By: Travis Allen

An (intentionally) untold number of hours of my life have been spent playing Diablo 2. A full fourteen years after it’s release the game remains a remarkable standard by which all action-RPGs (ARPG) are measured. Nearly every aspect of the game was honed and tweaked and polished to perfection by an incredibly talented Blizzard North. Environments were soaked with flavor, from the damp, muted, chilly English moors the game begins on, to claustrophobic, slimy, maggot-infested tunnels, to gothic fire-infused walkways spanning pits of lava in the depths of hell. Fans of the game are immediately transported back in time upon hearing just the first few chords of the Tristram theme music, which captured the travel-weary, besieged hero sentiment in such a way that a player immediately related to the beleaguered residents of the makeshift town.

Even today the game is arguably still the greatest ARPG ever released to the public. Combat was solid and satisfying, with even a level one character’s swing of the sword resulting in gratifying thwacks on Fallen hide. Spells from every character class were visually enthralling. Torrents of fire spewed from the ground engulfing zombie masses, and barbarians came crashing down amidst enemy hordes from thirty feet in the air, all of which evinced great effect. Each time you lobbed a spinning orb of ice or sent a spiralling spear of bone towards lumbering beasts or scurrying Fetishes, there was a visceral sense of action. Pacing between battles was quick enough that you never fell out of the rhythm, but not so high-strung at all times that you couldn’t appreciate truly large battles when the random monster layout ended up clumping half a map’s worth of foes in a single spot.

What captured the audience in a way nothing really had before, and was partly responsible for the historic success of World of Warcraft, was the game’s itemization and skill system. Item drops were paced in such a way that as a player worked their way through the various acts, upgrades to existing equipment occurred just frequently enough that you knew a new toy wouldn’t be far off, but not so frequent that you didn’t have time to appreciate cool gear before it was obsoleted. At the higher levels of character development items often ceased to be strict upgrades and instead became sidegrades, allowing for customization of play experiences.

While there was certainly a Grade A build for each class, an Abzan Midrange build that was well-known and versatile, the true beauty came from the vast set of options unlocked by the intersection of unique skills and functionally different gear. One of my personal favorites was the BearSorc, a hilarious frankenstein of a character build. By combining a certain set of items with no apparent synergy and dressing up a character that had no business using any of them, the emergent properties were such that you were now wildly powerful and completely unconventional. It was the equivalent of Tin Fins, a group of cards that seem discordant on paper, but is in fact unreasonably powerful in practice. If you’ve ever found yourself wanting a Magic: The Gathering action game, the best one that will probably ever be made already exists, and it’s been around for years.

One of the most interesting and engaging aspects of the game was one that grew up from the community entirely organically. A whole economy for powerful items matured as the game progressed, from early days of ubiquitous trading-window hacks to late-stage excessive duping and market crashes. Early on in the game’s lifespan one of the most valuable and universally desired items, the Stone of Jordan, was a key component of the Diablo 2 marketplace. Eventually market forces shifted and items were measured in value based on how many Stones of Jordan they were worth. A cool hat may have been worth one to two SoJs, a well-rolled Stormshield may have been ten or twenty, and a perfect Godfather or Windforce may have commanded a full forty Stones of Jordan.

That was where the market started to break down. When trading items between players, the absolute maximum number of items that could be traded away by one party was forty; the size of the player’s inventory. This became a hindrance as saturation and duping meant that items were worth more and more SoJs. Truly rare and high-end items were worth more than forty SoJs, but there was no safe or reliable way to perform a transaction that involved a greater number than that. One party would be able to completely hose the other, with absolutely zero in-game or customer service repercussions. This left players seeking solutions outside of the trade window.

Aside from the hundreds of sites that sold Diablo 2 gear for cold hard cash, the one trading location that truly thrived was d2jsp. The website still exists for use in other games, although I’m sure the D2 portion is nearly defunct at this point. Like wavedashing in Super Smash Brothers Melee, if you don’t know the name d2jsp, you weren’t playing Diablo 2 at the highest level.

What set d2jsp apart from every other trading solution was that it introduced a flexible currency into the market between players. Normally trading high-end items between players was a nightmare. I may have a near-perfect Breath of the Ancients, but if I’m looking for an Ethereal 2os Crown of the Ages, it’s going to take forever to make that trade. Not only do I have to find someone with an exceedingly rare item, I have to hope they want my sweet sword. d2jsp fixed this by adding “forum gold.”

Forum gold was inherently valueless, with item prices set entirely by the community. It provided a tool for players to trade any item for any other item, simply by turning their half into forum gold, and then paying someone else for their item using forum gold. FG was, and still is, a currency. I would find someone with a huge pile of FG that wanted my sword. I’d give them my sword in the game, and they’d send me however much FG we had agreed it was worth. Then whenever someone was selling an item I wanted on the d2jsp forums, I would pay them the requisite FG and they’d give me the item in-game. It was a bit clunky, and required some level of trust in the people using the system that was violated with some frequency, but it provided a badly needed service to a community with item values that had massive spreads.

Forum gold changed the nature of the game for many, and made items that would otherwise have been completely inaccessible, obtainable. It was invaluable for the average or newer player that wanted to reach the upper stratospheres of items. Just playing through the game a player would occasionally find an item worth a few FG. They would gather up bunches of these items, sell them each for one or two FG, and then find themselves with enough to buy a higher-tier item. It was a reliable method a player could utilize to slowly increment the quality of the gear. No longer were the rarest and best items completely out of reach short of hacking local save files. There was a path, it was clear, and everyone could take it.

I loved d2jsp and forum gold. It was a rich vein for those that understood the system and how to use it. More than just buying things people were selling for too cheap and relisting it, it provided a tool to move unique and high-end gear that otherwise would rot away, while at the same time turning piddly low-level armor into genuinely useful pixels. With time I was able to amass quite a large pile of FG, along with several characters geared to the teeth with some of the best items money could buy. Of course I promptly blew it all on Diablo 3 when that came out some number of years later. In fact, Diablo 3 had an auction house that used real life money whose existence was almost entirely based on the success and necessity of d2jsp for the Diablo 2 community. (The auction house later imploded and was removed by Blizzard, but that’s a whole other topic.)

What does my waxing poetically about Diablo 2 have to do with Magic? There is in fact a great deal of similarity between the item market in D2 and trading MTG cards. Both systems use bartering rather than currency at the player-to-player level. Both require each party to want something from the other. Both result in headaches when one side of the deal is worth 10% more than the other and players are left trying to fill in missing value without using a granular currency like the USD. And like D2, a website has stepped up to fill in a gap between players.

