Who goes out of their way to look for MTG proxies and then reports them to WOTC? I don't even see proxies when i do searches for cards. I think you have to specifically search for "proxy". I don't do it, I won't go out of my way to do it, and I certainly won't do it just to report to WOTC. Not after the recent PR fumbles.
That's untrue; you're just not running searches on the cards being counterfeited. I see these auctions regularly without trying. I don't really understand how people enjoy Magic enough to be posting on a website like this yet care nothing whatsoever for its future livelihood. If proxies reign, cards devalue, and consumer confidence in the game dwindles. Product sales decline, and that eventually could lead to the game no longer being produced in paper. I get the animosity toward Wizards' recent missteps, but it has to be really hard to love the game while harboring disdain for the company that makes it.
WotC doesn't care enough to abolish the reserve list and reprint the cards and stop the counterfeits so why should we? All the bragging they did with trying to stop the Asian counterfeiters has done nothing. All WotC is worried about now is selling packs, not the game as a whole.
This is simply not true. Let's suppose WotC abolished the reserve list and reprinted cards, you're saying that that would stop the counterfeiters?
Ok well what do you want to call the abolition of the reserve list? Can we call it modern?
Can we also call the reprintings Modern Masters/ Commander/ Judge FOILS/ FTV/ Core Sets?
People will blame the reserve list for anything I swear.
But here. Finally here and now
we have actual EVIDENCE where if you don't have a reserve list, and if you reprint cards, counterfeits will still continue. We have counterfeits of a number of modern staples which are not protected by the reserve list.
The reserve list has absolutely nothing to do with this issue, and oddly enough in many ways, at this point prevents the effect of counterfeiting.
What do I mean? The reserve list is responsible for the high dollar price of vintage magic.
That means that only collectors will go out of their way to to buy vintage.
Go into your local game shop and try to explain to them all the finers of magic forgery and counterfeiting. People don't care! It's tough to learn, its hard to learn. People have to pixel peep, memorize, scrutinize. Why would they want to learn these things for low value cards. The answer is they don't.
But for a $5000 NM unlimited Lotus, they will learn, they have incentive to learn.
A Chinese counterfeiting can really screw up the profit model of Magic. If the counterfeits are good enough, people won't be able to distinguish the card at a first glance. That will be a huge problem for wizards.
But will it be a huge problem for Vintage? Vintage is filled with extremely experienced people and counterfeits. The incentive to learn is driven by the high prices. No one can afford to pay 5k for a lotus and receive a fake in the mail.
Vintage/collectors are in fact the only segment of the magic population that knows how to check for fakes, even very good fakes.
We scan at 600+ dpi. We examine the Rosette pattern to death. We can tell if something is even a little bit off--the coloring, the shape, the tracklines on early vintage prints, even the precise mass.
A chinese counterfeiter will have great difficulty passing a fake piece of power 9. We have seen counterfeits for YEARS.
What's more even if a chinese counterfeiter manages to pass one through, the Vintage market is too small. There simply arent that many people out there able to pay 5000 for a lotus.
In one of the oddest twists of fate, the reserve list at this point, creating sky high vintage prices, probably prevents a great deal of counterfeiting.
Or better it might be to say, it blunts the effectiveness of mtg counterfeiting,
...by creating a ridiculously low volume market.
...by creating a class of mtg players able to detect counterfeits to a very high degree of detail
...by creating market conditions where it is simply unprofitable for counterfeiters to attempt to pass off fake cards.
You're an ebay worker and you have to check for fake neopet cards. Or fake beanie babies, or fake typewriters from the 1950s.
You cannot check the product in person. All you have to go on is pictures. How do you do it?
I know because you have been playing magic for a while, the proxies seem obvious to you. But move it out of your domain of comfort and its easy to see why this would be a problem.
Can you discern fake books? Fake fountain pens? fake silver?
Ebay doens't get involved. I think they should, but it easy to see why they don't.
Most real life arguments do not operate in a logical vacuum where the best and most consistent side wins. Most arguments devolve into a personal and deeply emotional struggle.
This is something I have struggled to grasp. I understand it in a superficial sense. But knowing of something and knowing what the other side looks like is a whole different level of comprehension.
