Ok I am going to purchase 12 sealed boxes of Alliances from a local person for $150 per box. Is it worth cracking them and selling the few money singles other than FOW. I seem to remember getting between 4 and 5 FOW per box but I may be wrong.
Join Team Short bus We have all the special People, We allow helmets at our tables.
Originally Posted by Ertai's Familiar
$150 a box sounds pretty awesome, considering that you get an average or 2-3 force of wills in a box.
force of wills go for $50 a pop now.
I am convinced that WotC is "dumbing" the game because of all the stupid posts they come across on MTG-related forums
Force of Will is only an Uncommon, so 4-5 per box in a set that only had (if I remember correctly) 145 cards is pretty average.
Don't Hate the Herd
If the statistics work out, you should make out with ~50$ in profit per box, plus the additional cards.
Who has 12 unopened boxes?
But yeah, crack them, there's more stuff in there other than Force as well that sells for a bit.
Play limited with them.
He owned a big shop for years and when he closed up everythign went into storage and he just forgot about it. I am looking into trying and make a deal with him to just buy everything else he has. Most of it is from Alliances and back since that is about the time he closed shop 1996 or so.
Join Team Short bus We have all the special People, We allow helmets at our tables.
What exactly?
Was this even a real Skeggi's hero?Lol. You're my hero.
1 Force of Will 29.98 (0.67%) 154 volume
2 Lake of the Dead 3.88 (-3.72%) 33
3 Kjeldoran Outpost 3.32 (-1.19%) 26
4 Thawing Glaciers 3.20 (-0.62%) 23
5 Elvish Spirit Guide 3.12 (-0.64%) 42
6 Helm of Obedience 2.29 (0.00%) 19
7 Shield Sphere 1.66 (0.00%) 13
8 Lim-Dul's Vault 1.24 (40.91%) 13
9 Kaysa 1.11 (0.00%) 5
10 Exile 1.09 (0.00%) 6
this is per Black lotus project so the prices are not all spot on since it is based on MOTL
Join Team Short bus We have all the special People, We allow helmets at our tables.
ESG and Pyrokinesis both see a lot of play and were from Alliances, and not reprinted.
ESG is up to $5 each on SCGs and it's a common, so you can probably crack 10 per box and net maybe an extra $20 or $30 (you can usually consistently move units at ~50-60% SCGs sale price). Pyrokinesis isn't as hot an item, but it goes for a buck or two.
EDIT: Forgot about a lot of cards, see above post.
Helm of Obedience, LDV, Pyrokinesis, ESG, and Force of Will all see play pretty regularly in at least tier 2 decks, and Thawing Glaciers might potentially see some play with the CIPT-effect artifact.
Lake of the Dead does something no other card does (even though it sucks) and Kjeldoran Outpost could always potentially see play.
When you buy all these boxes you should post pictures of them, since you wouldn't want people to think you're full of shit yet again.
My only dream is that yours never come true.
"People played violin as the Titanic sank. Tomorrow they will play Green Day songs with plastic keytars as their Hoovervilles burn."
qft
Old Fogey
You're not just wrong, rules say you're a dick!
1. Yes.
2. What do you have against him, to stalk him like you did, and then bring it up. Again.
I have nothing against him. I enjoy a lot of his posts, he writes some of the best fiction on the Source.
My only dream is that yours never come true.
"People played violin as the Titanic sank. Tomorrow they will play Green Day songs with plastic keytars as their Hoovervilles burn."
If you want to turn a profit, I strongly suggest you don't crack the boxes. First off, 4-5 FoWs in a box is... wrong. There are 135 uncommons per box and 45 unique uncommons in the set, so math says you'll get 3. Of the 6 boxes of Alliances I've opened in the past couple weeks, most had only 2 (2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4). ESG is the only other money uncommon and most of the other money cards (of which there aren't many and none are really that valuable) are rare. If you manage to sell the singles for full value, you'll probably make a little under $200. By comparison, trollandtoad.com sold 9 boxes of Alliances @$234.99 over the course of ~2-3 days this past week. Most auctions end around $240-245 and all of the Buy It Now listings on ebay have them for $270. If you were to undersell them (say, $260) and post them as Buy It Now auctions, you would make about $240 ($90 in pure profit) per box, which is considerably more than you could get for the singles. The only reason to crack the boxes would be if you wanted to keep some of the Legacy-playable cards and draft the others. Alliances has been hands down the most entertaining set I've ever drafted, so if the cut in profits is worth it to you, I can vouch for that.
Great success!
There are some sick weird print runs in Alliances, where a Whirling Catapult (R3) is more common than a Force of Will(U1). I've seen some boxes of AL that don't have a single FOW in them!
The correct way to handle this is to actually draft all of the set : )
I'll echo the "Don't open them" crowd. Even with Force pushing $50 each, you're unlikely to make your money back on a box given the print runs and the fact that almost all of the cards in the set sell for less than $0.50 (if you can even find buyers for them). You'd make far more selling the boxes to shmucks who think they can open a bunch of Forces and make a profit than if you opened the boxes with the hope of opening a bunch of Forces so as to make a profit.
Alliances only had R2s and R6s for for rares (46 R2s, 3 R6s to give a 110-card sheet, no R1s etc) and the same for uncommons (40 U2s, 5 U6s), with 3 uncommon sheets for each rare sheet. Thus, U2 = R6. FoW is a U2. Assuming all the booster packs contain average expected numbers of FoWs,
45 x 3 = 135 uncommons per box.
Number of FoWs per sheet = 2
Average number of FoWs per box = 135 / 110 * 2 = 2.455
If you manage to get $50 for each FoW, which is practically impossible, that's 2.455 * $50 to give $122.73 from FoWs per box.
You might be able to make some $ from Lake of the dead, Kjeldoran Outpost, Thawing Glaciers, Helm of Obedience and Diminishing Returns for the rares (all are R2) and from uncommons like Pyrokinesis, LDV, ESG, Pillage and Contagion (all are U2). Some of the other cards like Shield Sphere or Balduvian Horde could be sellable too.
You could also draft to have some fun while opening, but older sets weren't really made for limited, so it can get frustrating at times.
Last edited by Occam; 02-22-2010 at 05:39 PM.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
What do you against Getsickanddie?
I opened a ton of Alliances and typically got 2-3 Forces if I did get some. It was rare, but it did happen to not get one at all. Though back then I didn't want to see that card anyway. It was crap back in those days.
Problem with Alliances is Urza's Engine is a R6. I don't remember what the other two were, but they sucked also. That meant you had high odds of opening that crap over and over. I remember a friend of mine packed 12 of the things out of one box. Kind of spoils the box. Force is an U1 and there's actually U6's in that set. Odds aren't great to make money off it. Only if you got a hell of a deal really since there's very few money rares. I wouldn't try at that price you mentioned.
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