Puca Trade (PT) is still just a Magic trading website, but it’s characteristically different than Deckbox and its ilk. Deckbox works by connecting players based on what cards they want. If we each have something the other wants, Deckbox makes it easy to connect with that individual and facilitate a trade. While it provides for a much deeper pool of players to trade with, it still suffers from the issue that each party needs to be getting something useful to them in order for a trade to be completed. Deckbox isn’t looking to solve this problem, it’s just looking to put so many players in the same pot that it doesn’t come up often.

Puca Trade functions more like d2jsp than Deckbox. I show up and see what cards people are looking for. I don’t attempt to broker a deal between us, though. I don’t browse their Haves list to see if we can make a trade work. Rather, if someone wants a card I have, I just ship it off to them. What I receive in return is not cards, but points. Points function as a currency. As I send real cards off to people, I get their points. Then when I decide I want a card, I use my points to ‘purchase’ that card. (Purchase isn’t exactly the right term, since I’m not going to the market, picking something, and handing the seller points. Rather, I hang a sign on front of my door – “I’d like one Snapcaster, please!” – and someone comes along, slides the Snap through my mail slot, takes the points out of a basket next to the door, and continues on their way.) What Puca Trade does is put a highly divisible middle-man into the trading process, making life easier for people on either side of a deal.

With a system of this nature comes many nuanced opportunities to maximize gains. There aren’t many ways to do something completely wrong, but there are strategies to take that will be sure to help you make the most of your Puca experience. This certainly won’t be an exhaustive list, but it should at least get you on the right path to getting the most bang for your buck, without actually involving any banging or bucks.

One particular aspect of Puca Trade makes it particularly unique, and will be the backdrop for most of our discussion. Card values are not fluid on PT; they are in fact the result of “complex algorithms.” During a real life trade, you and your partner are able to debate the value of cards. Maybe a Snapcaster is $30, maybe it’s $33. There’s a back and forth to decide on a value. On Puca Trade, it’s set in stone. As of writing this, Snapcaster is 3016 points. That value can and will change, but if you’re trading or picking up a Snapcaster today, it’s worth 3016 points. 99% of trades will take place with the pre-determined card values. (There are ways to circumvent this, and don’t worry – it’s not against the rules to do so.)

The fact that card values are set automatically is neither good nor bad, it just is. It’s important to be aware of this fact though, because it will dictate how we approach trading within the system. Values set through heuristics and algorithms will occasionally be “wrong,” in the way that any monetary value assigned to an item without intrinsic value can be wrong. Part of our strategy will be looking to capitalize on gaps such as this.

Know What You Want

The first thing you need to do when coming in is understand why you’re here. What are you looking to get out of the system?

The actual transfer of cardboard on PT is not particularly expedient. As a new user you’ll start with about five bucks worth of points. In order to get enough to pick up real cards, you’ll need to add your cards to the system, wait until you find someone who needs them, get them in the mail, and wait for them to receive them. From the day that you sign up to the first time your account is credited points from another user could easily be over a week. Then you’ve got to wait for someone who has cards you want to agree to ship them to you, then actually ship them, then get them in the mail…

It’s a slow process. Our takeaway then is that you shouldn’t be using PT to chase down Standard staples you need for FNM next week. PT is best when used for longer-term goals, such as finding the last few pieces you need for a Modern deck, slowly assembling a Legacy list, cards to fill in holes in your collection, and of course EDH components.

This isn’t to say you can’t use PT to acquire Standard cards. Just realize that it’s generally not going to happen quickly.

Know What You Have

While the actual transfer of cardboard can be a bit time consuming, the rate at which trades happen is blindingly fast. We’ll talk about this in a minute, but the lead-in is that you need to know exactly what product you’re working with. Go through your trade binder and identify the cards you’d like to trade. (Instead of blindly adding them to your collection, make sure you check what PT thinks their value is first. Most of the time PT is just fine and you should go ahead and add it. There are other times this isn’t the case, as we’ll see below.)

Only add cards to your Haves that you are 100% willing to trade at their given value. If there’s a card you’re not sure you want to get rid of, or if its PT value seems a little low, skip it for now. The reason for this is that you need to be able to pull the trigger to send a card within seconds of someone needing it. If you have to hesitate and question whether it’s a card you want to get rid of, you’ll miss the opportunity to send. When someone wants a card you have, you need to be lightning quick on the ‘Send Card’ button.

Part of maintaining this list will be removing cards from your Haves if you trade them off locally. If you’re only working with a handful of cards this isn’t hard to keep up with. If you find yourself with thirty or more cards on your PT list though, you may want to just pull them out of your binder and leave them at your desk so that you’re always 100% on knowing exactly what you have. You don’t want to see a Bloodghast pop up as a possible trade, and then wonder if you traded your last one at SCG last weekend and have to dig up your binder to check. By the time you have your answer, someone else will have already committed to send them the card and the opportunity is gone.

No Casuals

Knowing without hesitation what cards you have to trade away is key because of how quickly trading works. Anyone that wants a reasonably available, common-place card is going to have their order filled within seconds. The list of people that want Alpha Veteran Bodyguard will have names on it and is not going to change very often, but the list of people that want Mantis Rider is nearly always empty. Why is this? As soon as someone both A. wants Mantis Rider and B. has the points to cover it, someone agrees to send almost immediately. There are way more people looking to trade away Mantis Rider than there are people looking to pick it up, so trades happen lightning fast.

The flip side of this, and what strikes most new users, is that most of the time nobody wants your cards. Or more specifically, nobody fulfills the conditions of wanting your cards and also being able to afford them. Out of the 86,400 seconds in a day, there may be a grand total of twenty to sixty of them wherein you have the opportunity to send someone a card. You need to be paying attention when this happens, but how do you manage that?

I’ve been using Auto Refresh for Chrome, and I’m a big fan. It’s simple enough. Tell it how often to refresh the page, in this case the ‘Send Cards’ page, and then stick the window on another monitor where you can keep your eye on it. I usually do mine for about 20s or so. All day long it just sits over there, constantly refreshing, and as soon as a match comes up I’m mashing ‘Send Card.’ Like I said, prepare for long periods of downtime and then a sudden flurry of activity while you rush to send the card.

Other tools exist to help manage the tracking of trade opportunity changes. There are other apps that will monitor when the text on the page changes, which you can use to track the “Total: 0” text. I’m sure there are other tools as well. I haven’t dived too deep into this well myself, but there is certainly more out there to refine the process. These would be especially helpful if you don’t have the luxury of multiple monitors.

Use Auto-Matching. Also don’t.

When you’re looking at the page for sending cards, you’ll notice a toggle for auto-matching. When you turn this on, it will only show you cards people are looking for that are in your Haves. This page is what will nearly always be empty. When you’ve left the PT page to the side to refresh all day long while you’re working, you’ll want this to be on so that you only see valid trades.

