I’ve made a lot of money on speculative card purchases over the years. Spellskite, Disrupting Shoal, Angel of Serenity, Gyre Sage, Bonfire of the Damned, Scapeshift, Entreat the Angels…my list of successes is fairly long. I haven’t kept track, but I’m certain that I’ve made more money speculating on Magic than I’ve lost.
Almost as long, though, is my list of failed speculation attempts. Sometimes, I’ll get intrigued by the potential of a newly spoiled card that turns out to be just another Mudhole. Other times, I’ll react to some piece of news to Wizards of the Coast and buy ninety copies of a card that never breaks out. (The new legend rule makes Stangg playable in Vintage, right guys?)
Humiliated, I end up shouting about my busted spec on Twitter, sometimes while drunk on microbrews that cost me more than the spec itself. Then I decide to shove it in a place where it will never see the light of day again: my failure box.
It looks like this:
Wait, that’s a different kind of failure box. Mine looks like this:
In truth, this is what I call my "long-term spec" box. It contains all the cards that I’m currently going long on. Many of these are cards that I legitimately like as casual risers—you know, the sorts of cards that go from $1 to $3 to $5 to $8 and suddenly everyone is all "Balefire Liege is worth what now?"
The box is also filled with hundreds of shattered dreams—specs that busted so badly I decided it wasn’t worth moving on from them because maybe someday they would rise again and I would be able to prove to the world that I was, like, three years ahead of the curve.
This is where the failure box lives. Up here, I keep all of my Magic stuff that I don’t really know what to do with. On the left, I’ve got one of each From the Vault sets and the Japanese Jace vs. Chandra Duel Deck. If I had known the Japanese one would barely rise in price while the English one would hit $100+, I would have kept my English one sealed and played with this one. Nope. Good going, me.
That’s the difference between something marketed as a collectible versus something that actually is collectible, by the way. The Japanese set was sold as something to treasure, so people kept it sealed. The English one was sold as a toy, so people opened it up and played with it. Several years later, the English one is hard to find and the Japanese one is still common.
What’s in those corrugated cardboard boxes? Why, it’s one of each sealed guild box from the Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash Prereleases! This is another item I paid full retail for at my local store because I figured they’d be stupidly rare several years down the line. So far, no good—StarCityGames.com has been selling sets of these pretty cheaply. I still like them long term, though, and worst case I can throw my own Prerelease.
The longboxes you see on the right side contain some things that were good to go long on (Zendikar lands) as well as some random stuff that showed up in various collections or at yard sales. Pokemon cards and four complete sets of Time Spiral? I’ve mostly just been too lazy to sell them.
The first thing out of the box is my favorite current long-term spec: Sylvan Primordial. I don’t play Commander as much as I’d like to, but whenever I do this is among the cards that I fear the most. Primeval Titan was obviously more powerful in streamlined Commander decks, but in the more fun casual builds this card can be even better. I’ve been buying these between $0.50 and $0.65 each shipped because as long as Commander is still a format in a few years the retail price on this card will break $5 without a doubt.
The failures begin! I actually don’t think that Thrun, the Last Troll is a bad card to have right now—it did just rise to $10 after the M14 rules change—but I overreacted to that news in a big way. I had a massive amount of store credit, Gaea’s Cradle had already sold out, and Mox Opal was already too expensive.
What can I say? There are some nights when I make bad decisions. I had been having an emotionally draining few days, and they led me to a moment when I decided to make a mighty swing at a spec that had a low chance of panning out. Don’t do this at home, kids.
Even still, the spec probably won’t turn out awful for me. Thrun did go up a little, and he has a shot of going up some more during Modern season next year. He has been $20 before, and he’s a mythic rare, so the ceiling is there. Worst case, I have to do some work and lose a little. Best case, I might not be regretting my decision sometime next winter.
Or I build myself a shed out of Thruns that I can sit inside of and cry. If anyone tries to bother me, I can blubber that I have hexproof, which means they have to go away.
One day, someone on my Twitter feed clued me in to the fact that foil Epic Experiments were down to three bucks on SCG. Again, I was flush with store credit (this is a common occurrence during all of my questionable spec binges) so I bought them all.
