Quiet Speculation: PTQ Part Deux!

Well Zage, what you should do is somewhere in your daily life save money. I have no idea what you do do with your money, but lets say you bought a bottle of soda every day at work. If you did that five days a week, you’d be spending I’d image almost like 6-7 dollars on that at least. Per month, that’s at least 24 dollars. I don’t even know if you do that, but think about where you spend your money and you can find something you spend money on you could be saving elsewhere, like buying groceries instead of getting take out or eating out. Not buying Pizza or snacks at FNM from the hobby store your playing at and instead bringing food.

For myself, I have a large stack of soon-to-rotate-and-be-worthless Shards rares I’ll sell at the TCGplayer 5k. I’ll make about 40-50 dollars with it, and be using that to buy up some of the cards on this list. I might spend the time to sell them online instead, which takes more time but I’d get more money this way instead of selling to vendors.

A good way to keep track of what your not spending is to carry around a paper clip in your wallet to seperate the money your not spending as you don’t spend it, to keep physical track of how much your saving.

Now, none of these predictions will happen until the actual rotation happens, and then not until major tournaments start cropping up with results. So you have quite a few months to find a way to save some money.

Now, with alittle over 20 dollars, I would only be looking to make money on the little risk/reward cards, like Beastmaster’s Ascension or Comet Storm from this article. Divide up what you spend your money on, and what you could use in the future and look to make some money on. Planning to make a ramp deck? Buy into Oracle of Mul Daya and Commet Storm.

Where I like to compare prices is right on tcgplayer.com. If you search for a card on their engine, they’ll list usualy 20+ stores and what they’re charging and how many they have. I never buy the cards from there though, I find where I want to get my card from and go straight to their website, and buy directly from them.

Find a store that has both of them at a reasonable price. You can find Oracle at about $1, and Comet Storm at $2. With 24 dollars, you could buy 4 Comet Storms for $8, and 8 Oracle of Mul Dayas at $8 more dollars. I added it up to 16 because I don’t know if there’s a store that sells them for both at that price, but you can find them close to that so there’s some wiggle room. You have 8 dollars left over if you find the two at those prices, which is more then enough for shipping and even rewarding yourself with a soda you’ve been avoiding until now. Or, isntead of a split like that, buy more comet Storms if you manage to save more money instead of Oracles since you think it’ll go up the most from the list.

Now, if you were planning to use them in future decks, awesome. I would feel like I saved even more by using the same cards in a deck that I was sitting on. But, if you don’t use them, just shove them into the very back of your trade binder with a note infront of them or something. I haven’t started doing this myself, but it’s a good idea to if you’ll be sitting on them for awhile for them to go up. So, you’d have a pocket with four Comet Storms in the back of your binder with a note reading, “$2.” You’d have two more pockets, with four Oracles each, with a note saying “$1.”

After that, just forget about them. I’ve started putting together a small binder of nothing but stuff I’m sitting on. It has multiple playsets of dual manlands, fetch lands, certain Wwk rares like 16 copies of Stoneforge Mystic, some of my own random speculations, and soon it’ll have most of the cheaper cards listed in this article. I’ve even got three playsets of Warren Instigator, which I bought at 5.50 a piece because I was SO sure there would be good goblins in Wwk, and now it’s a 2 dollar card. Oops.

@Zage: Wow, that felt good. I wasn’t even sure if you’d check back to see if someone responded to you. Thanks for the appreciation!

Yeah, being able to earn some free booster packs rocks. Like you said, the worst case scenario is you’d lose like 10 bucks re-selling the cards. I don’t think it’s as simple as that though. I would GLADLY pay 10 bucks to gain confidence and experience with speculating on cards. If I could have done that, I would of only bought a single playset of Warren Instigator instead of 3 playsets. I bought them at 5.50, now they go for 2 dollars. I saw 13ish instances of the word Goblin in the Orb of Insight, and was sure there’d be some good ones to make Warren go up. Dumb move. 13 wasn’t big enough of a number to indicate a tribe happening, and buying 3 playsets was way too much. With my meager income, a single playset would of been more optimal. I haven’t sold them though, and am still sitting on them in the hopes that they might do something miraculous. Point is, making mistakes is just as valuable as being right.

Starting out small is important. And you don’t even have to just use money to get these cards, I’m sure you have a card collection of your own you can use to trade for cards. Recently a made a 1:1 trade to someone with me giving him some shards cards for fetchlands, and while I was thinking about it he commented on how I was actualy getting 10x a better deal even though it was 1:1 because shards was going to rotate and fetchlands soon will probably just go up and up once Zendikar is out of print, like Shards is now.

Just another option for acquiring the cards and getting a taste for speculation. Just start small, gain some confidence and make some mistakes that will teach you what not to do.

Yeah, anonymous was me. Usualy I don’t post in comments for articles and forgot to put my information in. Or maybe I was in disguise?

But yeah, no edit option to put my name on that post sucks.