My predictions for this summer and next year:
Mint Revised Underground Seas see $100 mark
Force of Will continues to climb seeing $180/playset (probably $200)
Mox Diamond will not come down. Not going to say $50 by next year but $50 by next year.
What to buy for $0.10 - Nodes
Fully agreed. This is the kind of thing I'm worried about. Enough people being selfish on corner cards (like Imperial Recruiter or something) driving people out of legacy because they can't afford any decks. This is a reason power creep can actually be a VERY good thing (or at least affordable). No need for a $255 Tabernacle if they eventually print something better.Originally Posted by caiomarcos
Actually, if would be pretty funny if Wizards started to soley base the reprint policy on a cards price, but the only people who would really be hurt by this are people who buy hundreds of Mana Drains or something, therefore not really hurting many people at all if they reprinted them. This probably isn't the case though.
@Dahcmai
I believe the price of Sea Drake hasn't come down per my "Price Z" explanation; People bought them at whatever price and refuse to sell them for that price or much lower.
I also hadn't thought about what Andrew77 said, but it seems very probable. Most people use Ebay prices while many dealers use Starcity, meaning that a select few people with a lot of money could very well pool efforts in a business venture to squeeze as much money as possible out of this game.
On another note entirely, seriously, why even bother trying to put so much effort into making money off of a card game? Wouldn't almost anything else like stocks or real estate be more profitable?
Ich bin aueslander und sprechen nicht gut Deutsch
@ Add corner cards: I guess Loyal Retainers could be the next? It's price nearly doubled here in Germany (at least for english ones)
@Stocks/Real estate:
Stocks are probably more risky (unless they reprint something better than Mana Drain if you sit on 100 of them) and Real Estate requires probably more starting capital.
You realize that scalping makes markets MORE efficient, right?
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
Don't know what your definition of "scalping" is but from my point of view it's deeply immoral and I'm glad it's forbidden by German law.
Besides that, all this talk about "markets" or even "efficent markets" makes me sick. People hold on to all these neoliberal relicts like it was some kind of Holy Grail, worshipping free markets, low taxes, yadayada. Leave your ivory tower and walk out into the world, markets are never fully efficent / perfect. There's always gonna be information shortcomming and irrational preference.
The seven cardinal sins of Legacy:
1. Discuss the unbanning ofLand TaxEarthcraft.
2. Argue that banning Force of Will would make the format healthier.
3. Play Brainstorm without Fetchlands.
4. Stifle Standstill.
5. Think that Gaea's Blessing will make you Solidarity-proof.
6. Pass priority after playing Infernal Tutor.
7. Fail to playtest against Nourishing Lich (coZ iT wIlL gEt U!).
I'd never know. I had to look scalping up on the dictionary (I have English as a second language), and there it says:
Noun - a small profit made in quick buying and selling.
Verb - to buy and sell (stocks) so as to make small quick profits.
According to those definitions and the description of some of actions taken by some users, they don't practice scalping, but something else I don't know the name.
Second, I know no economics at all, so my bet is on you.
EDIT: I read about scalping on Wikipedia and finally found out what it really is - the activity such as in concerts and sports events.
I personally HATE scalpers, more than any other illegal activity or malpractice. Living in Brazil I know first hand how out of control and bad for everyone but for the own scalpers scalping can be, people trying to make a living out of it and to take an edge while at it can RUIN the fun for everyone trying to attend the event. Thanks for showing me that what drives the prices of some magic cards is also scalping, now I hate it even more.
It's also forbidden by Brazilian law but you know, it's Brazil.
EDIT2: Julian23 kinda beat me to it, and I agree with him 100%.
"Want all, lose all."
everyone trying to attend those events can do so because scalpers exist. shortages exist because prices are too low to meet demand. similarly, if no Force of Wills exist at $20, it's because they are worth more than $20.
(but if scalpers didn't buy them at $15 more would exist at $20! no. they would not move at all. markets stay liquid because of speculators.)
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
Or they could walk to the ticket booth and pay face price instead of paying whatever the guy with 500 tickets is asking for.
Scalpers are unnecessary middleman, they perform NO TASK other than driving prices up for their profit.
It's not easier to buy from them, nor safer nor faster etc, just more expensive.
You made me realize that this also happens with magic cards.
"Want all, lose all."
If they could actually do that, they would. They don't because they can't because the tickets sold out because they were priced too low, and people who value the show, card, whatever at a higher price can't get any unless someone resells their ticket.
It's unbelievable how people can be mad at someone for performing them a service. If a concert is $50, and you want to go and the tickets are sold out, the guy who sells to you for $75 has done you a favor, because clearly you were unable to go before he sold you the ticket and clearly you valued going to the concert at $75 minimum.
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
I must have went through hundreds of those things. If it's any consolation, I forgot how many were in my personal box and only left myself with three. oops. Still playing a Rishadan Airship in that last Sea Drakes spot. lol
Why would I do that? I work for $20 an hour at a crappy company. It sucks and I know I'm never going to retire off shit like that. 401k is for chumps. I don't play the stock market because I used to and I couldn't seem to make crap off it. I think I have maybe $45k or so in it still. I beat that in cards in a single year. It's too hard to predict people in corporations. I know I'm not going to get much of a better job since I never went to college. Luckily for me, I play Magic.