Let me say this—Epic Experiment is an awesome-looking foil. It is also a nice casual card with an outside shot of being broken someday. I’m fine keeping them in the box for the foreseeable future because I doubt it’ll drop below $3. Hey, it’s actually already up to $4!
Now the real goodies begin—foil Zendikar lands! My decision to throw these in the box was a reaction to the time I sold a bunch of foil Unhinged lands for $8-$10 a few months before they shot up to the roughly infinite number of dollars they’re at now. I picked these up in trade during Zendikar between $3 and $5, so I’m happy with my decision to keep them. They’re still maturing, so for now they stay in the box.
One of my biggest weaknesses is listening to random people who tell me about how great a card is. You see, I don’t play much Modern, so when someone I trust for information about the format tells me that something is on the verge of breaking out, I mostly just…listen.
Which brings me to one of my worst ever specs. I’m pretty sure I paid around $15 each for these on the behest of a friend who insisted he was about to turn the format upside down. I figured there was nowhere for them to go but up, seeing as the card was seeing fringe play in Legacy at the time as well. Instead, my money went up in flames while Olivia drank a goblet of blood and laughed at me.
Oh hey, it’s some extra dual lands. I don’t like to trade these away if I don’t have to, but I really should have moved the Savannahs back when Maverick was winning games and the card was retailing for $100. Sometimes, it’s important to remember that every card has the ability to go down in price—even dual lands.
With Legacy’s recent marginalization, I think I’m going to move these out of the long-term box and back into the trade binder. I don’t expect a dual land crash or anything, but it’s not out of the question that we might see a new set of lands that can function as duals in Commander (legendary duals?) which might bring down some of the hard demand for the originals a bit. Regardless, I can probably get someone to overpay for these in trade.
What’s this? A full (out of the box) set of From the Vault: Dragons! I’m pretty sure these don’t have much farther to rise in price, so I’m going to pull them out and sell them as well. I bought them in a collection a few years back and put them in my trade binder, but no one was ever interested unless I was willing to break up the set. I think they mostly ended up in here out of sheer boredom. I’m even bored writing about them, honestly. When can we get back to the failures? I know there are plenty more of those.
When I did my Gatecrash set review, a troll who liked to shout at me on Twitter before I blocked him told me I was dead wrong on Duskmantle Seer and Enter the Infinite—Duskmantle, according to him, was a $2 card and Enter the Infinite (which I said would be a bulk mythic) was the real deal. I offered him a simple bet: in two months, I’d send him a set of Enter the Infinites if they were higher and he’d send me a set of Seers if they were worth more. He didn’t take the bet (it heavily favorite me—I could lock in the low price of Enter the Infinite to hedge), and it turned out we were both wrong. Enter the Infinite is still bulk, but Duskmantle Seer has been a zero as well.
Even still, when these came down to $5-$6, I pounced on a couple of sets figuring that they’d eventually be broken. They had started showing up in more and more decks, and I was convinced that this was an overlooked format staple similar to Falkenrath Aristocrat.
Nope. Luckily, I still have another year or so before my spec is fully and entirely busted. If these perk up even a little, I’ll be selling them and moving on with my life.
Curious what I had socked away in that precon box? It’s Jon Finkel deck from the 2000 World Championship! This was another lot that I found in a collection with its original box long gone. These things sell between $10 and $50 online, so I suppose I should sell it at some point, but it’s an interesting enough curiosity that I’ve just sort of…set it aside.
Here’s some other World Championship gold bordered cards, including an inked Survival of the Fittest. These things show up in collections often enough but no one ever really wants to trade for them. I keep them around in the long-term box with the slim hope that someday Wizards will make a random edict to bypass the reserved list and make these cards tournament playable.
And on that day, I will make, like, a hundred and fifty bucks from this stack.
Thespian’s Stage is my deepest spec at the moment, and it’s one I am very high on.
This card was never going to be a force in Standard, but over time lands as versatile as this always end up worth a good amount of money. It’s already one of the best lands in Commander and one that should be run in every single deck. Yes, even that one.
The Legacy combo with Dark Depths is nice as well. Right now, Dark Depths is the expensive card that will act as the price bottleneck, meaning Thespian’s Stage’s value won’t be affected for the meantime. At some point, though, this Gatecrash will go out of print, and this card will start to sneak up.