But yes, that is a good characterization of what I have witnessed--that for most people all argument is a personal and deeply emotional struggle.
It sounds then that an element of persuasiveness is showing that you are on "their side"
What you are talking about is persuasion. It has nothing to do with being stupid. Rather it is about being able to effectively frame a conversation in a way that relates to the other person's perspective. It actually takes a lot of smarts to do it effectively. As it mixes a certain degree of knowledge about the person, and a nuanced control of language to thread the needle without putting them on the defensive. This implies being able to understand and potentially even argue for their viewpoint.
Can you elaborate on how someone would be put on the defensive.
I have always seen arguments as a paradigm between two points of view and seeing where the logic falls.
But indeed, people have not always reacted positively to that approach.
I debated putting this question in Water Cooler talk, but I thought it would be best here because I specifically wanted to address the debate community at large.
The debate community here seems pretty rational for the most part, certainly more than the average population in my view.
I have long struggled to communicate adequately with general population at large. Oftentimes I find the reason is because I tend to or try to view things logically.
But this is not how the rest of the world communicates. There is a very large portion of the world that does not communicate in logic at all, but in some other medium of persuasiveness. It could be emotion, it could be tone of voice, it could be showmanship, charisma. I honestly do not understand many of these things, but I am in a position now where I must learn how to convince the general population at large. (your average jury for example)
So I pose the question, How do I be stupid? and I'd like to qualify that. I'm not just talking about putting my head into an oven, or swimming with a toaster, what I am talking about it how do I communicate in a manner that disregards all logic and reason.
How do you, other members of debate, communicate with others who do not communicate in logic or reason, or who actively discard it entirely.
There are a great many people who actively disregard logic or reason. In fact, I believe this kind of person to constitute the majority of humanity.
So my question is how do you, members of debate communicate in your own lives with people who actively disregard logic and reason? Do you forgo your own logic and reason to communicate within a different stratum?
Aesthetics is one of the most powerful drivers of demand in magic. Anyone who collect and pimps out their decks know that their card prices are a function of rarity and simple looks as opposed to practical effect.
Magic pricing demand has always been at its heart, a set of emotional decisions. It takes no leap of faith to say that Magic has always been subject to hype and subjective desires. Suddenly a card is cool so it goes up.
White border gains have been talked about for the past few years in possibly the slowest hype trend to ever hit magic. That being said, at some point white border cards have to be the "cool cards" because wizards doesn't print white border cards anymore. It's a hipster thing, a rarity thing, and frankly an aesthetic way of being unique, much like foiling or pimping.
I will note in particular that white border vintage cards--power 9 has had some of the largest percentage gains these past few years. In short Unlimited Edition cards, including UL duals have skyrocketed.
On this thread its been remarked more than once how ironic it would be to see white border cards be for once in magic history, the cool and desired cards.
But as someone who actually started playing magic in 1994, White border magic cards were what I started with. I have never seen them as an eyesore, and I hope they get their day in their sun for whatever new aesthetic trend magic players are now moving to.
What I would recommend for people is, if they must speculate, to speculate in areas where there is what I call real demand.
What I mean by real demand as opposed to fake or speculative demand is that one is backed by people who actually need the cards to play, the other is backed by people who are speculating in cards.
Let's say Captain's Claws goes up by a dollar a card because of some speculators. Well...no lies, the price went up a buck each. A gain is a gain. But the only reason it went up is because other people thought it would go up too, not because players actually need it.
The problem with this kind of "gain" is that you're just gambling against other people. The only way you can make your money back is if you beat the other speculators. If you sell before they do, then you screw over the other speculators because there is no actual demand among regular magic players. Hence the other speculators can't actually unload their 1000 copies of Captain's Claws....or whatever the choice of speculation is.
It's for that reason why I'm hesitant to conclude that any card will or will not go up. Hell, even leeches went up out of pure speculative demand. But good luck unloading leeches to actual players who want to undo poison counters. (See what I mean by "fake" demand?)
Thus, if you're going to speculate, you have to base your speculation on cards that have an actual market with real demand.
After being on this website for nearly 5 years and watching the market, we have seen some repeated principles of MTG investing. Fundamentally these are the major categories of actual demand:
Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Standard and EDH.