We can definitely make use of the list when auto-matching is off as well though. I like to turn it off and then sort by points, highest to lowest. This will show you the most expensive cards people can currently afford in descending order. The first thing you’ll notice is just how many people want Alpha and Beta cards. Apparently a lot of people are trying to put together sets of those. (We’ll get to A/B cards later.)

What you’re viewing here is the list of cards people want, can afford, and haven’t been sent yet. This is interesting to us because we’re seeing the unserved market. Here are all the cards that are desired that aren’t being sent. Once you get past the slew of A/B and Legends stuff, you’ll see all sorts of odds and ends. It’s important to pay attention to this stuff – this tells you what to look out for when you’re trading at your LGS. There’s always a bunch of Snapcasters on the list. Shocklands are common. Modern foils like Spell Snare and Serum Visions show up. The new fetches, especially Flooded Strand, seem to be popular. Geist of Saint Traft has been underserved lately.

If you’ve been at the Magic grind for awhile like I have, you’ve probably got not only one trade binder, but a bunch, filled with all sorts of odds and ends across the spectrum. Browsing this list you may see cards that make you think “hmm, I think have one of those around.” You’ll dig around, find it, and agree to send it. When your collection gets big enough, it’s unlikely everything you’re willing to trade will make it onto your PT Haves list.

In addition to looking for possible trades, pay attention to not only what you’re seeing, but what you’re not seeing. Notice that there are nearly no Siege Rhinos. Checking the page for Rhino confirms that aside from two foil copies, nobody in the system is looking for and can afford that card right now. If you notice an absence of something, look up the card and you can see how many people in the system have it on their wants list, regardless of whether they can afford it.

Seeing what cards are heavily represented on that list, and therefore aren’t being sent out, may be of use to you in another way as well. If fifteen different people are looking for Snapcasters but they aren’t receiving them, perhaps there’s a reason why. When you see lots of copies of the same card not sent, that should be a flag that there may be a reason nobody is sending them.  If you aren’t sure why nobody will send the card out, it may be time to do some research.

Don’t Send Small Cards

The bare minimum in cost to send a card is the price of an envelope and stamp, which is probably in the neighborhood of $.50 to $.75. Keep this in mind when you’re deciding what to trade. I have a stack of Lotus Petals, but I’m not trading them on PT. At $3 each, the postage cost is about 18% of the value of what’s inside. That is way, way too high. If you can send them as a playset sure, it’s great. It’s not worth it one at a time though. Perhaps some of the guys that grind the heck out of PT can offer suggestions for how to profitably move smaller-value cards of this nature.

In general, I won’t send anything worth less than 500 points, or about $5. That keeps the value of the stamp relative to the card inside to under 10% or so. Even that’s not a ratio I’m happy with. I really shoot to move cards in the $10 to $20 range. Once a card is around $10 the cost of postage relative to the points you’re earning is much better, and under $20 means that you don’t need to worry about using additional security measures. Once a package is over $20, I’m putting it in a bubble mailer and using tracking through PayPal’s services, which puts me at about $2.50 in shipping with the cost of the mailer. Between $10 and $20 is the sweet spot then, as your postage:points ratio is optimum. (You get back into a good ratio once the package gets high enough in value, say about $70+. That will happen far less often than the $10-$20 trades though.)

Send Weird Cards

One of the biggest reasons to use PT is that you can get full value for cards that are otherwise very difficult to find buyers for. Foil Kaervek the Merciless is worth $8 or $9, but how often do you think people are going to want this type of card from you at your local store? That’s the type of card that has real value, and a real market, but there may not be a warm body within forty miles of you that actually wants the card. PT is an excellent place to out these types of cards, especially because many people are on PT with the intent of filling out EDH decks. The nature of PT means that EDH foils are a key pillar of the economy. All those cards in your binder that are worth more money than anyone ever expects but nobody ever wants to trade for? Those are perfect PT fodder.

Climb the Ladder

In general you want to be moving up the chain, turning lots of smaller and mid-level cards into bigger things. Think things like Vendilion Clique, Tarmogoyf, and big foils. In general more expensive cards are more expensive for a reason – they’re more useful. And more useful cards leave people’s personal binders less often. Relative to cheaper cards, they’re harder to find in trade binders and harder to justify buying with cash. Part of the beauty of PT is that it allows you to take this wide mess of lower-value cards and easily turn that into one or two solid pieces of cardboard that would otherwise be very challenging trade in real life. Consider two scenarios at a GP. You have a binder full of random $5-$20 cards and you want to trade for a Tarmogoyf, or you have a Tarmogoyf and you want to trade for a bunch of random $5-$20 cards. Your day is going to be a lot easier if you have the Tarmogoyf.

This isn’t to say you can’t pick up small stuff on PT. I traded for a slew of cards between $4-$10, and I traded away stuff as big as Mox Opals. The key is that those trades were for personal satisfaction; cards I really wanted for EDH. I framed it in my head as such: in real life, would I be happy trading card X for all these foils? Frequently the answer was yes. I had a spare Crucible of Worlds, so I shipped it on PT, and the points probably got me three or four cards at least. I decided I would make that same trade in real life, so I was ok turning the Crucible into points. If you’re looking at a card in your binder, and looking at the cards on your Want list, and thinking that you wouldn’t trade the card in your hand for the cards on the screen, just don’t send it. There’s strategy in trading up the chain, but it’s ultimately a personal decision.

Manage Your Team

Don’t just shove every card you’re eventually hoping to trade for onto your Wants list or you may find yourself never coming close to picking up the bigger cards you want. As you rack up points, cards that you can currently afford will show up as potential trades in the system. If you have twenty cards under 1,000 points on your Want list, you’re going to end up getting all twenty of them before you get a single 3,000 point card. Because you only receive points when the individual on the other end confirms he got your cards, your points will roll in sporadically. You’ll keep breaking the 1,000 point threshold, someone will send you one of those twenty cards, and you’ll be right back down to thirty-five points, no closer to that 3,000 point card.

If there’s fifty cards you’re hoping to pick up through PT, have an idea of priority. If there’s one or two you really need before all the others, put only those on your list. Once you have enough points for those two and you receive them, you can start adding the other, less important things to your Wants. Keep in mind too that expensive cards often take longer to find matches for. When I started I put around thirty or forty cards on my Wants list. While there were cards on my list under $20 I couldn’t keep more than 1,000 points in my account. Now that I mostly only need $40+ cards, they’ve been sitting there for a week, and who knows how long it will take. A foil Stoneforge Mystic may be your highest priority want, but keep in mind that you could possibly pick up every other card on your list before you ever would have gotten someone to send you the SFM.

The silver level membership is useful for this, as it adds a Watch list. This particular feature is handy, although certainly replaceable outside of the system. Silver also adds the ability to send points, which we’ll talk about later.