Luminate Primordial is no Sylvan Primordial, but I paid a lot less—basically bulk rare prices—to get these for the box. I can always dump for what I paid if they don’t pan out, but I’d wager they’ll retail for a couple bucks each at some point.
Here are a few other Primordials I’ve gotten though random dealings and in drafts. Whenever I pick them up as throw-ins, I shove them in the box.
Patrick Chapin articles discussing newly spoiled cards are a goldmine for finding great specs. He was on to the power of miracles before almost anyone else, and I pulled the trigger on enough of those Avacyn Restored mythics to make me a tidy profit.
Even the great ones miss, though, and this was one of them. I loved Chapin’s sample decks built around this card before Gatecrash was fully spoiled, but even after Dragon’s Maze brought us Notion Thief this card has stayed firmly on the sidelines.
My $1.50 each in store credit would have been better spent on almost anything else in the entire store. Even Giant Shark. Especially Giant Shark.
A couple of shocklands! I haven’t done much trading lately, but when I have I’ve tried to aggressively pick these up. They’ll jump a bit this fall, and you should have a nice window to make some money on them.
I held a few Solemn Simulacrums aside when they dipped after the M12 rotation. It’s a nice casual card, and I don’t think they’ll be printing it again soon. They’ve gone up a little, but not much.
When casual cards drop from $10 to $2, I perk up. While the additional stock from M13 means that the price of Gilded Lotus will never fully recover, I traded for a bunch of these at $2 last year and threw ’em in the box. They’re up to $3.50 now, and I bet they’ll hit $5 this year.
I snagged these Craterhoof Behemoths at $1.50 each before the card took off the first time. I traded half of them when they were up over $10 and threw the rest into the box, disgusted, when they went back down to $3. I figured I’d wait until after rotation and sell them as casual cards.
It turns out that Craterhoof wasn’t done being playable in Standard. They’re back at $8, and I’m going to sell them now before rotation.
Back at the "advice from friends" well, an awesome Legacy brewer I know told me last fall that this card was the key to beating BUG. Knowing where Stillmoon Cavalier would head if he was right, I took a flier on a few Chinese playsets for about $2/card. He honestly might have been right, but the Legacy format evolves faster than people give it credit for and the card never showed up in any winning lists.
Rite of Replication is a random casual card I love and picked up in trade for $1-$2 any chance I could. Now they’re $3.50 and sold out on SCG. I’m gonna keep these aside until they hit at least $5.
This little guy has been on the verge of being broken in half since the day it was printed. I put these aside when they were retailing for $5 each, thinking that was absolute rock bottom. They’re $8 now, and I bet this little snake isn’t done rising yet.
I got these in with a bunch of other "bulk rares" right when Return to Ravnica came out. They see play in Standard, but I think it has some Eternal upside as well, which is what I’m betting on.
I nabbed these during the Scars of Mirrodin preorder phase before I learned it was in an Intro Pack. Considering how good this card is in Commander and how much people love comes-into-play effects, I was surprised this never moved above fifty cents. If it were in Standard today, it might even see some play in Restoration Angel decks.
It took me a while to remember when and why I bought these. After a few quick Google searches, I realized that it was thanks to Torpor Orb being spoiled. I think that combo might have worked in Standard, but it’s a bit too junky for both Modern and Legacy. The card did rise to $2 retail, though, so I can probably still get my money back.
Good lord, the further I go back in time in this box the more terrible memories are dredged up. Much like playing against actual Dredge, the only thing I can do is numbly nod my head and watch things unfold.
In Commander, I really love big green splashy things. This one was a mythic, and I figured the demand would eventually start to creep up. Heck, the foil still retails for $10! Not so much the regular version, though—I paid $1 each in store credit for these, and they’re currently worth $1.50 each. Big money!
These went straight from my trade binder and into the box when the influx of Sol Rings from the Commander precons crashed the market on this card. They’ve rebounded a bit since then, and I expect that trend to continue.
This formerly busted spec has started to show some life as of late. I preordered a ton of these at $2 each based on the logic that they were only available in the Commander precons yet they are auto-includes in every single multicolored Commander deck ever made. To me, that was a bottleneck ready to make the price of this card explode.
