Vintage Buyouts

rbartlet

My two cents...

In the scheme of things, do price fluctuations matter? Proxy and non proxy vintage events are likely to continue to exist, at least in the near future. There will always be players that are willing to pay for cards, and those who are either unwilling or unable to do so. The notion of cardboard crack exists for a reason: there will always be someone who is willing to pay.

I have always lived in cities with high housing costs. I would love it these costs were lower. Unfortunately, it is difficult to proxy a house, and a cardboard box on a street in not a viable substitute. I can imagine my wife's reaction... I have choices about where and how I live.

Vintage is different to housing. It is a game, and is difficult to categorise as a life necessity, when compared against housing. If individuals are able to drive prices upwards, in order to turn a profit, kudos to them! Over the years, I feel like I have come to accept that whilst I would love for as many people as possible to play and understand the fun of vintage, it is not fiscally viable. I am certain that there are many other hobbies out there that are not viable due to financial reasons. Unfortunately, that is how the world works.

If you want to buy a card, there are few options outside of buying it (i.e. you buy it; or you don't). You then need to find a copy of the card at a palatable price point. This has a loose correlation to the reserve list, but really only insofar as the total number of copies of a card in circulation. Don't get me wrong, I would love for the reserve list to go away, but even if it did, it would be highly likely that any reprints would require a significant amount of time to appear, and you can guarantee that WoTC would be sensitive to trying to ensure the dollar value of the original cards. I guess that I translate this to: printing more copies of cards may not actually help. Judge foil Mana Drain?

I regularly remind myself that if I were just getting started in Magic today, I would not be even contemplating paper vintage: the costs are high. I look back now at paying a few hundred dollars for a lotus many years ago, which was a lot of many for "a piece of cardboard", as my wife liked to put it. I do not expect WoTC to even try to regulate the secondary market.

My main hope is that people are able to find their way to vintage, then discover a way to play that is right for them (i.e. within their means).

themonadnomad

@rbartlet said:

I agree with all of your points - one thing i would like to add regarding the following:

If you want to buy a card, there are few options outside of buying it (i.e. you buy it; or you don't). You then need to find a copy of the card at a palatable price point.

...is that you do not necessarily need to buy a card in order to have access to play that card. As an example, the current vintage champion took down the crown with borrowed Power. Borrowing cards and ownership collectives might end up being a bigger part of the future of sanctioned paper Vintage as we move forward.

benjamin_berry

So you need to be rich or have the right friends to play? Still a very exclusionary environment.
There is a new business opportunity here though. Renting power for a tournament.

Smmenen

The last two major Magic purchases I made were apparently timely. I bought 3 Moats last year, and two Tabernacles about 3-4 months ago (I already owned 1). I wanted them for Old School Magic, but I'm glad I did.

joshuabrooks

@Smmenen said:

The last two major Magic purchases I made were apparently timely. I bought 3 Moats last year, and two Tabernacles about 3-4 months ago (I already owned 1). I wanted them for Old School Magic, but I'm glad I did.

I made the mistake of going after Abyss before Moat....but I'm sure it will be joining Moat soon enough in the over $500 club.....sigh

letseeker

@benjamin_berry that is actually a great idea, you could even go so far as to rent out staples of the format and maybe even whole decks if you wanted to.

benjamin_berry

@letseeker said:

@benjamin_berry that is actually a great idea, you could even go so far as to rent out staples of the format and maybe even whole decks if you wanted to.

I'll tell you what I'll comp your entry fee if the morning of the tournament you come listen to my presentation on investing in card time shares. /s

Cambriel

TCG mid is a serious problem. Vendors rely on uninformed buyers who look at TCG with their quick phone apps and see a giant number that legitimizes a price. They know the cash value is lower, but when some kid shows up to the trade tables with a binder full of highly liquid standard and modern staples wanting to pick up his first power, or some old Legends card, that arbitrary price means he gets taken to the cleaners. Vendors look at $1500 Tabernacles as an opportunity to take in $2000 in buylist which they can flip for cash faster than the one kid looking to build Lands. It's not malicious; they're just being good stewards of their own inventory and looking to turn a profit. Business is business.