Death to the Hoard

Always have a plan for your points. Avoid having a stockpile of points with nothing you plan on spending them on. A situation where you have thousands or even tens of thousands of points and no cards on your Want list is exactly the situation you want to avoid.

Our reason for avoiding this is inflation. Every time a new account is created, there’s 500 free points to be had just by doing things like filling out your profile. Adding 500 points per person isn’t bad, but it isn’t the whole story. Puca Trade also sells points for cash, which has the potential to add huge sums of points over the long run. I honestly have no idea how often people buy points directly from PT, but if my Twitter feed is indication, I’d bet at least 3-5% of users, with possibly up to 10-15%, have and/or will continue to buy points from the site. 

Introduction of these points to the system still isn’t the biggest issue. Inflation in a system such as this stems from the fact that there’s no outlet. Once points are in the system, that’s it. They’re there. Points added to the system never leave the system. If every month PT is adding thousands of points to the market, but they’re never leaving, the average value of a point is decreasing over time. Theoretically, if this trajectory were to continue unaltered, five years from now points would be worth considerably less than they are today. Therefore, it’s unwise to keep part of your collection’s value tied up in a currency that currently is facing the possibility of inflation.

There are three caveats to this warning. The first is that you shouldn’t worry about this in the short to mid term. Looking to save your way up to a dual land or a Workshop? Go for it. There’s nothing wrong with saving up for a big card. Inflation doesn’t happen overnight, and it happens gradually. You aren’t going to lose money spending a few months building up a bank account of 30,000 points.

The second is that this is a risk/reward caution. Remember, we’re all striving to be Bayesians. It’s entirely possible that for some reason Puca points rise in value. If that were to happen, you’d obviously want to have as many points as you could. However, it’s far more likely that they lose value. Think of it this way: if you cash your excess points out into shocklands, it’s a very safe investment. You don’t need to worry about those devaluing anytime soon. If you instead hold the Puca points, there’s a small chance the points could gain value, but a much larger chance that the points lose value. So why increase your risk exposure by having a volatile asset with low reward when you could just put your collection value into something much more sturdy?

Third, I’m sure the guys over at PT are aware of this facet of their model. After asking them about it they tell me that currently there still aren’t enough points in the system based on whatever mathemagic they use, so they’re allowing more to enter. If it reaches a point where inflation starts to creep up, they may introduce point sinks to help pull excess out of the system. A bit of guidance from an economist may be all it takes to safeguard Puca Trade against concerns of this type. Even still, I point you back to the second paragraph – why take a risk that you don’t need to?

Don’t Bother With Short-Term Specs

Do you know how many people wanted Chalice of the Void while it was still 500-600 points on PT but spiking to over $10 on TCG? A lot more than were shipping it. Picking up spec targets is fine, but they need to be long burns. Nothing that you expect to spike in under two months.

Work the Margins

Before adding a card to your PT Haves, make sure you check out it’s market value here on MTGPrice. The cards with wide spreads between retail sales and Puca points are what you want to be sending away, while the cards with real tight margins are what you want to be receiving. Let’s see an example.

ROE Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
TCG Copies: $35-40
Puca Points: 4,806

RAV Foil Doubling Season
TCG Copies: $35-$40
Puca Points: 3,376

If you have the Emrakul, you can trade him away on PT for 4,806 points. You can then use 3,376 of those points to pick up a Doubling season, earning you a cool 1,430 points in the process. Meanwhile, you can head to TCGP and pay the same price for both copies of the cards. Theoretically if you were going to buy a Doubling Season from TCG, you’d be better off buying an Emrakul instead, trading it away on PT, then using those points to pick up a Season.

This isn’t a perfect example. Emrakul shows up as $54 on MTGPrice, while that foil Doubling Season is only $40, so there’s your 1,400 point gap. For the guy with cold hard cash though, they’re the same price. (This is a good example of how fluid and unreliable our concept of worth is.)

This does illustrate an important concept though: be aware of the spreads between the rest of the market and PT. Your goal is to put yourself on the ride side of every transaction. It won’t always happen, but it will help inform you what is worth listing on PT and what isn’t. There’s a reason there are never less than a few playsets of Snapcaster Mage in demand. The PT value is so close to the cash value that for many people it’s not worth sending the card out. Why take 3,000 points when you could have $27?

Seller Beware

Currently, foil Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer is 339 points. Meanwhile there’s a single NM copy on TCGP and it’s $17. Slobad spiked after Daretti emerged as the most popular Commander 2014 deck, but Puca’s algorithms haven’t caught up yet. For awhile foil 7th City of Brass was around 400 points, which is $4, while copies are actually worth about $100. When you’re plugging cards into your Haves, especially foils, do yourself a favor and be sure that PT is up-to-date on prices. You don’t want to actually send a $75 card for seven bucks worth of points.

Alpha Mail

When browsing the list of all possible trades, it’s readily apparent that Alpha and Beta cards are heavily represented. People all over the system are trying to put together sets (good luck) and are using PT to make it happen.

Alpha and Beta cards exist solely as collector’s items, which makes their pricing more complicated and nuanced than everyday Standard staples. There’s an entire article in discussing how the pricing model for collector’s items behaves differently than competitive staples, but the long and short of it is that A/B cards have a much wider spread between a site that uses retail prices like PT and a consumer-to-consumer site like eBay. Snapcaster Mage may run you $30 on any given MTG retail website like CFB or SCG, and in a player-to-player sale the price will likely be at least $25. On the flip side of that, while you may pay $125 retail for a Veteran Bodyguard, on a site like eBay you’ll pay less than $100.

With such disparate pricing across different markets, A/B cards are great for adding a big volume of points to your account quickly. Picking them up for secondary market prices and then shipping them on PT for retail-equivalent points is a great profit.

But wait, we can do even better. Imagine the guy with an Alpha Veteran Bodyguard in his trade binder. How long do you think that’s been sitting there? Given how long I’ve had my two Beta Dark Rituals front and center, probably a long while. There’s a definite market for these types of cards, but the buyers are spread out and not necessarily the type of person to swap binders at FNM. Even if someone does happen to seem interested, the retail price tag my scare them off. That’s where we come in.

Chances are the guy with the Bodyguard would like to move the card. By making aggressive trade offers, you may be able to pick it up for a lot less than the sticker price. Make offers with Standard staples that you know are popular. You may be surprised what deals people are willing to make on product like this. Try starting with three Flooded Strands, for instance. That’s $60 in grade-A Standard stock that’s not going to be hard to move. It’s solid, reliable, popular, useful cardboard. This is going to be appealing to someone that’s watched that Bodyguard develop wrinkles it’s been in his binder so long. It may require some haggling, and not everyone will go for it, but you may be surprised how willing people are to trade expensive, collector’s-only cards for less value in useful Standard cards.

