at its time, except its the modern era and with path you got 2.7 per box on average versus only 1.8 per box on average for these.
As far as it being the highest, its certainly the highest in a while that I can recall, that doesn't mean there haven't been higher in the past though during the cards standard run. The fact that its $9 now, and the set is still going to be in standard for what? Over a year still? Definitely doesn't seem good, hard to say what the card could realistically go to though, and of course if some of the rest of the cards in the set start seeing more play the values could start to increase a bit and the set could start being opened more.
Wizards link: http://magic.wizards.com/en/products/archenemy-nicol-bolas
Set Name: Archenemy: Nicol Bolas
Release Date: June 16, 2017
Twitter Hashtag: #MTGARCHENEMY
Languages Available: English
MSRP: $59.99 *Applies to U.S. Only
Given that it appears to be in a box set like format unlike the old archenemy decks, and according to the wizards site the msrp is going to be $59.99, I have a feeling it may be a card shop only item. How limited it will be, I have no idea though. I doubt it will be as limited as commander arsenal, that was something super special. This is more like archenemy v 2.0. Just in a complete box set versus the old individual deck setup. I imagine it will be somewhat limited though simply for the included commander arsenal looking ratcheting life counter. Whether it will be enough to drive the price up beyond $59.99 its hard to say. A lot depends on the cards in the box set, though at $59.99 I think the price will be low enough to entice buyers, and people who were looking for the commander arsenal life counter anyway will likely use the opportunity to get one on the comparably cheap given everything else it comes with. If the decks turn out to have some decent stuff in them beyond the planeswalkers that could also influence how hard they may be to come by and how quickly they may sell, etc etc. Comes out next month though. I know I'll be picking up a set, just because I have the old archenemy stuff, so figure I may as well get this one too, plus it just looks like a good solid box set for the price anyway. Hopefully its not too limited so people who want it can get it, but I still suspect it will be a shop only item, so we'll just have to wait and see.
The trouble with that though, is that its also not really realistic to request that of a store (assuming they didn't just immediately list more at a higher price, which would then suggest that they cancelled the orders to resell at a higher price, rather than it being a program issue with crystal commerce or the like. Put yourself in the shoes of the seller. You use the only decent software available for synchronizing sales across multiple platforms, and when a situation like this occurs, the software gets overwhelmed and isn't able to keep up with multiple orders placed in multiple places at the exact same second, and as a result multiple copies of the same card, the same multiple copies listed on each platform, are sold to several different people, leading to the oversell and inevitable cancellation.
Now then, you as a buyer, purchased the card for $3. The card is now selling for $20+, meaning the online store is unlikely to be getting any new ones in for less than say $12, so they are looking at an automatic significant loss by trying to fulfill those unintentional oversells that were the fault of the software that a LOT of smaller online stores use. Should online stores try to mitigate this sort of issue by as I have suggested in the past keeping separate inventory for selling on different platforms at the like? Sure, but at the same time, in the grand scheme of magic in general, how often do cards get unbanned and cause a frenzy like this, versus the entire rest of the time when everything runs just fine and the software never has an issue? As with most things, there is some potential risk for using such software in the case of a sudden massive spike in demand, but the other 99.99% of the time, the software does its job and allows the seller the visibility of selling on multiple platforms with the same inventory.
What you could do as a buyer though, would be to potentially find out what the seller might be able to bring in the cards at post-spike, and see if they would be willing to fulfill the orders (at cost) under such a scenario, to where the buyer would be able to get the cards for a decent amount less than the current post-spike price, but still unfortunately more than the purchase amount. That sort of request is something that could potentially be agreed to, otherwise the store is likely to just stick with the "if we had the cards at the time of your purchase we would sell them to you, but at the end of the day, we had 5 (or however many) orders for the same 3 cards and still only have those 3 cards to be able to sell, and can only fulfill one of those orders." "When/if we get more back in stock it will be at a much higher purchase price and we wont be able to sell them for the same $3 as they were listed for before." I'm not saying they said or would for any certainty say any of that, I'm just using that as an example of a realistic response to such unfortunate situations.