According to Wizards Casual Demand is collectively greater than all of those combined, but the demand is spread out against the entire set of all magic cards. Casual demand is therefore spread so thin, its hard to predict which cards it will hit, but past cards included Glimpse the Unthinkable, Doubling Season, Angels, Dragons, and Tribal.
Basically what that means is that when looking for speculation targets, the areas you want to look into are tournament demand. If the card is not competitive in tournament,
it's not a good spec. target because it means the only home it could have is in casual play. You never want to speculate on a card simply because causal play could make it go higher. Casual demand can frankly make any card go higher. It should be your LAST resort. What's more is that even if casual demand makes cards go higher, its a slow rise--sometimes years. The longer you need to wait to make a profit, the more risk you have of having your speculation target get reprinted.
At this point, picking out speculation targets should be a little more clear.
Your primary factor in evaluating a speculation target should be, is this viable in within the major categories of demand.
Galspanic, are you sure it has .50 written all over it? Give me proof that it won't be worth more. CoA is what $8 and is far worse. Tribal decks will love it & Mutavault will crap all over it. The reason I say CoA is worse is because of higher curve & the fact that your opponent benefits. I'm not saying it will be in the Sword's price range but I do see playability with it. Maybe it's just me and you're the first person to crap on it.
I can answer this.
Let's analyze the sources of Demand:
Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Standard, EDH, Other Casual formats.
Is stone forge Masterwork usable in Vintage: Answer is no.
How about Legacy? Answer is No.
How about Modern? Maybe, let's dig deeper.
How about Standard? Maybe, let's dig deeper.
How about EDH and other casual, Maybe, let's dig deeper.
Let's take a look at Modern. Within modern only 1 type of deck wants to use it right? Tribal.
It doesn't make sense for burn to use it. It doesn't make sense for combo decks to use it.
So what competitive modern tribal decks would like to use it?
Once you answer that question, ask yourself how many of that card will be required in the decks? Do you see it being a one of? a four of?
A good question to ask yourself here is what equipment do tribal decks use? If the answer is very little equipment, then you might imagine this equipment not being used
that much either---especially because having multiples seemingly weakens its power. (there are fewer other creatures)
Now let's take a look at standard and ask yourself the same questions.
What about EDH demand? Do people play EDH tribal? Seems like a small market to me... Because even if people did want to use it, they would want only one copy.
What about Casual demand? Would you put this in your casual tribal decks? I probably would not. At the casual level, I suppose its not too bad, but I still think I have better cards to play. I might try it with Eldrazi tokens for synergies however.
But I agree with the comment that a single pyroclasm would undo the value of this card.
I'm not saying the card isn't a winner. 50 cents is small money, and a single speculator could buy up every single copy pretty easily.
What I am saying though is to run your analysis through the filter I just gave you.
Answer the questions to each of the tournament level demand and you get a good idea.
Modern and Standard Tribal + casual is your market. Within that market it looks like its a one or two of card, certainly not a four of.
I doubt it will lose money, it will probably gain to be frank because 50 cents is so low. But after answering the questions they way I did, I didn't come up with a positive impression its going to be a winner.
I'm just curious as to why the moxes are not all the same price. Surely the people buying them want to play powered vintage list. I have never seen a vintage list just run 2 or 3 moxes would they not usually play one each of all five? Should the demand for them not be relatively constant between all 5? Why such a difference in price?
This is a faulty assumption: "Surely the people buying them want to play powered vintage list"
When we get to vintage level cards, collectors make a good percentage of the buyers. This is part of the reason why the liquidity of Vintage is so low. It is also the reason why Vintage prices do not really drop even in the absence of Vintage's popularity.
That being said, Mox Sapphire enjoys a privileged position seeing as how three of the power nine are blue, not to mention force of wills.
Market demand for Mox Sapphire should be/is higher.
What kind of a price hit would it take from a reprinting?
Well JtMS was reprinted in a FTV and it dropped $75 or so or around 50%. FTV doesn't inject TOO many copies of cards and he still dropped significantly.