A playset of Strands is 7,460 points as of 12/21/14. If you trade the set of Strands for the Bodyguard, you can then ship the Bodyguard for 11,249 points, earning you 3,789 more points – nearly $40! Living the dream on A/B cards will be cutting a profit at both ends. Pick them up in trade for below average rates by offering quality Standard cards, and then ship them for maximum retail value in the Puca system. It’s unlikely these opportunities will come up often, as NM Alpha and Beta doesn’t show up in binders every day, but keep it in mind as you browse, and remember that prices are much more flexible when bartering for collector’s material.

A Silver Level You Can Buy

Multiple account levels exist within PT, with the differences listed here. There’s a big jump from common to uncommon (silver), and a much smaller jump from silver to gold. Upgrading from silver to gold doesn’t give you much in the way of lasting benefits, especially when you consider that card price history and trends are readily available right here at MTGPrice for free. That leaves sending cards as gifts (pfft), higher priority visibility, and increased referral bonuses. Unless you’re working the referral bonus game, that basically leaves the higher priority visibility, which I’m pretty sure isn’t worth an extra $5 a month.

Jumping from a free account to silver is definitely worth considering though. There are a lot of added features that can matter, such as the Watch list, receiving foils, and list exporting. While these are useful, what we’re most interested in at this level is the sending of points. Being able to transfer points between users opens up a lot of options in wheeling and dealing that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Perhaps the most common use of this feature is the sending of non-NM cards. Let’s say I’m browsing the list of cards people are looking for and I see someone needs a Reset. I have one, but it’s a bit edgeworn. I can’t send it as NM, but I’d still like to ship it for points. I can message the guy who needs the card and ask him if he’d like an SP copy. If the NM copy is 1799 points, perhaps we negotiate to a price of 1600 points. I click the “send card” button and ship him an SP Reset. Once he receives the card he completes the trade, and I get 1799 points. I then use my ‘Send Points’ functionality to send him the difference of 199 points. Without the ability to send points like this, I would never be able to ship SP cards without using external reimbursement, like PayPal or shipping him additional cards with the Reset, which are both messy options.

Sending points also opens up the door to cutting deals. If User A is twenty or thirty points short of affording a 2,000 point card, User B can just send him the card and User A can transfer his 1,980 points to User B. This allows for transactions to occur that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, because User A’s desire for the card never would have shown up on the ‘Send Cards’ screen.

On that note, don’t be afraid to negotiate. I’ve already worked out a few deals where I agreed to pay less points than PT assigned a card. I felt PT was asking too much for something, I told my trade partner what I thought was a reasonable number, and he agreed. Everyone’s happy. Negotiating on cards comes up most often on foreign language product.

Game On

I upgraded my account to silver simply because I wanted to trade for foils, and I don’t mind paying the yearly fee, but there’s a way to game this if you so desire. You need silver to trade for foils, but you can trade them away without it. A free account has full functionality when it comes to shipping cards. If you know there are several foil cards you need, make a note of their total value. While your account is free, keep sending cards and increasing your bankroll. Once you’ve got enough points to cover all the foils you need, buy a single month of silver. Ideally, you’ll pick all of them up within that single month. Now instead of having silver for two or three months and not taking full advantage of it, because you have to spend weeks shipping cards and earning points, you only need to pay for it for a month. If you’re only looking for a specific handful of cards and not continued usage of the service, it’s a good way to save yourself a few months of subscription fees.

Timing is Everything

Cards will pop up on your send page when people have enough points to cover it. People earn those points when someone they send a card to confirms that they received the card. People tend to check their mail when they get home from work – between 5pm and 9pm. This means that the most lucrative times to watch PT are the evening hours. If you’re looking to send as many cards as possible, the times when people are getting home from work and opening their mail are exactly when you want to be watching like a hawk. A lot more people are opening their mail and sitting down to the computer at 7pm than they are at 3am or Sunday at noon.

Whew! That was a lot of strategy. I hope you find some of it useful. Good luck trading!

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.

By: Travis Allen

There are many ways Magic decks appeal to players. The archetypal GR list that is a pile of nasty monsters, each capable of winning a game when left unchecked, appeals to players who just want to beat the snot out of their opponent with heavy-hitters. Slow UW decks that seek to slowly gain complete control of the game with counterspells, removal, and card advantage appeal to those who want to leverage their play skill over their opponent in a long, drawn out process. Combo decks tickle the fancy of players that want to do cool things very quickly, ending with a critical turn in which the actually or virtually win the game on the spot. Burn decks appeal to sociopaths.

Everyone is drawn more strongly to one type of deck, and some are drawn more strongly than others. A severe spike may find one archetype more interesting than another, but will never play anything other than the deck that gives him or her the best chance of winning. Other players will stick to discard decks exclusively, despite the fact that they’re bad in every format, because they derive perverse pleasure from seeing their opponent empty-handed. Regardless, while everyone has their preferred method of winning, there still exists sexy decks that at the very least will momentarily capture the attention of nearly any player.

Sexy decks are ones that can claim to do something wild and unique. What does sexy in the world of Magic look like? It’s drawing your entire deck in a single turn. It’s a screenshot of your opponent at -20,000 life. It’s killing them on turn zero. It’s hitting the token limit on MTGO. (Which is only 200, by the way. That is a heinously low token limit, and further evidence of how garbage the software really is. What if your opponent is playing some stupid Rhox Faithmender deck and gets to 370 life before you go off and make infinite 1/1 hasty tokens on the last turn of time? “Sorry, even though you win in paper Magic, you lose online.” I’d be pissed.) Sexy is not things like casting Mana Leak or activating Deathrite Shaman to dome someone for two life at the end of their turn.

We’re all momentarily enthralled by sexy decks and sexy plays. It’s human nature. Even if we know that it isn’t good or reliable, it’s still fun to see the extremes of the game. It’s a great reminder of how flexible the world of Magic really is, which is a welcome reminder when staring down the seventh Siege Rhino of the day in round two.

Sexy decks are usually defined by sexy cards. One or two hot cards pull the whole package together and make it look desirable. Birthing Pod is a sexy card. Goryo’s Vengeance is a sexy card. Villainous Wealth is a smoldering, tight black dress in an upscale hotel bar, my-girlfriend-would-be-upset-if-she-knew-what-I’m-thinking-about sexy card. Sexy cards are perfect for letting us entertain our darkest, filthiest, magical christmasy-land fantasies. As such, they’re also prone to exciting our wallets as well.

Work horse cards can be expensive, but it usually takes time to get there. They’re boring and dependable. People buy them because they have to, not because they’re excited to. Sylvan Caryatid, a AAA Standard staple, has taken nearly two months to go from $6.50 to $16.50. Caryatid is powerful and format-defining, but it’s not exactly sexy. Sexy is Glittering wish, which went from $2.50 to $20 in twenty-four hours.

