In Magic drafts, there’s a borrowed poker term called “free rolling,” which is where you have enough returns on drafts that you can sell the packs and use them to buy entry for more events- essentially playing for free. There’s a way to do this in Legacy, a way to fund future card purchases with a little extra money and get more core cards for your collection. You can achieve this with card speculation.
The card market in Legacy is increasingly driven by speculation. Speculation is, essentially, taking a guess that an item will change in value in the future and putting a bet on whether it will go up or down (and yes, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s how I’ll be using the term today). If you are familiar with financial markets, you know about things like short-selling and futures contracts; however, the concept, as it applies to Magic, is even simpler. You buy or trade for a card now and then hope to sell it in the future for a profit.
Legacy is a prime format for this activity for a variety of reasons. It is an “eternal” format, meaning that cards will never rotate and will presumably, always have a shot at playability. It involves many older, out of print cards that are challenging to find. It has had only one card added to the banned list (which is Flash), meaning that the market is not likely to devalue a card rapidly. The best reason to look at Legacy over a format like Vintage is that it is far more popular, even beating out Extended in DCI-reported even attendance. Ergo, there is a good market of buyers and sellers.
In this article, I will talk about the techniques and advantages of short-term eternal format speculation/investment, supported by plenty of examples. You will see how this market differs from regular markets and get a realistic view of how and why you should consider speculation. It is that realistic point that I will address first.
You will not make a lot of money speculating on cards. At worst, you will probably make enough to continue buying cards that you like and want, and at best, it’s a menial and low-paying full-time job. However, it is fun to roll the dice on card and satisfying when it pays off. Speaking of payoff, I value my payoffs differently than the stock market does. Because stocks are traded in volumes in the tens of thousands, it’s helpful to talk about gains in a stock in terms of percentages. The benefit is that however much money you have tied into a stock, you can understand how much you gained or lost. When it comes to Magic, however, gains can be astronomical on paper and miniscule in reality. For example, if I sell a card I bought for a dollar for four dollars, I made a 400% return, which is Bernie Madoff-level crazy. But that was just a gain of three dollars! The physical realities of having to purchase, store, ship and sell cards means that the volume you, as a casual speculator, can deal in is very small. Thus, I value all of my actions in dollar terms; it’s more readable and realistic. It makes valuing your time easier as well; if I spend six hours for a profit of only $20, it’s not worth my time to engage in.
You are limited by the amount of money you want to tie up and also by how long you want to tie it up. I tend to ride about $100 at any time on cards that I am holding on a bet that they’ll take off, and I would suggest that you make this your upper limit too. You are also limited, as I said before, by having to pack up and ship cards. There is no futures commodity market in Magic where you can buy Engineered Explosives, to be shipped in a month, directing those cards at whoever bought them from you. Instead, you have to take physical possession of each card.. You are also dramatically limited in your supply. On the weekend of a hot pro tour with a breakout deck, where a card jumps $4 in price overnight, you might have sellers canceling your sales. This happens very frequently by dishonest sellers. If you want to get cards and be absolutely sure that you will get them, then Starcitygames is actually and objectively the best place to buy from, since they are the most professional site around in terms of filling paid orders, even on hot cards.
When I talk about speculation, I mean the act of buying cards to sell in the short term. Thus, while something like Tropical Island is probably the best stable, rising card, it’s more of a keep-and-hold card. I am focusing on how to identify hot cards before they become hot, enabling you to make quick returns and buy fun cards that you want.
Identifying Good Speculation Opportunities
Since speculation involves profiting based on knowing something before the market does, it’s beneficial to be up to date on what’s hot. Following the Pro Tour and Starcitygames 5K coverage provides a great opportunity to see what is emerging. However, some cards are just so common that you will not see any great increases on them. You have to use some factors to calculate if the card is actually going to pick up. For example, consider how old the card is. Cards printed fifteen years ago are in short supply because they’ve been lost, sat in shoe boxes in closets and run through the washing machine. Thus, the older the card is, the better it looks. Also, consider the rarity of the card. This ties into the availability and ultimately, your chance to see benefits from it. Cultivating relationships with other players and especially with dealers and format innovators can help you get the inside track on what cards are hot. Even reading articles on this site can help you; I accurately predicted the rise of Karakas and Sneak Attack here and on the accompanying twitter feed, for instance. Patrick Chapin routinely will openly and honestly write about the Next Big Thing Here are some examples:
Card Study: Karakas
When Iona, Shield of Emeria was printed, reanimator decks had a very good creature that could shut down whole decks. The best answers to it are colorless, for obvious reasons, and the best of those do not cost mana. In October, I identified Karakas as a potential card for rapid price increases and picked up a two copies from this site for less than $10 each. Since Karakas is an old card, a rare from Legends, and relatively hard to find, I thought that even if it saw a little play, it would jump in value. Sure enough, Karakas has increased at least fifteen dollars, showing up in maindecks and sideboards in several Legacy decks.