In many ways, we were better off in the days of Scrye. Internet sales were supposed to pinpoint the true value of cards, but in reality it has just become an unregulated market for speculation. The tools we have available are too easily manipulated. I wish a popular site like TCG would start calculating mid prices as an average over time, rather than a snapshot of a single moment. If it took 30 days to drag the needle up on old cards, it would be a lot harder for people to spike a card and cause a panic.

evouga

Which deck(s) have started running Moat and The Abyss? These both sound extraordinarily slow in the modern Vintage metagame.

Cambriel

I've seen Moat a time or two to deal with Eldrazi. It's catching on in legacy more as a Miracles strategy for the spaghetti monsters.

Personally I think Bridge and Humility are just as effective.

Smmenen

@evouga said:

Which deck(s) have started running Moat and The Abyss? These both sound extraordinarily slow in the modern Vintage metagame.

There are 3 Moat in the Landstill deck that Top 4ed EE4

That said, I bought both cards for Old School.

rikter

@Cambriel said:

I've seen Moat a time or two to deal with Eldrazi. It's catching on in legacy more as a Miracles strategy for the spaghetti monsters.

Personally I think Bridge and Humility are just as effective.

They are. Moat has been available forever at like half the price, and people didnt buy them. The idea that one guy price gouging represents some sort of correction in price is laughable. I hope he loses his shirt.

MaximumCDawg

I don't think this is the first time that modern speculation culture has impacted Vintage, but it might be the first time some people have noticed. Modern and Legacy have been dealing with this for years.

Perfect Information, Free Market

Here's the issue. Information and cards are available to anyone, anywhere today. On the information side, Twitch and similar programs allow people to keep a close eye on what is being played. Robots scour the internet collecting price data and aggregating information about buying activity and buy list prices on major retailers. There are at least three very prominent websites (mtgprice, quietspeculation, and mtggoldfish) pushing financial and market data, as well as articles about how to invest wisely.

On the card side, we have peer-to-peer sites like TCG Player and Pucatrade along side the old standbys of eBay and major retailers. If you want a card, you can go online, punch in some information, and you will get it. If you see a card getting played at the Legacy Open in the top eight, you can go online and click to order it immediately. If you want to unload a card, you can post it and get it sold in seconds. Bargain hunting? Well, we got that covered now too, with sites like MtgScavenger searching eBay to find unusually low prices on cards.

The point is that both information and cards are now liquid in paper. Not quite MTGO-liquid, sure, but still very liquid.

This presents a speculator with money to burn with a very specific kind of opportunity.

Anatomy of a Price Spike

Since everyone knows everything all at once about Magic goings-on nowadays (well, everyone who cares to can, anyway), buyers and retailers can react instantly to new information. Algorithms react even faster than that.

When a card gets play at a big event, or enables a new combo, or whatever, the player base can move generally to buy the card. In the case of a rare from Legends, it takes a very tiny percentage of the player base making this decision to buy out the card. Sellers take notice, and repost at a higher price. This is one way price spikes happen.

Speculators can also cause a spike by doing their own buyout. If you think that some card, say, Moat, has been static for too long, you can charge out a credit card and buy most of the available copies from most retailers. Then, you re-list them at an absurdly high price and wait to see what happens.

These spikes do not always stick. Regardless of whether the community or a speculator sucked up the supply, if the new price is so high that sellers can't move their stock at that price, it will slowly go down. Slowly, because the seller will only move the price down if time proves it won't move, or as competitors list their cards just under the higher prices.

However, a price spike does accomplish one thing, and it accomplishes that thing VERY WELL: A price spike quickly determines the maximum possible price that retailers can charge for a card in that environment. That is to say, a price spike lets retailers determine exactly how much they can get away with charging for a card. A recent example is Mindslicer.

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Odyssey/Mindslicer#paper

Someone bought out this dumb-little hellbent enabler and relisted it for around fifty bucks. Everyone laughed because this was dumb. People did not buy Mindslicer for $50, and the price tanked. People started buying again when the card was a much more reasonable price, around five bucks... which was actually still a 500% increase over what the card was selling for before the spike! In other words, the spike allowed the selling community to determine that the market will actually bear a $5.00 price tag for this particular card no one uses.