Everyone can appreciate a sexy deck, and sexy decks contain sexy cards. Sexy cards see drastic movements in price.

You go to Pat Chapin for Grixis decks. You go to Craig Wescoe for white weenie decks. Who do you go to for sexy decks? Travis Woo.

It must be the name, because he and I share a love for brews that do very sexy things. I’m playing Jeskai Ascendancy in Modern right now, and I’ve cast more Goryo’s Vengeances in my lifetime than most men. I was trying to get Tooth and Nail to work as soon as Modern was announced, and even when I play real decks like Scapeshift I shoehorn a Gifts Ungiven/Elesh Norn package into them. We both like sexy decks. We both like claiming crazy things. We both like playing on the edge of the format.

Travis Woo enjoys his creations and he wants you to enjoy them as well. When I consider his proselytizing I am reminding of Mike Flores. They both share unbridled enthusiasm for their creations, convinced that they will turn the world of Magic on its ear. Each new deck they unveil is, in their eyes, a game-changer that will Make Them Take Notice, and Set the Format On Fire. Their unadulterated exaltation of their creations is a key component of their public identity. Neither of them writes about a deck and says “This seems decent in testing and I’m looking for ways to make it better.” They say things like “cash in your 401k to buy Primal Commands because this deck is unreal.”

The excitement Woo exudes when discussing and showing off his creations, along with the fact that they often utilize cards that have been sitting in dusty boxes for years, has a tendency to generate powerful hype when a new model rolls into the showroom floor. Stream a few games of sacrificing Summoner’s Egg at the end of T3 and then killing your opponent with the Emrakul that was underneath and people get into a tizzy. Cries about Woo breaking it circulate amongst the echo chamber, and before you know it there are no copies of the eponymous card left on TCGP. This has become known as the Woo Effect.

Without fail, these brews end up being far too unstable to reliably perform in large events. A few diehards will actually sleeve them up and take them to local Modern events where they’ll realize that UR Delver is just too real a deck and too miserable to play against for the concoction to succeed. The deck is desleeved, the marquee cards put into the trade binder, and the player returns to Channel TWoo eagerly awaiting the next revolution.

Do you know what isn’t sexy? Slowing your combo down to play around removal. Boarding out the turn-one kill and instead beating down with a few 2/1s. Getting disrupted by a turn one Thoughtseize and spending the rest of the game durdling around while your opponent does you in with a Tarmogoyf. Consistency isn’t sexy. Losing to sideboard cards isn’t sexy. Low prices aren’t sexy.

Waves of Aggression is the most recent recipient of the TWoo fervor machine, and the impetus for me to write this article. It was $.50 to a dollar on CFB for the longest time, yet now I can barely find a copy under $6.

This is hardly the first time this is happened, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Let’s look back at the last few times a card has seen such a drastic rise in response to inclusion in a TWoo article.

The next most recent occurrence that I can recall was Summoner’s Egg. In typical TWoo fashion, this image was included in the article in which he writes about Summoner’s Egg.

This stands in contrast to the price graph.

Like Waves of Aggression, it hovered in the $.50 to $1 range before he wrote about it. The spike here was slightly less, only hitting roughly $4, but the fall more severe: back to $1.50 CFB; up a whopping $.50 from where it started.

Following Egg is a pair of green cards that seemingly held great potential. I seem to recall TWoo advising you take out loans to buy into Primal Command.

Primal Command faired a bit better. I was on the train on this one as I’m a sucker for a good green card. I remember picking them up between $2.75 and $3.25. The best buylist is as high now as it’s ever been at $5. It’s worth noting that while the spike on Primal Command first occurred in January, it wasn’t until May that the buylist actually got to $5. I spent weeks watching Command, hoping it would rise enough in price that it would be worth cashing out. It took months before there was actual realized profit to be had. I guess at this point, eight months later, I’ve made a profit of $2 a copy. Hooray?

Genesis Wave saw roughly comparable success. Copies were $2 on CFB right up until January 1st, when they jumped all the way to $7. The buylist didn’t follow immediately though. It ended up hitting $4 a copy, but not until February, and it only lasted two or three weeks. It dropped to $3 shortly after, and remains there today. I can recall shipping a few sets for $20 on eBay, but I think all said and done I made maybe $10 a playset. You’re certainly pleased with that, although the window of opportunity to do so was short; maybe a two or three days at most. There was no way you could have moved more than a handful of sets in that time period.

Finally we come to what would have been the most lucrative of TWoo’s recommendations: Disrupting Shoal.

Disrupting Shoal was $2 before Ninja Bear Delver Whatever, and managed a respectable $12 afterwards. A 500% increase is for sure a healthy profit margin. The buylist didn’t do a great job of keeping up, spending only days north of $5, but the private market would have been good to you. The heydey didn’t last forever, but NM copies are about $5-$6 on TCG right now which is still more than the $2 you would have paid for them.

Living End is perhaps the card most connected with Woo, although I don’t think he can claim responsibility for its price today. According to his CFB bio he T8’d with it in 2010, but the price spike isn’t until mid-2013, shortly after Modern Masters was released. While he certainly put the card on the map, buying in when he “broke” it would have meant a three year wait on getting paid.

What’s the takeaway from all of this? First I want to remind you of the costs of flipping cards.The short version of the story is that a card has to see a substantial rise in price in order for you to make any profit whatsoever, and even then it can be difficult to make more than minimum wage.

Next I want to point out that really, with the exception of Disrupting Shoal, you really wouldn’t have made much money buying cards Woo recommends. If you bought the night the article was published, before any movement had occurred whatsoever, you stood a chance to make a profit. It would have required not only being the first in line at TCGP, but also not having your order cancelled, receiving the cards before the hype died down, and actually getting them sold somewhere. If you were a day late to buy your copies or dragged your feet listing them after they arrived, any margin of profit would have been entirely erased.

Keep in mind too that the buylists almost never move quickly with these sorts of spikes. Vendors know that these are flashes in the pan, and therefore demand will die off rapidly. They aren’t in a rush to buy your Waves of Aggression if they expect that nobody is going to want to buy the card a week later. This means that in order to out your copies you’ll need to go to somewhere like eBay or TCG. While you often sell the cards for more money in those venues, there are also greater transaction costs, greater risk, and they require a larger time investment.

I also notice that the two cards that sustained the largest percentage increases, Disrupting Shoal and Living End, are both free spells. Perhaps the lesson here isn’t to watch what Woo is playing, but rather just to assume any free spell will eventually be broken. (I personally have a pile of Soul Spikes that’s just waiting for the day.)

