MTG Salvation

Quote from Varyag »

The tanking of modern prices.

On the right, summer 2016, on the left, today May 7 2017. Total drop in format value from nearly 4000$ to 1200$.

Goldfish data, "fished" out with the Wayback machine.

The data you presented is incomplete. On the date you pulled, the modern staples section contained 236 cards; the current version is only 61. The new list is missing entire decks like Tron, Burn, and Scapeshift/Titan.

IMO, you are fine as long as you don't lie. Selling collections is normally at a discount anyways.

At rummage sales/swap meets, negotiate whatever price you are able, just don't claim something is worth less than it is if they ask. There is no obligation to inform them of value otherwise.

For one-on-one meets, I personally try to give them a good offer based on the collection I see, but you can negotiate whatever price you can (just don't lie).

Those who prey on the new/inexperienced within the community or use false information are sharks.

There are several red flags if you know what to look for. You don't even have to analyze it under a microscope.

1. The words on the front face for the name, type, and artist are too white. They should appear grayish and contain rosettes. Cards were not printed with white words until 4th edition. This is the easiest and most obvious thing to spot.
2. You can see the rosette pattern in the black border of the front face clearly. It should be solid black barring printing errors, which were more common then.
3. The blue mana symbol has an incorrect dot pattern. It should be dithered (dots are in a grid).
4. On the back, the M of TM is much too bold and too sharp. It should be thin and jagged like the one on the left.
5. The text "The Gathering" has the wrong dot pattern, they should be dithered (dots should appear in a grid and blue dots get smaller near the top of the letters like the left picture). Also, there should be red highlighting around the letters.

Some of these could be caused by a print error but it isn't worth the risk IMO. If you want to buy dual lands, get a loupe, buy a couple cheap revised cards in every color, and study them. Review the text placement on dual lands (I have seen one on this site that had the text placement of Unlimited for name/type/artist but the rules text of Revised, very subtle but also just wrong).

Yay statistics (don't know how to post a table, column names a bit off, tab delimited):

Source: Gatherer Extractor
Regex: \b[A-z]{2,}\b
Searches "ability" column for all words with 2 or more characters (excludes mana symbol text) but does include reminder text (could be a significant factor). I also excluded basic lands.

Overall, Future Sight and Time Spiral are the most wordy sets by a good margin, possibly due to lots of reminder text.
Ice Age has the most words in the set by almost 900 or about 10% more than Time Spiral but also has 82 (about 30%) more cards. Shadows over Innistrad has the 5th most words of any set.
Small sets tend to be more wordy than large sets. Core sets are generally the least wordy.

I'm not sure if Eternal Masters will be a good thing with the reserved list still intact. The secondary market acts so quickly with few, if any, repercussions for the speculators. The reserve list is an additional guarantee of profit. Panic buying from players doesn't help, although has some justification.

On that note, Mox Diamond disappeared from TCG player.

I would buy 1 of each. Best of both worlds.

Supplemental set cards can easily be considered "marked" if played in a deck with standard print cards. These products need a unique set symbol, it sucks buying a card and receiving an Intro Pack/Event Deck/Clash Pack version instead.

Quote from Draagnaj »

For an extra $.03-$.04/perfect fit - I would always double sleeve - It really is only an extra $4 to sleeve a 60+15 modern or standard deck. Then again, I like all of my things looking the same.

Agree 100%. I double-sleeve everything with KMC Perfect+Dragon Shield. I'll gladly spend an extra $3-4 to protect a even a "cheap" $100 deck.

Nonbasic lands are always good to own.

As a strictly cash investment, any new or non-reprinted multicolored or utility land which enters untapped is a good investment. You never know when something will become useful/popular. Lands which enter tapped can also be good (manlands, scrylands, tri-color) but will rarely be favored. Fetches will always be in high demand. At worst, multicolor lands maintain their long-term value very well.

Don't buy them as soon as the set drops, give them some time to be opened and distributed (unless they are rare lands for $1 pre-order). 2 months usually.

Take him to FNM so he'll realize he doesn't know as much about the game as he thinks.

Quote from Casual Deck »

Quote from sealteamfive »

Regardless of how counterfeits are played, players playing counterfeits are likely not invested in MtG.
But thats only my train of logical thoughts. For you and I, whether emotionally or financially, we are invested in MtG and buying legit cards is our way of ensuring WotC's business model.

