Greetings fellow gamers,
I guess an apology is due for my longabsence; I have been traveling the globe and staying in rural areas that did not have Internet connections readily available. Now that I’m back, we will continue where we left off and again work toward our foil Force of Will on a weekly basis.
This week, the first step I took was to check if any of the bots that offer free commons are up and running. I managed to get 64 commons from one of the bots to use later as random trade material. Nothing much of value, but free is a good price. (And my computer botched the screenshot…)
Next, I scanned the classifieds again and found a compelling offer including two M11 dual lands. The seller had one foil and one non-foil for two Tickets; I could not resist grabbing them.
I was surprised that those lands are currently so cheap! They provide a solid mana base in various color combinations and seem like they should be worth more. Currently, Shards of Alara Block is still providing color fixing in various ways, but when the block rotates, the Magic11 duals are likely to form the backbone of multicolor decks (together with the Worldwake duals). I am glad to pick up a few if I can and hold them for a while as their value increases.
Later, I grabbed another 24 free commons from a bot account. Never pass on free cards!
There are a few cards that currently fetch prices that are hard to believe. Birds of Paradise, for example, are without doubt one of the most efficient mana providers in the game, and yet they go for less than 1 Ticket on bots! Taking into account that Noble Hierarch is leaving Standard soon, I jumped on the chance to buy a few of the precious Birds for my portfolio (and also added a few more of the underpriced M11 duals).
Up to this point, I hadn’t used up much of my allotted trading time, so I scanned for other opportunities a few days later. After so much buying it was time to sell a bit to get back Tickets. I checked the current buy prices for some of the harder to sell items (mainly non-Standard foils) and decided to sell the foil Smokestack to a bot for a healthy profit- I got 16 tickets plus change for it.
The last trade of the day qualifies as “high risk, high reward”. I spotted a card that is very tough to find and in high demand by a small selection of players- foil Hurkyl’s Recall. Taking into account that it might have even more demand interest with the upcoming artifact-based set, Scars of Mirrodin, I decided to take the gamble and buy two of them for around 14 tickets total. I have a feeling that I will be able to get a very nice margin on these but only time will tell if I am right!
I would like to talk about a little trick that I use to “guess” price developments of cards. A very good time to profit (or lose) arrives each time a set is rotating out of Standard. Many cards people have gotten used to playing are suddenly not available anymore and replacements have to be found. It is very helpful to examine some of the most played cards that are rotating and see if any of them have similar cards that will still be in Standard but aren’t currently in the spotlight.
For example, Birds of Paradise are close in power to Noble Hierarch – in most decks they are worth less because they are missing the “Exalted” keyword or can’t make black or red mana, but with Hierarch leaving, the cute Bird has a chance to go up in value again. The same is true for the M11 duals. They are currently overshadowed by tons of color fixing in previous sets, but as the Standard card pool shrinks, so do the options to fix the mana. I don’t think you can go wrong buying a bunch of these hidden gems for less then a Ticket each.
We did not sell much this time, as I focused on finding some interesting buys to add value. Since we are now low on tickets, my priority next session will be to try to turn some slow movers into Tickets; we have to remain liquid. With the next article, I will put up a new collection value graph and see if we made progress towards our end goal- the shiny FoW.
Until then good luck and till next week!
Marin
I’m glad your back to doing this once again. I was wondering if you had giving up or something as I noticed you were still posting other articles. Perhaps you could make a spreadsheet or something for the price you bought the cards for so you know what the over all profit of each card or group of cards you bought.
Hello Neros,
we will have a spreadsheet with prices for the next article. I prefer to wait until I have sold some of the more speculative cards such as the foil Hurkyl’s Recall as it is really hard to attach a concrete value to it. You can expect a summary next week.
Hi,
thx for going on with this Article! Birds and Duals are really interesting, but printed a lot, so we will see….
By the way: Im sitting on my Foil Fork and will not get even 12 bucks for it…
Promo foil cards have a very steep downward slope in terms of value. Often there are only a smaller number of players that are interested in such narrow cards and then it becomes very hard to sell them for a lot. I hope to sell the two I have left for some profit and move on.
This will be an interesting time for speculation, as Scars of Mirrodin will definitely warp card values in the short-term as new cards are spoiled!
i want to help u make a large margin on one of your recalls, as soon as we can get to gether you will have 1/8th of a force of will foil for the shiney impossible to find recall