For a couple years, this card bounced around between $2 and $3, but it’s $5.99 and sold out on SCG right now. That’s the great hope of this box—sometimes, time actually is on your side.
Two years ago, there was a Legacy Pro Tour over Memorial Day weekend when Stoneforge Mystic and Batterskull dominated the scene. In retaliation, people began to run Manriki-Gusari to combat the new equipment heavy menace.
I was driving up the Eastern Sierras with Emma when I got an email notice to buy in on Manriki-Gusari, so I pulled over to the side of the road in the shadow of Mount Whitney while I fiddled around with my mobile phone and bought out a few online stores.
I kept waiting for the card to break $2, but it never did. It’s $1.50 now, so I can probably get my money back, but I don’t think they’ll ever print equipment better than the stuff out there now so this card has a limited ceiling.
Hey, remember how the Simic were supposed to have Merfolk? Here’s the full list of what we got:
Yeah, Master of the Pearl Trident wasn’t a plant after all. If the card is reprinted in M14, it’ll drop even further—down from the $2 I paid to $1 or lower. If it isn’t, there’s a shot that it could slowly rise in price over time thanks to random casual demand. My decision on what to do with these will depend on that.
Is this my worst spec ever? Not quite, but it probably comes close.
This is another casual hit I felt has been always undervalued, so I socked these away whenever I got them in trade. I had eight or nine at one point, but the others all ended up in decks. For some reason, though, this is still just a $1 card.
I sniped these on my phone from the trading floor at the last-ever public Worlds because rumors were flying that Channel Fireball had developed a sweet combo deck around it. It never happened, so into the failure box they went. They haven’t gone down in price per se, but I don’t know why anyone actually wants them.
This is another pick-up from the same era. I actually sold multiple other sets of these between $7 and $10 per card, but I put this one aside in order to hedge against it becoming an expensive format staple. Nope.
The day Laboratory Maniac was spoiled I bought every Leveler I could find for twenty-five cents each. That turned out to be a whole lot of Levelers.
At first, the play looked genius—the card jumped to $5 on most sites and was sold out everywhere. I listed a bunch of sets for $10 each…and none of them sold. I lowered the price to $9 each and sold…one set.
The price kept tumbling, so I kept relisting for lower and lower prices. Eventually, I realized that there was no actual demand for this card despite the retail price being decently high. No one had even raised their buylist prices, so I was stuck with them. Into the box they went.
When Leveler went up in price a million fold that first night, I was thrilled. I was about to make a fortune on the back of one of the all-time worst rares in Magic.
Then someone clued me in to Divining Witch. "Uh oh," I thought. "What if I bet on the wrong horse? I’d better hedge my bets."
So I did. Woof.
This is part three of the same horrible spec. The Paradigm had indeed shifted, putting all of my money in the graveyard and all of my sadness into the failure box.
This wasn’t even a spec, just another casual card I liked that I kept getting as a throw-in. It was $0.50 then. It’s $3.50 now. Not bad—just not enough to make up for the last few piles of cards that you saw.
Enough digital ink has been spilled in this column about this spec of mine already. I paid $2.50 each in store credit for these. They’re $4 each now after briefly jumping to $8 after Vizkopa Guildmage was spoiled. I liked it as a long-term spec similar to Sanguine Bond, so I held onto them. That might pay off someday, but the smart money was clearly on selling into immediate hype.
This is actually just the remnants of a successful spec. I picked these up a couple years back for $0.50 each and sold the vast majority of them to a buylist at $2.50 each when they spiked at $5 retail. I kept a bunch behind, though, because this card has always been on the verge of being absurd. If they jump again, they’ll go much higher than $5.
Elephants! Another sweet throw-in I’ve hoarded just because I didn’t think it was a $0.50 card somewhere down the line.
A few days after Innistrad hit the streets, Brad Nelson and Brian Kibler posted independent articles the same night about how this ill-regarded rare was their sleeper pick of the whole set. To me, this was a big red flashing can’t-miss sign that I should buy in. I bought a few copies at $0.50, a few more at $1, and even a couple at $1.50 when that was all that was left anywhere.