Those players just play MtG casually, even step into FNM and maybe able to earn packs or even worse.. selling counterfeits. With cards costing that much, it will attract all sorts of profiteers.

It's a logical train of thought, but narrow.

I've been playing off and on since Revised. I'd bet that I've "invested" more time and money into the game than the majority of forum posters. And yet, I'm all for reprints, low prices, accessibility, and more people playing the game. Why?

Easy: I'm expecting a different sort of payoff. You believe your "investment" in the game should pay off in dollars and cents: that it should have monetary compensation, and that you should be financially rewarded for your investment. I believe that the payoff for the game is having fun and interesting games.

When someone looks at the prices for a Legacy, Modern, or even Standard deck, and then decides the format is too expensive for them, that cuts into potential fun games. Every player who decides to cash out because they can't keep up with the prices, that's interesting games lost. And every time someone puts "the value of my cards" over "getting more people to play," it just frustrates me. Legacy is a stagnant format because of the RL: there are a finite number of dual lands, and demand can never be satisfied while the RL exists.

Wizards has allowed people with a selfish interest in keeping prices high to dictate what is good for them. Those people have no vested interest in what is good for the game as a whole: they're entirely selfish actors. While that isn't a bad thing in and of itself, it IS a bad thing to allow them to dictate terms of production to the company that actually produces the cards. The RL was a foolish decision, where Wizards surrendered their own agency over their IP to a third party with no vested interest in keeping that IP healthy and growing. It was a bad business decision then and it remains a bad business decision today.

Breaking the RL breaks the trust of a relatively few high-end investors. Keeping it slowly erodes the faith of millions of people who WANT to play with the cards that Wizards has decided to put forever out of their reach. I would suggest that in the long run, that slow erosion of faith in Wizards to do right by the players, that belief that they will screw players over to favor the secondary market, will do more harm than any broken promise ever could.

Modern is in a position to suffer from the worst parts of Legacy and Standard both. The power level of the most utilized cards in Modern edge out so much of the card pool that most decks are the same cards in a given color with different arrangements of colors on a deck by deck basis. That's one of the problems Standard is plagued by is how small of a card pool there is that is of any interest. However, like Legacy, Wizards haven't been willing to step up their game on card availability and give us much needed reprints in limited FTV products that are marked up by asinine amounts past MSRP, or $10 MSRP Masters sets that are mostly chaff. Modern was destined to fall pray to Wizard's lazy, outdated reprint policies. It's been slowly heading this way since it's inception, so the situation with Modern is nothing new.

The colorless mana symbol update is such a benign change that I'm still baffled why anyone thought it was or still is a big deal. MaRo already confirmed that <> as part of mana costs is an OGW thing. All you have to do is look at a BFZ Eldrazi Scion and OGW Eldrazi Scion side-by-side and it explains very plainly the change. It's honestly not even worth mentioning.

Eternal Masters leaks are like any other leak, but the problem is on the "investors" and Wizards' hands both. We need sets like Eternal Masters, but we needed them a long time ago before Wizards let the mtgfinance/investor crowd get such a large foothold in the secondary market. If they had started doing Masters sets years ago, we wouldn't find ourselves watching people buying out entire corners of the market to relist. Wizards' idle hands created a situation where not investing in Magic if you had the means to start is foolish. You could absolutely depend on their stubbornness to not reprint much needed card, and know the value of the cards you invest in would keep rising with minimal losses. Now we have people buying out Reserved List cards and marking them up 50-150% or more in response to Eternal Masters, because if they're going to lose value on reprints like Wasteland and Force of Will, then they're going to make us pay even more for cards that can't be reprinted because of the Reserve List. It's shady, scummy and no one can do a damn thing about it except for Wizards, but they're too afraid of pissing off a small handful of investors and collectors so they won't abolish the Reserved List, and the rest of us that want to play Legacy or Vintage, or want certain cards for Cubes or EDH suffer for it.