If LotV is reprinted in a MM or FTV like set she'll probably drop similarly but not as much so maybe settles around $50-75, probably on the higher end. Reason I don't think she crashes as heavily is because of modern need compared to Jace being banned. There's just a bigger demand.
Now if she is in a set like SoI (which I doubt) she'll plummet. But doing away with the core sets really limits where she can be put since that card ties in to a specific time line and story.
I disagree with this.
The fact is we don't have good numbers on FTV supply and what's more every FTV product is different.
Since we don't know FTV production runs for specific products, all we can look at is the effect on market price.
It looks like FTV reprints do bring down the cost of a card quite a bit.
This implies that an FTV reprint of a card is/would be pretty crushing to its price.
With the prices of Modern staples skyrocketing, Modern Masters over a year away, and Legacy support now dropped, I have to raise the question,
Is Modern actually cheaper than Legacy?
I always thought that Legacy seemed to get a bad rap for its price because of dual lands.
But with the advent of fetches, keeping a large number of duals in a deck became unnecessary.
Plus it seems to me that Modern is simply subject to more churn in the meta from bannings. Splinter Twin being banned is sure to shake things up.
On the other hand Legacy doesn't seem to suffer from the ban hammer banning the staples of top decks.
What I'm saying here is dollar for dollar, you're more likely to spend money changing a deck in Modern than you are for Legacy.
A $1000 deck in Legacy is less likely to experience the need for reinvestment for more staples than the $1000 spend building a modern deck.
OPEC manipulating oil prices since the 60's is wide spread information. I never found anyone referring to oil supply as the actual endowment - it has always have been much how much oil the producing states/companies decides to put on the market.
You are also not a victim of anything. As far as I know people are not entitled to choose the price of things they buy.
We are collectively victims in the sense that we were price gouged and subject to a misinformation attempt to legitimize the oil prices as resulting from supply and demand forces.
The price of oil is fundamental and propagates its way into a vast number of products either as a cost of energy, or because components of the product require petroleum to manufacture.
You as a market participant living in physical reality are subject to these forces in the sense that you cannot adapt your behavior efficiently. You need food, shelter, energy, toilet paper, and probably a car. Your personal demand, and frankly the personal demand of much of the developed world for oil (or other products which depend on the price of oil) is relatively inelastic, and in that sense you were price gouged.
Wait, I'm lost, TomCat26: are we talking about peak oil, or are we talking about oil depletion?
I'm talking about the fact that the American public was subtlety directed to the record higher oil prices as being caused by oil depletion, and that we had even reached global peak oil production.
We were all led to believe that the reason prices were so high was because of the lack of supply in the ground, rather than deliberate OPEC manipulation.
We led to believe that peak oil was inevitable, and the reason why prices were so high was that time had come--there would be diminishing production from here on end against a developing world of ever increasing oil consumption.
Media Coverage, Punditry, and Commentary all circled around these implicit positions. I say it was subtle in the sense that no one shouted these things in my face directly.
But rather the Media coverage and commentary all based their discussion around these reasons.
The truth is probably closer to something Typho0nn is saying. Only Saudia Arabia knows the actual cost of what it takes to pull oil out of the ground, and only they know how much they have. Given the recent events, the price of oil is probably closer to being the result of a full scale DeBeers artificial diamond scarcity for profit rather than actual economic demand and supply forces.
A person who makes proxies of magic cards and sells them on ebay is liable for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and likely patent infringement because Magic the Gathering is patented.
Now, they probably still don't want people selling cards where they've printed the mana symbols on there -- those are Wizard's copyright -- but it's nice to get official confirmation that the Booze Cube is not something they're going to be going after.
Disclaimer: I am not an IP attorneys.
The point is that, as a player, I don't think we particularly care about protecting Wizards from people who photocopy a mana symbol. When you play Booze Cube, that doesn't threaten the integrity of the game. We should, I would hope, be able to agree that counterfeit cards have real and dangerous repercussions for all of us (whoops you traded your cards for fakes, SUCKS TO BE YOU) and what Wizards is now calling "Playest" cards do not pose this risk.
Disclaimer: I am an IP attorney.
The point I was trying to make is that a person who commits copyright infringement, patent infringement, etc, opens themselves up to liability.
