By: Travis Allen
I began playing Magic beyond the kitchen table at Zendikar’s release five years ago, way back in 2009. At the time I think the most expensive card I owned was Doubling Season, and I’m pretty sure it was about $5. I knew next to nothing about how much most cards were worth, or what was good to trade for, or what might spike in price next week. I was focused solely on making gigantic Cytoplast Root-Kins and sacrificing Leveler while Endless Whispers was in play.
It was through playing that I slowly became more knowledgeable about the economics of Magic. At the start I was clueless. (I remember trading Mistys for packs because cracking packs was fun and I didn’t need good mana in casual games.) I was driven by my desire to play different decks every week and try different strategies. One week I was on some Extractor Demon/Crypt of Agadeem infinite mill plan, the next I was casting Bogardan Hellkite somehow. Exploring different decks and gameplans and cards was thrilling and there weren’t enough Fridays in the week to cast all the wacky cards I wanted to.
Jumping from deck to deck meant that I was constantly having to acquire new cards, which meant it was either going to be very expensive or I was going to make a lot of trades. I traded before, after, and during every round at the local store. I traded like a fiend on the MTGS forums, back in the days before Deckbox and PucaTrade. It was through this constant churn of cards, along with my natural parsimoniousness, that I began to wise up to the market forces of the game. My goal of not spending any real actual dollars (a goal now long, long forgotten) in conjunction with the occasional Medina article drove me towards being a shrewd trader, always tracking prices, differences in trades, and impending market shifts.
That was a long time ago now. These days I barely pull my binder out of my backpack at the one event I manage to make it to each week. I don’t have nearly any Khans of Tarkir cards, and with the local scene so heavily into Standard, there isn’t much demand for my eight Imperious Perfects. Nearly all of my MTG-related activity occurs in front of a computer screen, where I’m mostly reading, writing, buying, and selling. My time is no longer filled with plowing through trade after trade with other local FNMers, but rather buying fifty copies of this or snagging a cheap foil of that, while flipping spiked cards from my spec box on TCGPlayer.
I’ve been trying not to forget about how different engaging the Magic market was back then for me compared to today. I realize the advice that would have been useful to me four years ago is very different than what I tend to write about now. Things like “buy Glittering Wish!” would have been useless to me, but “try and always be trading up” was something I could use, you know? With that in mind, I’m going to begin an ongoing series that I’ll revisit occasionally that is meant to be aimed more at the binder-grinding store player, not the wolf of…whatever street it is WotC is located on.
You’re playing Magic frequently. You go to FNM without fail. You attend nearly all the game days, prereleases, releases, monthly Legacy events, and Tuesday Moderns. You attend every PTQ and SCG IQ within driving distance. Many hours of your week are spent in front of a sixty card deck. You want to grow your collection and not feel like you always have to keep investing more and more money into the game to keep up with various formats. How do you manage this?
Incremental Growth
This week’s lesson is on trading. It’s something you should be doing. A lot. You should always be on the lookout for trades. Even if you don’t currently need specific cards, you should be trading. By the time you leave a store, you should be able to look around the room and mentally check off each individual – did I trade with him? With her? Did I miss him?
Each trade presents an opportunity. An opportunity to grow your collection, to grow your stock’s value, to add more tantalizing product to your binder. Picture each trade as a potential number. +2. +6. +3. -1. +0. That number represents how much value you added or lost to your binder. If you trade a $4 card for a $6 card, you’re +2. You’ve added two dollars to your collection. If you trade a $5 card for a $5 card, you break even.
Every time you sit down across from someone and initiate a trade, there are three potential outcomes. You can gain value, lose value, or break even. This seems simple enough. Looking at this mathematically, you may expect the average of all of your trades to even out to about zero. A lot of gains and a lot of losses that balance out.
Except that you are knowledgeable about how much cards are worth. You keep track of all of that data. You know to look something up when you aren’t sure. You have the information necessary to identify whenever a trade is negative and subsequently choose not to make said trade. In essence, the floor for how much value you can lose is quite high. After all, how often are you willingly making a trade where you lose $10 in value? Your goal is to make sure that basically never happens. In theory, you should be able to avoid ever losing value in a trade. If a trade is bad, simply don’t make it.
If no trades are ever bad, then what is left? Every trade either results in no change for you or you make money. That means trading is pure +EV. You only ever win or break even, but never lose. If you can only ever win, why not do as many trades as possible? You want to be cranking out trades as often as you can. The more you trade, the more chances you have to add value to your binder. The more overall value in your binder, the easier it is to then acquire the cards you do actually want at a later date.