That said, I have heard of some stores going above and beyond and taking the loss to fulfill the orders, but such really is an unusual sort of thing, and while such stores should be commended, the other stores shouldn't necessarily be bashed for a generally unusual circumstance that happens very rarely, nor should they be lumped into the crowd of people that are intentionally cancelling orders to relist the same inventory at a higher price.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, as I mentioned before, when a card spikes, its important to hedge your bets. As such I usually recommend buying from at least 4 different sources to try to maximize the chance that you get at least the amount you are looking for, and then can always re-sell/trade any extras that aren't cancelled. Its unfortunate that such would have to be done, but until perfect synchronization sales software can be developed and available to be used by the masses, well, one just sort of has to find ways around the issues to still get what you are after.
Ahhh, they sell on amazon too eh? Well, then I can guarantee it was a legitimate case of overselling. As I mentioned in my response a little earlier, a lot of online stores will put the same inventory on a variety of platforms (amazon/crystal commerce through their own website/ebay/etc), using software that will update the inventories on those platforms as their inventory sells. However most of these inventory update softwares have lag time before the inventory will update. In the case of the amazon purchase, Its likely that they had the same 3 listed on amazon/ebay/their own website, and inevitably the instant the unban was announced, people came in on 2 or quite possibly all 3 platforms at the same time and bought up the cards. What you saw was likely someone on amazon buying 1 of the card, leaving 2 being shown on amazon (since amazon's inventory software adjusts the inventory immediately versus some of the other programs), however its also likely that someone else on either ebay or their own website had already purchased the other 2 by that point and the cross-platform inventory adjustment software simply hadn't had the time yet to update the inventory on amazon or otherwise to reflect that. I've known a lot of 100% honest an legitimate online stores that have run into the very same issue over the years, and it honestly does come down to an issue of cross-platform selling, or poor inventory update software for whatever platform they are selling on as people are all trying to buy the same batch of cards from the same seller literally all at the exact same moment (sometimes even the exact same second). 99.99% of the time, none of this is ever an issue, because most card sales don't see such huge demand spikes like that to where you would need to have perfect to the millisecond updating inventory information across platform or otherwise. However when unbannings happen, of course, you suddenly see the mother of all demand spikes and you have 1,000+ people all vying for the same inventory from the platform or platforms of their choice all at the same time.
Part of the reason why when I ran a shop I kept 100% separate inventory between the brick and mortar shop and my ebay sales, and only did online sales through ebay, so no issues like that could ever happen. For larger online businesses though, the cross-platform exposure is necessary for them, so I don't blame them for taking advantage of it when it is available, just as I try to be understanding in instances when unusual circumstances like an unbanning can cause an issue with unintentional overselling, which is why I learned to purchase from a variety of sources on unbanned cards to make sure I got at least as much as I was needing just in case.
Now if strikezone immediately listed more at a much higher price, then that would obviously be an example of potential abuse, however, showing zero inventory for a while after until perhaps they get more in stock (if they get more in stock) and then listing those at a higher price (after having to pay considerably more to be able to get them in stock) isn't unreasonable at all. I try to assume that most buyers and sellers will be honest when it comes down to it. Will there be some bad apples that will let greed take over and intentionally cancel orders or otherwise? Certainly, but I like to think such sellers are in the minority, especially when it comes to more established, well known online stores.
In the end, that doesn't do you or anyone else who's order was cancelled any good, but at least it goes to show what may have happened, why it happened, and that, inevitably, it was likely or at least possibly not an intentional act of cancelling an order to list for more after the spike.
Part of the issue for a lot of sellers as well, is that a lot of stores also sell in multiple places. Whether from their own website using something like crystal commerce to process the sales, or on ebay, or possibly even other places. When a buyout happens that fast, often times whatever inventory management software they use cannot update the inventory quickly enough, and you end up seeing over-sales. Honestly I've always felt that if a store is selling in multiple locations, then each location should have separate inventory precisely for situations such as this. And, secondarily, if crystal commerce is incapable of handling processing and updating inventory as quick as sales can be made, then they either need to update their software to deal with this issue, or sellers should start using another service that doesn't have this rather large glitch attached to it, that leads to such a large amount of negative customer sentiment when things such as this occur.