Card Study: Dark Depths
Dark Depths has a fantastic combination with Vampire Hexmage, and when Hexmage was spoiled, there were a few days where Depths could be picked up for a song because the combination was not well-known. It was a rare from Coldsnap, which was a sparsely-opened set, meaning copies were hard to find. If you knew that Depths was hot and would be casually popular even if it was not competitively playable, you could snag copies. This card shot up in value very quickly, and I’d like to emphasize that the people who benefited were those who bought early and didn’t spend a lot of time seeing how things would play out regarding the card’s popularity. I spent a day thinking about whether I should get them (were they really worth $3? nah…) and didn’t get any, much to my later dismay. So strike early, especially on cheap cards.
Card Study: Sword of the Meek
Normally, I don’t even look at uncommons because they rarely reach payoff points that make it worthwhile for me to consider. Remember when I said that payoffs should be valued in dollars and not percentages? If an uncommon takes off, it may go up two or three times in value, but that only nets maybe a dollar. Sword of the Meek became popular because it has a sick combo with Thopter Foundry. Why pick up Sword and not Foundry? Aside from Foundry still being in print, Sword was from a third set and was hard to find because it was complete junk before the Foundry combo was discovered. Copies went from a quarter apiece to $3 or more, meaning picking up a few sets would have made you enough to be worth your time and maybe pick up a dual land for your troubles.
Separating Bubbles From Stable Increases
Price bubbles, where a card temporarily goes up in value because of perceived future increase in play, but then pop because of little actual use, exist all over Magic. Speculators drive bubbles in Legacy, and you can profit from these by anticipating them or lose a lot by tying up money in cards that are not going anywhere. This is where testing cards yourself can pay off, because you can tell if they will actually be good. Trying out Dark Depths, for example, would show you quickly that it was a strategically sound option that you could build a deck around. However, there are other hyped cards that never pan out. Let’s see an example:
Card Study: Dream Halls
After a stunning performance in a 270-person event in Europe, Dream Halls took off in Legacy. The card was an old rare, meaning it was good for speculation opportunities. The card was blue, meaning that you could probably make a good deck with it in the format. However, testing Dream Halls revealed that it was… fair? Not busted? Maybe even only okay! Dream Halls decks have been unable to repeat their performance, and the card demand has leveled out. If you got them when they were $3 and sold when they routinely went for $15, you could have cleaned up. Now, they might be a lot harder to actually dispose of at a price that was worth the time.
As a result of this, I make sure to have buy/sell prices for my cards, so that when they hit a certain price, I get rid of them even if they might go up in the future. I learned this after picking up a lot of Scroll Racks after Treasure Hunt was spoiled and then saw the card sputter; now I’m just holding onto them in case Land Tax is unbanned! If I had set up a margin that was acceptable — say, making $4 per card, I could have gotten rid of them and freed up that money for more cards. It’s better, in speculation terms, to have the cash today than the possibility of the cash tomorrow.
Card Study: Show and Tell
Sometimes, cards get a second life after their hype has died down. Show and Tell was the real break-out from the Dream Halls deck and was considerably harder to find than Dream Halls, since it has casual applications. As people realized that maybe it wasn’t worth buying the Dream Halls cards, Rise of the Eldrazi was being spoiled and truly monstrous beasts were coming out that you could show your opponent and then tell them how it would hurt. Show and Tell has seen significant interest since then, even above how popular it was with Dream Halls. It’s a bit of an anomaly for this reason, but I bring it up because sometimes, a card will sustain its value for entirely different reasons than how it first attained that value.
Card Study: Food Chain
Food Chain is currently a hyped card because it interacts favorably with Evoke creatures and the potential for Evoking out Eldrazi is pretty neat. That said, and I may eat my words here, but Food Chain is awful and isn’t going to do much with the tools it has right now. I wrote about the combination awhile ago and nothing has fundamentally changed since writing about it; you still have a deck full of goofy creatures and when you reach a certain mana threshold, they get good. In the meantime, you’re trying to resolve a 2G enchantment and then summon enough mana or creatures on the next turn to get it going. That is just too slow and untenable for this format; when the Food Chain is destroyed or countered, you’re slinging with Mulldrifter and Fierce Empath. I expect to see this card go up a little in value because people have high hopes for it, but I don’t think it’s going to have a breakout showing like Dream Halls did.