It’s easy to look at cards like Waves of Aggression spike so hard and wish that you had gotten in on the train, but the stark reality is that it’s nearly impossible to turn a profit from these types of spikes unless you were already holding a pile of copies when it happened. Without copies in-hand on day zero, your best approach to Woo spikes is to observe bemusedly while putting your MTG funbux somewhere more reliably lucrative.

On a separate topic, I’ll be a bit quiet for the next two months. Expect only two articles or so out of me between now and the first of the year. Don’t fret though; I fully intend to return full time in January, hopefully with tales about buying and selling across the sea in Tokyo. I’ll also still be active on Twitter – @wizardbumpin – to the chagrin of all of my followers.

By: Travis Allen

Perhaps the most common question I’m asked is “when should I sell [some card]?” It’s a reasonable question. You’ve got spare copies that you’ve been saving for a rainy day, say Sylvan Caryatid, and you want to know when you should get rid of them. The goal is simple enough to understand; maximize your profit while avoiding unnecessary risk. While there’s no clear algorithm that will tell you exactly when to sell, there is a heuristic I use when making the decision myself. I’ll provide you with my methodology today. First, two mistakes that are easy for anyone to stumble into when making decisions about selling cards. 

One of the biggest traps of speculating on Magic cards, or even more general investment avenues such as the stock market, is not knowing when to dump a good. There are a few psychological factors that play into this, such as the “sunk cost fallacy.” I can demonstrate this concept with an example from my own recent history. I purchased about $100 worth of Advent of the Wurms a ways back when they were still about $3. As it became clear they weren’t going break out and that I should out them while I could, I instead gripped onto them tighter, assuring myself that someone would definitely bust the card and I would make my money back. Because I had paid the $3 each for them, I didn’t want to sell them for less than that. Instead of taking the $1.50 each or whatever it was I could have gotten for them, I instead held on, waiting until I could at least break even. Here we are today, with the best buylist for my thirty-some copies being $.25.

When you’re considering whether to sell cards, you must divorce your decision from the amount you originally paid for them. If the best time to sell is today, then you should sell today, regardless of what sort of profit or loss you’re looking at. For a better understanding of the topic, I recommend checking out the wiki page.

Another trap when speculating on Magic cards is greed, plain and simple. When Fist of Suns first spiked in early January copies went from $2 to $12. If you had been lucky enough to have some in your possession when the spike occurred, you should have rushed to market. If you were greedy you would have listed the cards for the full $12, hoping to extract maximum value from the sudden surge in demand. Over the span of weeks the price slowly dwindled with a lack of results. If you kept trying to squeeze as much out of them as you could you would have never actually sold any. The card has now settled at $5, which means that if you manage to sell your copies you’d see a much smaller return than if you had just listed them at $9 or $10 immediately after the spike and gotten another fool to buy in. Instead of quickly shipping cards during the wave of hype, being greedy and hoping for maximum profit would have ended up costing you a good $3-$5 profit per card.

Managing to get ahead of a price spike is an excellent feeling. Watching TCG sell out of Master of Waves while you stroke your twenty playsets that you got for $6/card would have been euphoric. Getting in ahead of the spike is only half the battle though. Knowing when to get rid of your copies for a profit can be even more difficult than guessing the next big thing.

Hype-driven spikes aren’t the only times where we fail to sell out when we should. Impending rotations, promises of reprints, and the recognition of price ceilings are all indicators of the time to sell being now. Let’s take a look at some things to keep in mind when considering whether you should sell your copies of a card.

Choo Choo! All Aboard the Hype Train!

When deciding whether you should sell a card, ask yourself if it just saw a massive spike in price. If the answer to that is yes, then you should almost definitely be selling. “But Travis, what if that snake alchemist brew ends up being tier one and blah blah blah.” No, stop it. If a card spiked, ship your copies fast and hard. Nearly every single time a card sees a huge jump due to a breakout performance the price drops significantly from its peak in a matter of days. Master of Waves dropped from a peak of $25(!) to $10 in about two weeks, even though the best possible scenario of Mono-Blue being a tier one deck materialized. Think about that.

Everything went exactly right for Master of Waves. He was a four-of mythic staple in a tier-one Standard deck that dominated the format for months, and still the $20+ price tag was unsustainable.

Take a look at the price graphs on Aluren. Or Boros Reckoner. Or Fist of Suns. They all drop-off from their frenzied height. Exceptions to this are few and far between, and shouldn’t be used as evidence not to sell during a hype phase.

Remember that we’re trying to be the best Bayesians we can be. A major part of that is not thinking absolutely, but rather probabilistically. If a $1 card hits $10 overnight, you have to think of the future in terms of probability. Which is more probable? That the card continues to climb past the $10, or it drops to half of that within a week? Well, which is more likely – that a $1 card has been so severely undervalued that the real price is north of $10, or that it’s really a $5-$6 card and the market just hasn’t corrected yet? 98% of the time it’s the latter. When a card sees a sudden meteoric rise, it’s simply so much more likely that the card drops significantly rather than continues to gain that it’s 100% right to sell. The one time you sell too early you won’t even have to feel bad, because the last nine times you sold out during the hype you made a killing while the card eventually bottomed out at half of the hype price.

Playability Saturation

Instead of seeing dramatic spikes, some cards experience slow and consistent growth. A good example here would be Jace, Architect of Thought. He bottomed out during the summer between Ravnica and Theros before jumping back into the spotlight after fall rotation. Aside from a very brief spike to $40+ (which may be a data problem; I don’t ever remember seeing him that high), he hung around $20-$25. This was absolutely the right time to sell. Some people may have held on hoping to break $30, but why would that have been a bad idea?

First we need to consider what formats care about a particular card. While Jace was doing excellent in Standard, his demand elsewhere was nearly nonexistent. Modern, Legacy, Vintage, EDH – nobody other than the Standard crew was looking for copies. Meanwhile, he was already all over the place in Standard. Mono-Blue was running multiple copies. Sphinx’s Revelation decks had the full playset almost without fail. Even off-the-wall brews had a few copies. At that time, I would say that Standard was saturated with JAoT.

There simply wasn’t any room left in Standard for Jace to see more play. Every deck that could possibly be interested in Jace already had them, and there was no other format placing demand on the card. There were only two realistic outcomes: the price sustains, or the price drops. Faced with those two options, you certainly want to be selling.

When you’re looking at a card you’re considering selling, ask yourself: how much more play could this see? How much more untapped demand could exist for this card? When you look at a card like Eidolon of Blossoms or some of the Theros gods, the potential seems huge. They’re powerful cards that could play well in both Standard and casual, and the prices are very low. There’s room to grow. However when you look at Elspeth, Sun’s Champion’s price tag of $32, do you still think the same thing? Do you realistically believe that there’s enough gas left in the tank for her to break $35 or $40? Have other fall set Standard-only mythics had price tags that high?