When it comes to sudden price spikes, it has always seemed that well over 50% of sales get cancelled. Some are places that just flat out refuse to sell a now $20 card, for $1 or $5 or whatever, and are willing to take the PR hit to get that extra money, and some places simply have poor inventory management setups that lead to over-sales as such mentioned above. My general sentiment is that if you are going to buy a card that is spiking, you should always buy from multiple sources and hope for the best later on. Worst case, if you get all you ordered, you can always re-sell or trade off the extras, and with any luck at least one of the multiple sources for the purchases will pan out.
For those that had their orders cancelled, unfortunately there is little anyone can do about it, other than leave negative feedback accordingly on whichever platforms the cards were purchased on, go onto the market street area of these forums and in the appropriate thread in the store discussion area add your experience to the others in similar instances that have occurred from cancelled orders so people will know in the future who to avoid purchasing from when a price spike occurs.
But, as before, its important to be somewhat understanding that not all cancellations are meant to be malicious in nature. Some are not 100% the fault of the sellers/stores, little consolation unfortunately for those buyers who missed out, but still something to keep in mind.
One thing to remember about being a business owner, is that you get out of your business what you put into it. The more effort and time you put in to building your business, building your inventory, sales, and customer base, the bigger your business will grow, and the more potential for eventual profits to be gained there will be (after fixed expenses like rent/utilities/employee costs/etc etc). Many people who open up a shop do it because they think it will be easy, and because they view it as a way to be able to casually run a business while having a place for them to be able to enjoy gaming at. The realities are often very different from that though. If you want to be successful you had better be prepared to work hard, work potentially long hours, and only sit down to play games if its for the benefit of the business or if you actually are all caught up on your work. That's the thing though, a properly run gaming store, is typically never "caught up" on work to do. There is always something to be done.
That's not to say that you cant take a day off every now and then, especially if you have employees that can give you that time, but really a properly run gaming store should always have something for their employees to do.
I owned and ran the magic singles and non-standard sealed product for a local game store for 6 years, in addition to significant online sales besides that. The first couple of years as the business was growing, there was certainly times where the work was caught up on, but as business grew, that sort of free time came and went. The last 3 years I was at the shop, I was working constantly, between the shop and my online sales I was working 15 hours a day, 7 days a week 52 weeks a year (no vacations, no time off, save for holidays like thanksgiving and Christmas), and even then I still wasn't able to 100% keep up with everything because of how busy we had gotten.
As for what work an owner or employee of a gaming shop should be doing or would be doing, that could include some or all of the following:
Magic the gathering or other collectible card games: Sorting cards, pricing cards, inventorying cards, constantly re-adjusting prices on cards as the market adjusts, dealing with people wanting to sell the shop cards, dealing with people wanting to trade cards into the shop, dealing with people wanting to straight up buy cards, helping customers determine what they want to purchase or how to improve their decks (whether for the optimal version of the deck, or on a budget as needed), or just generally answering questions. Keeping knowledgeable about the rules and any new keywords/abilities/interactions that could come up if someone has a rules question, Keeping up on new cards, and potential interactions with old cards that could cause them to suddenly spike in value. Restocking inventory as needed. And that's just at the shop. Add to that online sales, where you have to deal with inventory there, pictures, listing things, answering questions, packging up and shipping things daily, adjusting prices, etc etc.
Needless to say, you likely get the idea. There should ALWAYS be something to do, at a shop that is actually interested in making money and providing the sorts of inventory, prices, and customer service that local gamers would be looking for.
Certainly looks that way. Lowest price I could find was $6 now ($24 playset). Ebay has all new listings, so that pretty much tells the story right there.
Looks like someone or multiple someones just bought out fluctuator from just about everywhere (all ebay buy it nows gone and all copies on tcgplayer gone) all bought up today, likely after the announcement of cycling returning. I suppose we will see where the card settles depending upon what ends up actually being in the set as far as cycling goes.
Those who support the "beat the other major party at all costs" viewpoint of course are going to be opposed to the ability for those third parties to be a spoiler as from the majority parties viewpoint, it should be the third party that should have to compromise in order to accomplish the greater good of defeating the other major party. It is complicated to be sure, and there are obviously benefits to both the current system and the proposed (or similar) systems that essentially remove the spoiler effect.