I suppose that doesn't matter much if you're 16, have no assets, and will likely remain insolvent for the next decade.
But it probably should matter more to you if you are further along in your career. Why expose yourself to liability for a couple of bucks?
This is simply not true. Let's suppose WotC abolished the reserve list and reprinted cards, you're saying that that would stop the counterfeiters?
Ok well what do you want to call the abolition of the reserve list? Can we call it modern?
Can we also call the reprintings Modern Masters/ Commander/ Judge FOILS/ FTV/ Core Sets?
People will blame the reserve list for anything I swear.
But here. Finally here and now
we have actual EVIDENCE where if you don't have a reserve list, and if you reprint cards, counterfeits will still continue. We have counterfeits of a number of modern staples which are not protected by the reserve list.
The reserve list has absolutely nothing to do with this issue, and oddly enough in many ways, at this point prevents the effect of counterfeiting.
What do I mean? The reserve list is responsible for the high dollar price of vintage magic.
That means that only collectors will go out of their way to to buy vintage.
Go into your local game shop and try to explain to them all the finers of magic forgery and counterfeiting. People don't care! It's tough to learn, its hard to learn. People have to pixel peep, memorize, scrutinize. Why would they want to learn these things for low value cards. The answer is they don't.
But for a $5000 NM unlimited Lotus, they will learn, they have incentive to learn.
A Chinese counterfeiting can really screw up the profit model of Magic. If the counterfeits are good enough, people won't be able to distinguish the card at a first glance. That will be a huge problem for wizards.
But will it be a huge problem for Vintage? Vintage is filled with extremely experienced people and counterfeits. The incentive to learn is driven by the high prices. No one can afford to pay 5k for a lotus and receive a fake in the mail.
Vintage/collectors are in fact the only segment of the magic population that knows how to check for fakes, even very good fakes.
We scan at 600+ dpi. We examine the Rosette pattern to death. We can tell if something is even a little bit off--the coloring, the shape, the tracklines on early vintage prints, even the precise mass.
A chinese counterfeiter will have great difficulty passing a fake piece of power 9. We have seen counterfeits for YEARS.
What's more even if a chinese counterfeiter manages to pass one through, the Vintage market is too small. There simply arent that many people out there able to pay 5000 for a lotus.
In one of the oddest twists of fate, the reserve list at this point, creating sky high vintage prices, probably prevents a great deal of counterfeiting.
Or better it might be to say, it blunts the effectiveness of mtg counterfeiting,
...by creating a ridiculously low volume market.
...by creating a class of mtg players able to detect counterfeits to a very high degree of detail
...by creating market conditions where it is simply unprofitable for counterfeiters to attempt to pass off fake cards.
You're an ebay worker and you have to check for fake neopet cards. Or fake beanie babies, or fake typewriters from the 1950s.
You cannot check the product in person. All you have to go on is pictures. How do you do it?
I know because you have been playing magic for a while, the proxies seem obvious to you. But move it out of your domain of comfort and its easy to see why this would be a problem.
Can you discern fake books? Fake fountain pens? fake silver?
Ebay doens't get involved. I think they should, but it easy to see why they don't.
This is something I have struggled to grasp. I understand it in a superficial sense. But knowing of something and knowing what the other side looks like is a whole different level of comprehension.
But yes, that is a good characterization of what I have witnessed--that for most people all argument is a personal and deeply emotional struggle.
It sounds then that an element of persuasiveness is showing that you are on "their side"
Can you elaborate on how someone would be put on the defensive.
I have always seen arguments as a paradigm between two points of view and seeing where the logic falls.
But indeed, people have not always reacted positively to that approach.
The debate community here seems pretty rational for the most part, certainly more than the average population in my view.
I have long struggled to communicate adequately with general population at large. Oftentimes I find the reason is because I tend to or try to view things logically.
But this is not how the rest of the world communicates. There is a very large portion of the world that does not communicate in logic at all, but in some other medium of persuasiveness. It could be emotion, it could be tone of voice, it could be showmanship, charisma. I honestly do not understand many of these things, but I am in a position now where I must learn how to convince the general population at large. (your average jury for example)
So I pose the question, How do I be stupid? and I'd like to qualify that. I'm not just talking about putting my head into an oven, or swimming with a toaster, what I am talking about it how do I communicate in a manner that disregards all logic and reason.