Consider what demand exists for the card. Think about how much play its seeing in the formats that may want it. Think about how much other cards from similar sets cost at their high point. Think about how much more the card could possibly rise. In a case such as Elspeth’s, the answer becomes clear. Yes, she could manage to eek out a few more dollars, but it’s considerably safer just taking the locked-in profit now and moving on to something with much more potential.

Hello and Goodbye

This factor is particularly salient today, only weeks after Khans release. Card prices are always high after a set release. They’re especially high after a fall set release. (People are excited about what the future holds. This is in comparison to a set like Journey Into Nyx, where the format is already pretty well-developed at that point.) They’re even HIGHER right after the fall Pro Tour, because all the new toys are on display and the frenzy is at its peak. Let’s see exactly what I’m talking about.

Right now the top thirty or so cards in Khans of Tarkir are worth roughly 20-25% more than the top thirty Theros cards. Keep in mind that the senior set is supposed to be more expensive than the junior! Theros boxes have dried up and MTGO redemptions are over. The stock available can only dwindle. Meanwhile, the drafting of Khans of Tarkir is just beginning. The amount of Khans that has been opened so far is only a small fraction of the total amount that will eventually be cracked. Prices in this set are inevitably going to crash from here. An in-print sent with this much demand is entirely unsustainable. $18 Polluted Deltas? $17 Windswept Heaths? No way this keeps up. Remember, Zendikar fetches were $8-$15 in Standard, and typically a lot closer to the low end of that scale.

At this point in time, a few days past the KTK gameday, you should be selling anything with the Khans set symbol on it. Keep only the exact cards you need to play with and ship the rest. Yes, even that card. Yes, even fetches. Nearly every single card on that list is going to lose value over the next two months. Why would you want to be holding onto toxic assets?

There are two exceptions. You should keep cards you want to play with. You don’t need to sell every single card from KTK. Feel free to keep fetches for decks you want to play or to continue using your Sidisis at FNM. After all, the whole point of all of this is to finance our habit. The other exception is foils. While most will come down, not all will. Dig Through Time foils in particular I’d probably hold on to. They may lose a little bit of value over the months, but not enough to really warrant selling or trading them. Remember that Abrupt Decay foils are now $70. I don’t think DTT is getting there tomorrow, but it definitely seems like it’s going to have an impact in every format, which bodes very well for foil prices.

There will be a card or two in Khans of Tarkir that rises in price from where it is now. Maybe it will be another Ascendancy, or Ghostfire Blade, or Crater’s Claws. I’m not sure which card will be $5 more than it is today. What I do know is that the total amount of value lost from Khans will be far greater than the small amount a single card gains.

Think of it this way. If we add up the value of a single copy of the thirty most expensive cards in Khans, it comes in somewhere around $275. Two months from now, that number will be much closer to around $225. As a whole the set will lose a large chunk of value. Now maybe Ghostfire Blade jumps to $4 from bulk, but unless you are prescient you can’t be sure that will happen. So which would you rather do: trade away all your excess Khans cards, ensuring you don’t eat a huge drop in value on the set as a whole, or hoard all of your Khans cards because two or three of them are going to rise by a few bucks? Getting rid of any excess product you have right now is a 100% guaranteed win.

Nothing to Lose

So far I’ve told you when to sell your cards. Now I’ll tell you when not to sell. This is even murkier territory. Holding onto cards carries inherent risk because you never know what’s actually going to happen. You can mitigate that risk though, and even get involved in virtually no-risk scenarios if you know where to look.

One of the worst things you can do is sell your senior set cards during late summer just ahead of rotation. Our most recent example of this would have been Theros block product during July and August. During those months the summer doldrums are at their most severe and prices are fairly low across the board because of it. Even Elspeth was a full $10 cheaper over the summer than she is today, in spite of the fact that she was one of three or four cards that entirely defined the Theros block PT.

During those hazy summer months there’s basically no real incentive to sell your cards. The absolute floor for a card’s price is typically found during the summer, which means you can’t really lose holding onto a card during that time. If four months ago you made the decision to hold onto Elspeth until October, two things could have happened. One, she could see minimal play in Standard once Khans came out. If this were the case, her price would have stayed relatively stable, with only maybe a marginal and slow loss. The other option is that she continues to be a force in the new Standard and her price rises accordingly, just as we’ve seen it do. Either way, holding onto Elspeth was virtually a zero-risk proposition.

Hold onto your Standard-legal cards through the summer. They won’t be any cheaper in October than they were in July, and it’s far more likely that most of your stock has risen in value, sometimes dramatically. You may even get lucky with random cards breaking out due to a shift in the format after rotation, ala Desecration Demon.

These same rules apply for Modern cards as well, although we’re holding onto them a little longer than Standard cards. Peak Magic prices seem to be around January and February. This is when you’ll want to move any Modern cards you’re looking to get rid of. Again, most Modern staples are at their lowest through the summer and fall. It isn’t until after the first of the year that they start to gain steam. Unless you’re terrified of a reprint, hold onto those Snapcasters and Restoration Angels until February. Today Scalding Tarn is $52, and was $60-$70 before the Khans fetches were announced. But back in March they peaked at a whopping $130 for a few weeks. Part of this was due to GP Richmond I’m sure, although that event wasn’t solely responsible for that much of a change.

At the end of the day, there are a few questions to ask yourself when deciding whether now is the right time to sell your goodies. Did the card just see a huge spike because of some break-out deck? How much more expensive could this card reasonably be, and how likely is it that happens? Given the time of year, is it more likely this card is closer to its floor or its ceiling?

Hot Tips for the Week

• Hold onto your Thoughtseizes. If you just read everything above, you should have already come to the same conclusion. There’s pretty much no reason on the horizon for that card to lose value over the next two to three years. At worst the price stays stagnant and at best they double up (at least). Look at what has happened with multi-format-staple Abrupt Decay.
• It bears repeating: sell any excess fetches.
• Delver of Secrets was only a $5 foil or so while it was in Standard. There’s no way Treasure Cruise or Monastery Swiftspear maintain those foil prices. Wait before you buy in.
• Any Modern cards you need you should be acquiring now. I’ve barely been around real Magic games for the past two months and I’ve already spoken to several people getting into Modern because of the fetch reprint. We got shocks two years ago, Thoughtseize a year ago, fetches today, and Modern Masters 2 is on the horizon for next spring. Once attention shifts back towards that format, prices will move accordingly.
• Speaking of Modern, Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time are the new hotness in old formats. Both of them want lots of small spells to fill you up your graveyard. Thalia happens to be excellent at hosing decks attempting to do that, and she’s slipped down towards $3 again. This is a great pickup in trade.
  

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