Card Study: Grindstone
Painter’s Servant made this Tempest artifact into a legitimate kill condition. Like many other cards in this article, this combination came out as a result of people following spoilers. The price rapidly went up on this (rare, old) card and unlike Dream Halls, Grindstone proved up. It sees play now and then in Legacy and its price has been stable since its first skyrocketing. It is an example of a card that, through testing, you’ll find will be in demand. This lets you command a higher sell price for the card; you’re not looking at immediately dumping, but instead, holding on for at least a doubling or tripling in value. For savvy players who got their Grindstones at $4 (and I was not savvy enough to), they can reap $20+ on them even now.
Figuring Out What Price Is A Good Price
My favorite cards to speculate on are ones with what I consider a “pure” price that is untainted by other people speculating on the card. Scroll Rack was a good example of this; at the time we started runs on the card, its value was strictly based on it being casually popular. At $4-5, people were happy to acquire or part with their Scroll Racks all day long. That gave us a base price that we knew it could never dip below. Karakas was stable at $10, where it was for years; similarly, copies bought at $10 could be resold or traded at that price basically forever. When you look at a card, think about what portion of the price is due to competitive or speculative demand and how much of it is driven by people who want the card for their casual EDH deck.
Card Study: Entomb
The black instant was solidly $4-7, even when banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage, since it enabled some cool casual Reanimator decks. Odyssey was a recent set that sold well, so Entomb should have been common to find. After its unbanning, the card jumped to $15, and after its great performance at Grand Prix: Madrid, it shot up temporarily to nearly $40. A lot of that price was due to people thinking that the sky was the limit on the card, and the price has since settled down a bit, though it is still unreal expensive for an Odyssey rare. Part of its value at the peak was due to people thinking it would go higher, and when the price stabilized, that part of the value evaporated.
Card Study: Sneak Attack
With Rise of the Eldrazi, smart players were looking at any way to get the monsters in play. Sneak Attack became a favorite of mine because it can be accelerated with Seething Song. Further, it beats Karakas (since you can Sneak the creature back into play or just attack, let Annihilator trigger and replay it the next turn after they bounce it), which most of the other cheaty cards could not do. Finally, though they were $11, that price was the same it had been for over two or more years; Sneak Attack was a fun casual deck but had no competitive play after rotating out of Extended. Now, the card has doubled in price without any competitive performances (yet) and if it shows up at a high table in a Legacy tournament, I am sure the price will go up even more. Looking at cards like Exploration and Show and Tell will inform you that Urza Block cards are especially ripe for double-digit price increases.
Knowing When To Sell
By setting a buy/sell price, you will know when to act and when to wait. Sometimes, these figures require revision, but a reasonable guess to get a reasonable profit is the best way to set them up. Good times to sell are a day or two after a stellar performance for a card, when people feel the need to get the cards before they go up even more in value (or so it is perceived). Here’s an example:
Card Study: Scapeshift
When Zendikar was spoiled, I read a review on this site that it might have cool interactions with Scapeshift. I found that the Morningtide rare was about fifty cents a copy and grabbed a few, thinking they might be neat in Legacy. After Scapeshift’s explosion both in Standard and Extended, the card was being actively chased. I eventually got rid of my set for a modest profit, and I am sure a lot of people who initially figured that the card could see some play also saw a good gain. I was not expecting Scapeshift to go beyond $5-6, and sold when mine were in that neighborhood. If I had waited for them to go to $10 or more, which might never have happened, I would still be sitting on them, unsure if they would ever go up that high again.
Limitations on Speculation
Like I mentioned before, you will not make a lot of money on card speculation. Sometimes, you will miss the memo on Grove of the Burnwillows because you were sleeping in on a Saturday during a Pro Tour. Other times, you will sit on cards, figuring that they will go up and then eventually just keep them for your own collection (like that Moat I’ve been agonizing about getting rid of…). Ultimately, if you are disciplined about getting cards and moving them through the door in a timely manner, and if you are not too greedy about getting better profits, you can make a sustainable bit of income to funnel into more cards.
Serious speculators can make this into a pseudo-job, but this is written more for the casual trader who is a serious player and wonders where their next Tropical Island will come from. Putting a little bit of the magic budget into betting on cards can provide nice rewards for a little time commitment. Getting two playsets of a card and then later, selling one at a profit can help enterprising players get a nearly-free set for their playables collection. If you’re looking to move a large volume of cards, considering percentage profits is a better way to get maximum efficiency, but in the volumes that I am talking about, a little cash here and there is all that matters. Even if you’re not interested in Legacy card speculation, knowing the principles will help you get deals on cards that will inevitably go up in price later.
If you have questions, comments or even your own card studies to talk about, post in the forums, shoot me an email or find me on Twitter; I’d love to talk more about this with readers!
Until next week…
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