My plan with the pile of these I have left over? Corner Brad and Brian at some future Pro Tour and make them sharpie "I’M SORRY I’M SO SO SORRY" on them. All of them.
I was pretty sure that this promo had nowhere to go but up. It was a beloved casual card with a $20 price memory that had dropped to $10 thanks to overprinting, and I figured it would start to sneak back up again when M13 fell out of favor. Nope—the card’s price was cut in half instead. I traded some guy a Dark Confidant for a whole pile of these at a can’t-miss price, and it turned out to be a very poor call. I should have sold them immediately.
This card has always been about one Top 8 away from breaking out in Legacy. It’s also on the reserved list and is a fun casual card that has done nothing but rise in value. It’s $10 now—up from $5 a year or so ago—and it will shoot up some more if it ever finds a tier 1 home.
This thing has jumped to $20 despite being banned in Legacy. If it ever gets unbanned, watch out. Casual players love their Squirrels!
This is another reserved list rare I’m hedging on due to a possible unbanning. I don’t think it’s likely, but it is just a 1/1 so you never know how Wizards might decide to shake up the format. I’d rather keep it around then sell it for its current low price.
A nice surprise. I threw these in here when SCG raised the price of Misty Rainforest and Scalding Tarn but left the other fetchlands alone, knowing they’d eventually rise as well. This one’s up to $30, so it might finally be time to sell.
This was another $0.50 store credit flyer at Return to Ravnica release, similar to Sunblast Angel. I figured I could double up if the card saw even a marginal amount of play. Nope.
In general, buying cards that have already entered the Twitter hype machine phase of their ascendance pays off. By the time people are discussing how "real" the card is, they’ve started to disappear everywhere and the price has begun to shoot up. As long as you sell into that initial hype, you’re good.
Nivmagus Elemental was the huge exception to that rule. The problem was that the deck’s coming out party happened at a tournament where 50% of the field was its worst matchup and its two televised matchups were early losses to that deck. That inspired exactly no one to go out and build it, making this a massively busted spec and one I lost a great deal of money on.
These are some random cards that likely ended up in the box out of pure laziness. The Forest is the Japanese one from the red APAC pack.
More laziness cards, and I’d love to remember why they were included. I played those Blightnings a bunch when they were in Standard, but I thought I had traded them. I don’t know what compelled me to add a random couple of Talara’s Battalions to the box either. It is possible I was going through the lesser-known "punch drunk" stage of grief over my Nivmagus Elemental spec and just started shoving random stuff in the box on some sort of awkward bender.
I picked up playsets of all the Commander and Planechase 2012 unique cards when they were current, knowing they’d start to go up after being out of print for a while. This process has started—check out Kaalia and her $15 price tag—but all of these still have room to grow.
Except for these. I went looking for them when they were spoiled in M14, but I couldn’t find them and assumed I had sold them for like $50 each a few months ago. Nope —they were hiding in the failure box.
At this point, I’m going to hold onto them for Standard. I see no reason why it won’t occupy the Thragtusk memorial $20-$25 insane green card slot for the next year or so.
Some of these I carried over, unfortunately, through the set rotation. Others I picked up in the fall when they were cheap as dirt. They’re still pretty low, but I think they’ll eventually do pretty well.
I bought these for about $3 each. They’re currently worth about $6. Next season, they should be $12. My hope is to keep Podding up to higher prices until I want to cash out.
The final few snapshots are all of the Scars block stuff I still have. They are from my personal collection, most of which I sold last winter and spring. I decided to hold on to all of this, though, because it hasn’t quite yet matured from its post-rotation doldrums. By next winter, it’ll all be ready to sell. The only stuff I moved at the time were Karn Liberated and Spellskite.
That’s it—the whole box. The literal skeletons in my closet. I wish I could say it was time for some scotch or at least a sad, defiant nap, but it’s only 2 PM, so I’ve got another five hours of work to get through. Tonight, I’ll bust out the cube and draft as many of the cards that are also on this list as I can. Maybe someday I’ll even make a failed spec cube where my quad Sunblast Angel deck will get overrun by a gang of rampaging Nivmagus Elementals.
Until next time –
– Chas Andres