Moat will do the same thing. It will fall in price after the spike only until someone decides to pay that price. Once they do, the price won't fall any further.

What This Means For YOU

These price spikes mean that Magic cards are going to cost the maximum they possibly COULD cost much faster than in the old days. Is this a good thing? If you're a retailer or speculator, sure. If you're a player, no. Either way, it's hard to see how you could put the genie back in the bottle at this point. Perfect information and perfect card availability is here to stay, so these things are going to happen.

The best that players can do is find ways to stay educated. Look for cards that are likely to spike and acquire them before they do. Don't buy into spikes at all; once the ship sails, look elsewhere. Keep abreast of the finance community's articles so you have some idea of what's going on and you can get good advice about what may be coming down the line.

nedleeds

People had 22 years to buy a Moat. There was nothing particularly subtle about it's efficacy. It was a great rare Legends card in 1994. It's a great rare Legends card in 2016. People born after Moat was good can legally drink, vote and join the US Army. I don't have any sympathy for people who feel like they 'missed out'.

diophan

Not everyone has been playing Magic for 22 years. Imagine how this feels to the newer player who has been playing standard or modern, and has been saving up for a legacy Miracles deck. Following the community consensus, they've been saving money and slowly acquiring duals and fetches. After getting most of the way through that, they find out that moat is now $400 more expensive. Sure, you don't need moat, but after spending $2,000 on a deck I'd be pretty annoyed to be playing a budget list.

If I wasn't one of the lucky people to have an almost complete vintage and legacy collection stuff like this would make me much less likely to try and get into these formats. Hell, about a year ago I thought it would be fun to build an old school deck but didn't want to drop a ton of cash all at once. I'm probably not buying into that format because of this kind of speculation.

MaximumCDawg

@nedleeds said:

I don't have any sympathy for people who feel like they 'missed out'.

@diophan said:

Not everyone has been playing Magic for 22 years.

I'd suggest it's not about having "sympathy" for people. No one needs a Moat to put food on the table. It's about whether you think it's good or bad that there such brutal mechanisms for making magic as expensive as it can be nowadays.

Magic is very different now that it was when Moat was printed, and it doesn't matter whether each of us got in before the price explosions or not -- the question of price spikes is still there.

Islandswamp

I really feel that the greatest value to be found in a Magic card is in it's functionality as a piece in my favorite game of all time.

If less people end up playing eternal formats due to cost, then there are less tournaments that fire, and a big part of the perceived value of an Eternal staple diminishes. Wouldn't most of you that own power enjoy it more if all events were able to be sanctioned and as large as proxy events? I'd think that being able to use your pretty cards more would be a desirable thing.

When prices spike this badly it makes me sad to be honest. I'm always trying to convince people that it's Vintage is fun and that it's worth the money, but some of the price tags just turn people off. It's true that proxy events help a little bit, but I would assume most people would like to eventually replace their proxies with real cards (I know I do). I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to.

I'm glad that I own most of what I would want on Magic Online. And as much as I love the convenience of that platform I have grown somewhat tired of only experiencing Magic by myself, sitting in front of a computer. I like the feel of the cards in my hand.

ajfirecracker

@Loukayza If Bill Gates bought out the market and gave the cards to players, you would find yourself in the exact same situation two years later as people started trading those cards

Topical_Island

@ajfirecracker exact?... given that the population of players has grown enormously, I don't think it exactly would be exact. Man, it feels like a solution is so close... if there were just a company that manufactured cards and wanted to sell them to players who wanted to play with them!

MaximumCDawg

@Topical_Island said:
MAXIMUM OVERSNARK DETECETED

In all seriousness, how many reprint sets do you want? We did away with the Core Sets and since then we've had Modern Masters 1 and 2, Conspiracy, Eternal Masters, the Commander Sets, and no signs of stopping anytime soon. They're literally producing a constant and steady stream of eternal reprints or cards that compete with eternal staples.

WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT SIR