I noticed a long time ago that my moxes and such were racing that stock portfolio and beating the pants off it. Then I realized all I had to do was recognize good deals in the game I loved. Easy enough. Then I figured out about pre-orders. Oh I love those. All you have to do is rack your brain trying to find that card people are going to miss. Sure I miss a few (goyf) and some I can't touch right off the bat (Mutavault), but there are some I was sitting on a ton of them when the price rose (Bitterblossom, Elspeth).
Magic oddly enough is a good game to make some money off of. I don't do the monopoly thing anymore. It's really hard to keep up with and typically it backfires anyway like it almost did with the Mana Drains. There's just too many of those cards out there and if it's something there's not much of, it's already expensive and hard to do that with. Don't worry, most people won't try it. I just found a good niche, once.
I'll stick to pre-orders and drafting the unnoticed sleepers anymore.
That's against ebay policy, asshole. If you're going to screw with the market, at least have the decency to do it within the rules.
How is it against Ebay policy to outbid everyone? I wasn't bidding on my own auctions if that's what you are thinking. I bid on ALL of the auctions and sold them in a storefront. Big difference.
Maybe the tickets/cards are sold out/rare BECAUSE of scalpers. They buy hundreds of tickets/cards for the sole purpose of making them sold out then unload at whatever price they wish. They're not even attending/playing the event/cards.
I guess we are not agreeing on what a scalper is. I'm talking about people trying to make a living out of it, not the occasional grandpa whose grandson could't go to the game. I'm talking about people who stock up on tickets/cards creating an unrealistic low supply. I've seen this thousands of times for sports and concerts (usually it is forbidden and punished), but never realized it was done with Magic. How naive of me.
"Want all, lose all."
Oh, I thought you meant you put them up on ebay and then bid on your own stuff till it looked like people were paying that much for them. My mistake.
People implicitly accept this when they purchase the scalped tickets rather than getting stoned out of events they were unable to get tickets for due to shortage. If the shortage situation didn't exist, scalping would be unprofitable and wouldn't exist.
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
Well, it's a lot easier to do with tickets since there's a limited supply of them. It's not so easy with cards if there's several million of them. That's the problem.
I'm not sure if scalping is the right term to use here at all, as scalping is essentially a short-term play to arbitrage products based on their bid-ask spreads. That is why they can be taken to improve market efficiency, as they cause bid and ask prices to converge. Not sure if that applies to magic to a large extent, as dealers essentially have a stronger grip on the floor at a magic convention as compared to market makers on a trading floor, and magic dealers essentially take advantage of the information deficiency some people have, to a much larger extent than trading floor market makers would be able to. For instance, a lower bid price of say 5bps is likely to generate a very elastic fall in supply, while in magic you can find people selling Strategic Planning for $5 even after its explosion.
In my opinion, magic can never be efficient as long as short selling doesn't exist, but the existence of the latter opens a new can of worms. I don't think that people are necessarily wrong when they speculate on cards, though. Some risk and insight is required, and unlike other financial investments, a banning or restriction could seriously ruin your day.
In the end, just focus less on the monetary aspects of the game and more on the game itself. As compared to a lot of other hobbies, magic is already extremely cheap. Even if FoWs were to drop later on, the loss will not be great at all.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I have seen some events around town solve the problem simply, although the solution can't work with Magic cards: limit of how many tickets a person can buy, usually 2-5. You can get more if you want, but you have to go through the queue again (and run the risk of them selling out before you do, wasting your time).
This solves the problem of shortages much more neatly than scalping: there is still a market, but it is denominated in time rather than dollars. The advantage comes from the fact that everyone has the same amount of time available to them, whereas not everyone starts with an equal amount of dollars. In this way, a time-based market is, if anything, MORE efficient at correctly distributing goods than a dollar-based one, because it eliminates the inefficiency of hoarding by making it too expensive (have to pay multiple people to stand in line for you) and ensures that more tickets wind up in the hands of those that value them more. It also eliminates the inefficiency of tickets going unsold/unused because the scalpers priced them too high.
Event coordinators are very foolish to allow people to purchase unlimited tickets. If they have priced them too low, then any profit the scalper makes is profit they could have made just as easily, say by raising the price as the supply dwindles. Introducing a flexible pricing scheme keeps the profit in the hands of those who produced the underlying value - the performers and coordinators of the event.
I don't disagree with any of this, but I would like to note that you are merely transferring the cost in dollars to costs in time and that shortages still exist because the original price was set too low.
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
That's pretty brilliant to me as an observer, though obnoxious as a consumer. Has this practice (buying on speculation, preorders, selected bidding) really been lucrative for you? I've been trying to break the system for the past 6 months to feed my collector's greed, but found that my equity portfolio just raced MTG (and once I'm more experienced with options, it would be a total wash). If you don't mind answering, is there publicly available information that lets you do this (i.e. something better than the spoilers), or are you working on a macro scale just pre-ordering cases or complete sets and fishing it all out once you get the cards?
Great success!
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