Here’s a very simple analogy. Imagine a button. Each time you push the button you make some amount of dollars between zero and ten. Why wouldn’t you want to push that button as frequently as you can?
Ignite Memories
The longer you play this game, the more varied your trade binder is likely to become. If you’ve been playing for six months, chances are all you’ve got is Theros and Khans of Tarkir cards. If you’ve been playing for six years, you’ve got stuff from all over the spectrum. I can flip to a random page in my binder and see cards from last block, 2004, or 1994.
Part of acquiring all these random cards is that you have to deal with their random demand profiles. Someone out there wants Ethersworn Adjudicator – it’s a $5 card after all – but you have to find the guy first. The eclectic assortment of cards you wind up with is not going to trade as easily as Siege Rhinos will, regardless of how much they’re worth. Whether you’ve got $3 Intruder Alarms or $40 Transmute Artifacts, finding a buyer is going to be tough for these guys. Snapcaster Mages may draw the attention of 70% of people that flip through your pages, but you’ll be lucky if even 1% ask about that Transmute Artifact.
If you have cards with solid value but difficult-to-capture demand, the best way to handle that is to just show the cards to as many people as possible. You can’t trade Ethersworn Adjudicators away if nobody ever sees them in there. But if you plunk that binder down in front of as many people as you can, eventually you’ll find the guy who started building a Sharuum deck that morning and needs a copy. That’s when you get to flip it for something easier to trade away. (This is also the time to be willing to take a loss if necessary, but that’s another discussion.)
In the course of playing Magic, everyone will end up with a random assortment of cards that will be difficult to find matches for. If you aren’t making frequent trades they will sit in your binders for years. (Trust me on this one, I’ve got far more first hand experience with it than I’d like.) The more trades you make, the more people see these niche cards, the more chances you have to turn them into liquid product. Why do you want liquid cards though? Glad you asked.
Mind’s Desire
When we talk about a card being liquid, what we’re referring to is basically how easy it is to trade away. Abrupt Decay and Beta Black Knight are both in the $12 range, but take a guess as to which one people will want from you more often. Highly liquid cards are things people are always asking for, such as Standard staples and lands. A card with low liquidity may have the same value on paper as a Polluted Delta, but far fewer people actually want to trade for it.
Having a liquid stock does a few things for you. One of the most important qualities of a binder with high liquidity is that you get to make more trades. The more liquid your cards are the more in-demand they are, which means people will ask to trade for them more often. We already discussed above why making frequent trades is important. High liquidity means the potential for a greater number of trades, which is advantageous to you.
Another benefit of high liquidity is that it’s easier to ask for more value in trade. The guy looking to pick up Transmute Artifact knows that it’s probably been in your binder awhile, and that there aren’t many people knocking down your door to trade for it. On the other hand, you probably get asked about your Flooded Strand every time someone sees it. With more overall demand, it’s easier to squeeze a few extra bucks out of the Strand than the Transmute in a trade. The other guy knows that if he doesn’t want to toss you the extra buck or two on the trade for the Strand, you’ll just turn around and trade it to someone who will. Liquidity.
Time of Need
The Friday afternoon ahead of GP New Jersey, Containment Priest was selling for a whopping $50 on site. Meanwhile, I could get it for $15 on TCGPlayer. Why the discrepancy? The answer is apparent to anyone that has ever been hunting cards hours (or minutes) before an event. Immediacy of need. Sure, Priest was $15 on TCGP Friday afternoon, but that doesn’t help the guy who needs it at 10am the next morning. As far as he’s concerned, the only copies in the world are the ones inside of that room. Vendors selling Priest know this, and aren’t letting you get off the hook cheap. If you don’t buy it from them, where are you getting it from?
You can provide similar services to players through trading, especially ahead of PTQs and GPs. Having extra format staples in your binder right before a big event can be wildly lucrative. I’ve gotten $25 in value out of a $10 Gifts Ungiven in the past because it was twenty minutes before the PTQ was starting and the store was sold out. The other fellow had two options: give up value in the trade, or not have the card in his deck. Of the two options, the first is far preferable for him.
Making lots of trades puts you in the position to provide cardboard to people that need it within a short time frame. Don’t be afraid to capitalize on these opportunities.