How do you, other members of debate, communicate with others who do not communicate in logic or reason, or who actively discard it entirely.
There are a great many people who actively disregard logic or reason. In fact, I believe this kind of person to constitute the majority of humanity.
So my question is how do you, members of debate communicate in your own lives with people who actively disregard logic and reason? Do you forgo your own logic and reason to communicate within a different stratum?
White border gains have been talked about for the past few years in possibly the slowest hype trend to ever hit magic. That being said, at some point white border cards have to be the "cool cards" because wizards doesn't print white border cards anymore. It's a hipster thing, a rarity thing, and frankly an aesthetic way of being unique, much like foiling or pimping.
I will note in particular that white border vintage cards--power 9 has had some of the largest percentage gains these past few years. In short Unlimited Edition cards, including UL duals have skyrocketed.
On this thread its been remarked more than once how ironic it would be to see white border cards be for once in magic history, the cool and desired cards.
But as someone who actually started playing magic in 1994, White border magic cards were what I started with. I have never seen them as an eyesore, and I hope they get their day in their sun for whatever new aesthetic trend magic players are now moving to.
What I mean by real demand as opposed to fake or speculative demand is that one is backed by people who actually need the cards to play, the other is backed by people who are speculating in cards.
Let's say Captain's Claws goes up by a dollar a card because of some speculators. Well...no lies, the price went up a buck each. A gain is a gain. But the only reason it went up is because other people thought it would go up too, not because players actually need it.
The problem with this kind of "gain" is that you're just gambling against other people. The only way you can make your money back is if you beat the other speculators. If you sell before they do, then you screw over the other speculators because there is no actual demand among regular magic players. Hence the other speculators can't actually unload their 1000 copies of Captain's Claws....or whatever the choice of speculation is.
It's for that reason why I'm hesitant to conclude that any card will or will not go up. Hell, even leeches went up out of pure speculative demand. But good luck unloading leeches to actual players who want to undo poison counters. (See what I mean by "fake" demand?)
Thus, if you're going to speculate, you have to base your speculation on cards that have an actual market with real demand.
After being on this website for nearly 5 years and watching the market, we have seen some repeated principles of MTG investing. Fundamentally these are the major categories of actual demand:
Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Standard and EDH.
According to Wizards Casual Demand is collectively greater than all of those combined, but the demand is spread out against the entire set of all magic cards. Casual demand is therefore spread so thin, its hard to predict which cards it will hit, but past cards included Glimpse the Unthinkable, Doubling Season, Angels, Dragons, and Tribal.
Basically what that means is that when looking for speculation targets, the areas you want to look into are tournament demand. If the card is not competitive in tournament,
it's not a good spec. target because it means the only home it could have is in casual play. You never want to speculate on a card simply because causal play could make it go higher. Casual demand can frankly make any card go higher. It should be your LAST resort. What's more is that even if casual demand makes cards go higher, its a slow rise--sometimes years. The longer you need to wait to make a profit, the more risk you have of having your speculation target get reprinted.
At this point, picking out speculation targets should be a little more clear.
Your primary factor in evaluating a speculation target should be, is this viable in within the major categories of demand.
I can answer this.
Let's analyze the sources of Demand:
Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Standard, EDH, Other Casual formats.
Is stone forge Masterwork usable in Vintage: Answer is no.
How about Legacy? Answer is No.
How about Modern? Maybe, let's dig deeper.
How about Standard? Maybe, let's dig deeper.
How about EDH and other casual, Maybe, let's dig deeper.
Let's take a look at Modern. Within modern only 1 type of deck wants to use it right? Tribal.
It doesn't make sense for burn to use it. It doesn't make sense for combo decks to use it.
So what competitive modern tribal decks would like to use it?
Once you answer that question, ask yourself how many of that card will be required in the decks? Do you see it being a one of? a four of?
A good question to ask yourself here is what equipment do tribal decks use? If the answer is very little equipment, then you might imagine this equipment not being used
that much either---especially because having multiples seemingly weakens its power. (there are fewer other creatures)
Now let's take a look at standard and ask yourself the same questions.