As for Core Sets? Core Sets have historically been the worst quality sets each year up until they were discontinued with Origins, and they struggled even after rebranding them as the Core Sets. Even in attempting gimmicks like bringing back one or two simpler mechanics, having devs from the game industry design cards, etc. they never found a happy place that could make Core Sets sell. I've gone to every pre-release since Torment, and every Edition or Core Set has the worst turn out of any set that came out the rest of the year. They usually had dull, slow limited formats and added very little to Standard, with a few exceptions (7th Edition, then Thragtusk, then Mutavault mainly). Really as a community of Magic players, we're not losing much by having one of the four sets in rotation every year not being a Core Set anymore. Standard has has a large issue of becoming extremely stale, so we're making a compromise: Standard rotates more often, so ones like this one that are nearly as expensive as Cawblade Standard don't last near as long; but we have more cards to keep up with and have to hussle to get rid of cards before their value drops like bricks because most Standard cards are still $0.10 rares after they rotate out.

Most of this is Wizards still living in the 90's and a lot of people in positions of authority at Wizards that need to step down and let some new life breath into the company. We're stuck with people like Trick Jarrett getting hired in, making sad PR articles about leaks that the rest of the community are collectively groaning and rolling their eyes at; meanwhile he conveniently neglects to acknowledge how their policies necessitate leaks and create the problems they're bemoaning and we get poorly handled suspensions and cute guilt trips about media previews being ruined. Thanks Wizards - your previews are really what matter to me; not the fact that I have to know if your sets are *****ty or not so I know if I should buy them, because you continuously let the supply stagnate in the face of more and more demand over the years and I can't enjoy all your products if I want to afford to play a constructed format.

For someone with such a low number of feedbacks received on ebay thus far, its important to have the lowest price + shipping so people who, say, search for lowest price + shipping will see yours at the top and you will have the greatest chance of yours selling first. Otherwise, just make sure you have great pictures, a detailed description of the card and you will get attention, its also important to see, because of there being so many auctions available for some cards, that you see what the completed listings for those cards have sold for. Just because the lowest buy it now may be $XX price doesn't mean that the cards will sell at those prices. If you want to sell the cards quickly, especially for a card that has spiked recently, you need to look at those completed listings to get a better idea of what the card has sold for, and then pick a price that works best, though something like a best offer in addition to being the lowest buy it now price will give you an additional chance of getting someone to make an offer on yours, even if you might want to get more, it should at least get you more views. Also the more items you list, the more cross-promotion you can get from your various listings. Anyhow, just a little bit of advice there.

The thread tags look a little unusually large. It might be worth shrinking them slightly in size.

Because investing in land is a good strategy in real life and mtg

NOOO I feel like the only person who HATES double faced cards. Please no more Delver caliber DFCs.

Quote from Elvish Sniper »

As someone who owns a playset of onslaught block fetchlands - damnit. My collection just got a whole lot less valuable/impressive.

As someone who owns all 10 fetches, and a playset of each...


I could wont complain. I'm not complaining. If it drops to 12 bucks, I'll still be happy. People can play modern now. Thats not a bad thing. People can Play even legacy... kinda. Thats not a bad thing. EDH got better. thats not a bad thing.

You didnt lose money. You have the cards, dont need to trade or open for them, and can play it the minute its legal, plus you had it for X years. Big whoop.

I'm happy more people can play.

Quote from _Striker_ »

The main thing which has me questioning the authenticity is a visible diagonal print pattern in the black border. Doesn't show up well on scans, most visible on upper left corner of back. The thickness threw me off too, it's 30% thinner than every other card I have from that time.
I wish I had a better scanner and camera.

Yeah, I can't make out the diagonals you are talking about in the photos...looking under a loupe, magnifying glass, or high res scanned may give you a better idea. Noticable thickness differences are not abnormal in older cards, but you should perform a light test to check (see how much and the pattern of light that shows through the back with a bright light to each card front). Magic cards do grow thicker over their lifetime exposure to humidity...so a card that was opened from a sealed pack several years later or was in tight casing/sleeving for years can be noticeably thinner. This was actually a issue towards the end of Magic's first decade. Players complained because newer cards seemed a bit thinner than their older ones and they thought wotc was moving to cheaper quality stock; but it was found to be due to this issue. Regardless of thickness however, the light tests should look similar.

I don't notice anything that screams fake. The color variations are reasonable for cards of that age (both from varying prints and/or differential sunlight exposure), and the resolution and focus of the photos is too low to see anything meaningful in the side photo or in regards to dithering.