Ad Nauseam
The last time I traded I needed to look up nearly every card involved. It had been awhile since I had seen the prices on several cards in the trade and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to accidentally give up several dollars of value for cards I wasn’t even in desperate need of. Once the phones are out the trade inevitably ends up nearly perfectly even, and I walked away +0 on the interaction. It’s better than losing value of course, but it’s still disappointing.
Trading multiple times a day multiple times a week means that you’re exposed to the pricing on the cards in your binder, and the cards you’re trading for, often and regularly. Having a constant refresher on up-to-date pricing helps you make informed decisions quickly. With strong pricing knowledge, you can propose trades that give your opponent what they want while still earning value for you.
Leveraging your extensive pricing knowledge is best realized through making trade offers before the phones hit the table and cents start getting added up. (There’s no need to lie either, which I strongly condemn.) Instead, just make offers. “How about my Mantis Rider for your Siege Rhino?” “Ok.” Bam, +2. “You want this Wooded Foothill, right? I’ll give it to you for your Flooded Strand.” “Sure, that works for me.” Boom. +4. Everyone wins. The other guy gets what he wants and you get to make some dollars on the trade. If you didn’t already know these trades were profitable though, you couldn’t offer them. And once the price-checking comes online it becomes significantly harder to earn a little value.
+Rep
As you bang out more and more trades, a few things will happen. You’ll fill out your binder with a wider and wider selection. You’ll rack up a lot of facetime with the regulars in the shop. And you’ll begin to develop a reputation. That reputation should be as “the guy who is always trading and has everything.” It will be in your best interest to foster this reputation.
When you’re the guy in the store with the reputation for having everything and trading constantly, people are going to start with you when they want to trade. “I need a Glen Elendra Archmage. I wonder if Travis has one?” Getting to the point where people are seeking you out for trades is great for you. Not only does it give you an image of honesty, credibility, and amiability, it also establishes you as an expert. Whether or not this is accurate at all, your trade partners will be more likely to respect you and your offers if they perceive you as a dedicated trader. (Of course, you actually need to be amiable and honest.)
Most importantly, a strong reputation as “the trade guy” means you get to make more trades, which we know is exactly where you want to be.
Volatile Rig
One word of caution before you go forth with the bindergrinding. The volatility of your acquisitions should match the frequency of your trading. What does that mean exactly? Cards have varying levels of price volatility, which basically means that some cards change values faster than others. Around the time of Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir, Dig Through Time’s volatility was through the roof. It was skyrocketing at the time, and saw drastic price reductions quickly thereafter. Within the span of five days the card was all over the place on price charts. On the other end of a spectrum is a card like Vendilion Clique. Price growth on clique has been slow and steady, with no expectation of dramatic shifts in prices.
If you’re trading multiple times an event at multiple events a week, you can do things like pick up Dig Through Time on Friday at $4, trade it Saturday at $12, and have none left by the time it’s $6 on Sunday. If you aren’t in a position to do that, avoid cards that are experiencing dramatic and rapid shifts. The more you trade, the more opportunities you have to ride these short waves of profit. When you trade less frequently, these types of cards are just huge liabilities. When you’re at one event a week, skip the hottest commodities and stick with cards a little more stable. You don’t want your binder to lose 10% of its value because you weren’t able to make it to the shop this week and a bunch of cards you picked up dropped in value over the weekend.
Prosperity
My goal with this article wasn’t to highlight hot picks of the week or explain how to take advantage of buylists. Instead, my hope is that this information will be useful to the 98% of players reading that don’t buy and sell frequently, but rather spend just as much time pouring over nine-sleeve plastic pages as they do playing sanctioned Magic.
Look for more articles from me in the future in the “Finance for the Rest of Us” series. For all of you out there in the trenches, trade often and trade aggressively.
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I rarely see a trade happen without phones verifying everything. Well, maybe when it’s a shark trying to take advantage of a kid who has to hurry up because his mom is waiting in the car.
@Joe – I think price-checking is commonplace for trading nowadays. If you aim to trade and profit, you have to trade with a card’s future value in mind, not it’s current price.
Good read, as always!
My favorite thing about trading is that it really builds up the community. You talk to people you usually wouldn’t because of trades. Brings people together.
This is a great read, Travis, thanks.
At my LGS, it’s rare to find someone willing to do a trade without looking up prices. Usually it involves one or two cards. Fetch for fetch is pretty simple. Also, because it’s a relatively small group, many people have knowledge of prices, so it’s harder to make profit.