What about EDH demand? Do people play EDH tribal? Seems like a small market to me... Because even if people did want to use it, they would want only one copy.
What about Casual demand? Would you put this in your casual tribal decks? I probably would not. At the casual level, I suppose its not too bad, but I still think I have better cards to play. I might try it with Eldrazi tokens for synergies however.
But I agree with the comment that a single pyroclasm would undo the value of this card.
I'm not saying the card isn't a winner. 50 cents is small money, and a single speculator could buy up every single copy pretty easily.
What I am saying though is to run your analysis through the filter I just gave you.
Answer the questions to each of the tournament level demand and you get a good idea.
Modern and Standard Tribal + casual is your market. Within that market it looks like its a one or two of card, certainly not a four of.
I doubt it will lose money, it will probably gain to be frank because 50 cents is so low. But after answering the questions they way I did, I didn't come up with a positive impression its going to be a winner.
This is a faulty assumption: "Surely the people buying them want to play powered vintage list"
When we get to vintage level cards, collectors make a good percentage of the buyers. This is part of the reason why the liquidity of Vintage is so low. It is also the reason why Vintage prices do not really drop even in the absence of Vintage's popularity.
That being said, Mox Sapphire enjoys a privileged position seeing as how three of the power nine are blue, not to mention force of wills.
Market demand for Mox Sapphire should be/is higher.
I disagree with this.
The fact is we don't have good numbers on FTV supply and what's more every FTV product is different.
Since we don't know FTV production runs for specific products, all we can look at is the effect on market price.
It looks like FTV reprints do bring down the cost of a card quite a bit.
This implies that an FTV reprint of a card is/would be pretty crushing to its price.
Is Modern actually cheaper than Legacy?
I always thought that Legacy seemed to get a bad rap for its price because of dual lands.
But with the advent of fetches, keeping a large number of duals in a deck became unnecessary.
Plus it seems to me that Modern is simply subject to more churn in the meta from bannings. Splinter Twin being banned is sure to shake things up.
On the other hand Legacy doesn't seem to suffer from the ban hammer banning the staples of top decks.
What I'm saying here is dollar for dollar, you're more likely to spend money changing a deck in Modern than you are for Legacy.
A $1000 deck in Legacy is less likely to experience the need for reinvestment for more staples than the $1000 spend building a modern deck.
What do you think?
We are collectively victims in the sense that we were price gouged and subject to a misinformation attempt to legitimize the oil prices as resulting from supply and demand forces.
The price of oil is fundamental and propagates its way into a vast number of products either as a cost of energy, or because components of the product require petroleum to manufacture.
You as a market participant living in physical reality are subject to these forces in the sense that you cannot adapt your behavior efficiently. You need food, shelter, energy, toilet paper, and probably a car. Your personal demand, and frankly the personal demand of much of the developed world for oil (or other products which depend on the price of oil) is relatively inelastic, and in that sense you were price gouged.
I'm talking about the fact that the American public was subtlety directed to the record higher oil prices as being caused by oil depletion, and that we had even reached global peak oil production.
We were all led to believe that the reason prices were so high was because of the lack of supply in the ground, rather than deliberate OPEC manipulation.
We led to believe that peak oil was inevitable, and the reason why prices were so high was that time had come--there would be diminishing production from here on end against a developing world of ever increasing oil consumption.
Media Coverage, Punditry, and Commentary all circled around these implicit positions. I say it was subtle in the sense that no one shouted these things in my face directly.
But rather the Media coverage and commentary all based their discussion around these reasons.
The truth is probably closer to something Typho0nn is saying. Only Saudia Arabia knows the actual cost of what it takes to pull oil out of the ground, and only they know how much they have. Given the recent events, the price of oil is probably closer to being the result of a full scale DeBeers artificial diamond scarcity for profit rather than actual economic demand and supply forces.
Disclaimer: I am an IP attorney.
The point I was trying to make is that a person who commits copyright infringement, patent infringement, etc, opens themselves up to liability.
I suppose that doesn't matter much if you're 16, have no assets, and will likely remain insolvent for the next decade.
But it probably should matter more to you if you are further along in your career. Why expose yourself to liability for a couple of bucks?