I wonder if a compromise that would encompass both the existing system within the US as well as the proposed system could potentially work. Basically a system that would give the option of the ranked voting system, while at the same time not removing the ability to only vote for one candidate but not have that vote lose its power as the minority party candidates are removed one by one to eventually get to the final two majority parties. The goal with that not being to try to get one final candidate above 50% of all votes cast, but rather ending up with the final two candidates and then looking at the majority of votes accordingly. So the people who want their vote to go to that third party candidate only and the votes effect not to be lost as the candidates get whittled down under a pseudo-ranked system will have the option of doing just that. But at the same time giving those people who aren't as concerned with the spoiler effect or pure ideology can vote for their 2nd or 3rd ranked candidates if they so choose to allow those votes to go where they want in the end. Just throwing out some thoughts on the subject anyway.
Looking at ebay, I see a slight trend back up, but that's normal after the initial flood gets bought up and supply begins to stabilize a bit more. I saw prices bottom at around $68 for NM copies (outside of a couple of lowball listings), and now I see (other than another lowball listing) the bottom seems around $75, which is about a 10% increase from where it was, which can certainly be how popular mythics from a modern masters set can trend after the initial decent price drop.
We'll have to wait and see how things shape out in the long-term but for now a stabilization between $75 and $80 seems about right.
One thing people often fail to take into consideration with modern masters sets, is that in general while the rares may certainly drop by 50% (or more) except for the most popular tournament staples which will drop closer to 33% before stabilizing, mythics from the sets tend to drop closer to 25% for the tournament staples before stabilizing. The more demand for the cards from those willing to spend the money on them there is, the more likely you will see significant pent up demand stepping in to pick up the additional supply of cards as the price drops that will effectively put a floor under the price of the card by keeping supply from exceeding demand below that level.
As a bit of a showing of the different markets between the EU and the US, I just checked on ebay and tcgplayer and the lowest singles price for Damnation is still $21 shipped. Checking the link, it looks like on MKM that there is 1 copy available for 12 euros, 3 copies available at 13 euros and then the rest are all 14 euros or higher. I suspect the likely bottom given we are just about a week out from the release so the initial frenzy of box openings should begin to slow a bit, might be around 10 euros depending upon how desperate people are to sell. Any lower than that and I would be legitimately surprised.
That's something that has been bothering me for a while with a lot of elections, not all, but quite a lot of them. It really shouldn't come down to the lesser of two evils as it were when it comes to political voting. As you said though, the current system doesn't really hold the major parties feet to the fire as it were enough to get them to put out better candidates. I wish it did, and I wish I could see elections on a more regular basis that were more about the best of the best, rather than the less worse of the worst. I hope this last election will get both major parties to realize something needs to change, and I hope that the third party candidates can step it up given what happened and start giving the major parties even more reason to do better if they want to be able to win in the end (with the current system we have anyway). And who knows perhaps this last election could be the beginning of a push that will start getting those third party candidates some more coverage and attention and we might actually see some Perot-like numbers again for a third party candidate to really get things going.
I do think it would be interesting to find out how people would have voted if they voted only based on ideology and who they honestly felt the best candidate would be for the political position being voted on, I agree with the OP and others in that area that inevitably with that in mind I think you would certainly see the numbers for the third party candidates rise as a result of that, but how much it actually would rise is the question, and I'm just not sure we've seen the right person come along for that in the third party ranks to be able to give the other two parties a run for their money even in such a situation.
As a commentary to the videos themselves on youtube, honestly you should be looking more at the amount of thumbs up to the video rather than the number of views towards whether people are actually agreeing with what the videos are talking about.
In the first link provided, it has 222,000 views, but only 6,100 upvotes.
In the second link provided, it has 383,000 views, with 10,000 upvotes.
And in the third link provided, it has 301,000 views and 14,000 upvotes.
Total of approximately 900,000 views but only 25,000 upvotes.
When I see something like that, from an objective viewpoint of overall support for the videos and what they represent, 900,000 views isn't anything to sneeze at, though in the grand scheme of youtube, an average of 300,000 views per video while decent, isn't really anything all that spectacular, I imagine quite a few of those views are simply out of curiosity, rather than showing any kind of real support. The upvotes however are, presumably showing actual support, but those are only a tiny fraction of the amount of views, as mentioned above. Less than 3% of the views actually gave it an upvote, not exactly a rousing show of support.