MTG Salvation

So these are all good questions and you should definitely feel good for asking them. Let me attempt to give some answers, although I don't speak from a position of any authority on gold borders.

1) TCGp has prices for the cards that are actually selling. I feel like that's an important distinction - if the cards aren't selling, it doesn't matter what price you put because nobody will buy them.
2) This is the tricky one. The market is "people who want to play the card in EDH/casual, and want a 'real' card but don't want to shell out for the black-border version". I don't think that you're going to get any collectors biting at this - collectors will buy a whole set, or maybe even just one deck, but piecing together a 75 card-by-card? Too much time. So, circling back, eBay is probably your best bet. Post your stuff for 5-10% less than the best current price, and it should eventually sell. I say eventually because these are not too rare, while the people who want one are.
3) It's not a phase, and prices will increase. But only some of them. These are basically extra reserve list cards, so stuff like Cradle is solid - it's not going to get a reprint that will tank the price of the original, thus putting it within reach of more people and reducing GB demand. Look at that Forest that they disingenuously cite as the "true weekly winner". I don't know where Stocks gets their pricing (median listing?), but that's CLEARLY a case of "someone listed some at a lower price and then pulled them", causing the arbitrary line to dip. It's not actually selling at $4. Same with the Randy B bio card. As to why they'd do that - well, it got your attention, didn't it?
4) Thanks, but our numbers are actually up lately. Moving on, no, making people aware of GB cards isn't really going to cause any market swings. It may convince one or two more people to buy GB rather than have a ripped index card saying "Cradle" on it, but there really aren't that many GB cards rotting in binders.

TL;DR - Cradle, Rector, V Stronghold, Survival, Replenish, G Monolith, maybe Yawg Will, and very maybe City are the GB cards that I'd say have legs. The rest are oddities that are mostly overpriced due to zero availability, but there's also zero demand.

So, I actually drafted this on Saturday. It went ... about as expected, honestly.

Elspeth went Naya Aggro. She was a complete house when she dropped.
Liliana showed up in a Golgari shell. Whenever she came down she won the game on her own - no other zombies required.
Daretti went Boros Aggro and ended up winning the whole thing. The pilot didn't even splash for Daretti.
Nicol Bolas went Izzet splashing black, and never got cast.
Ral went full Izzet and never got cast.
I ended up with Teferi, and wow, what a trap. I tried to splash him and a couple big sphinxes into my Selesnya deck, and I never drew both Islands and blue cards in the same game, so I often ended up just color-screwed or with dead cards in my hand.
Tezzeret tried to make Dimir work, but with so much competition it just didn't. He 0-3ed.
Vraska went Golgari, and managed to come down once and win a game.

So I would say that fully half of the planeswalkers were, at best, neutral includes. Tezzeret and Teferi were stones around our necks - I would definitely have done better to play pure Selesnya instead of trying to go Bant. There is NO support for UG nor for WU, but my other option was Izzet-Boros and Teferi isn't what that deck wants to be doing. The Tezzeret player was lamenting the lack of artifacts the whole time. Bolas could maybe have gotten there, and the winner didn't even play his planeswalker. Ral and Vraska are of course in the set, and Elspeth and Lili are monocolored which was a huge flexibility.

Having played it, I can now confidently declare this to be a garbage draft format.

Quote from Elemental »

I'd be happy to hear otherwise from someone who does the draft!

Draft is scheduled for first weekend in November. I'll keep you posted.

Basically, I want to try to poke holes in their "this is a good draft" supposition. If no holes appear, great. If holes appear, well, we'll know for next time.

Well, eBay has several listed, and $80 shipped is the low. You're certainly not going to get more than that elsewhere. If you list lower, you may hit someone's price point, and you'll certainly get a wider audience. Don't discount it just because other people haven't managed to sell theirs.

Quote from mtgsalaccount »

Quote from KnickM »

will never be sold.

Well if they'll "never" be sold then there's literally no point paying a high price for them in the first place, you can't make money selling something you never sell, so there is definitely a price where even someone with cards in a deck will say "it's worth it" to sell which seems to be how most or all the Moats available to the market were acquired by one person.
And, if people keep a card for literally "years", then they not only have to worry about it getting damaged but also have to worry about inflation because there is a point over a given interval of time where the devaluation of currency will exceed the profit made from the raised price of a card along with paying for increased shipping costs. Though, if Wizards doesn't pay attention then there are also equally manipulative ways to devalue such cards, with a little more work.

Sure - everyone has their price, and I'm sure that if, for example, City cracks a grand, I'd resign myself to never playing it and ship my copies. But when you say "literally no point paying a high price for them in the first place", you're discounting the reason that most of us picked them up in the first place - we want to sleeve them up and put them into a deck. I didn't get them to make a profit (although since I got my first copy out of a pack for $2.50, I'd say I'm doing all right). The people who're buying them for a profit are definitely offering them for sale - just at a much higher price.

You have touched upon one of the aspects of a price spike - people whose prices get met. When a card price rises, a number of people who have copies of the card will dig them out and post them for sale at a little under what the big guys are charging, to try to get in on that action. Sometimes there are enough people digging cards up that the price starts to go down again, as people compete to post the lowest price. But for cards like City of Traitors, old cards on the reserve list that are known quantities in Legacy, most people will shrug and say "Eh, I'm still using mine."

Quote from Stoogeslap »

I really don't follow deck trends... what is going on w/ premium Wispmare? It's a foil common from a Modern set... it's not like the pre-Mirrodin foils which had a lesser print run that the Modern-bordered foils.

Please, enlighten me...

Double-posting to indicate an update. There are now 13 sellers, asking anywhere from $12 to $20 (and that one guy asking $75) for the foil. The market price has not moved over $2, which indicates that nobody is actually buying the card at these inflated prices. This is phase II: regular people coming out of the woodwork and listing their copies to try to unload them while the price is inflated. Still nothing real about this "spike".

Quote from drakeavril »

So I was thinking, for release, is it cheaper for box or buy the singles I want? There appears to be value in the shock lands and some chase rares. I am only interested in maybe $60 of singles,

Sounds like you've answered your own question. Buy the $60 of singles that you want, rather than paying $100 for a box and getting some, then trying to trade the rest into the singles that you actually want.

This assessment is true for pretty much every set ever, BTW. I buy boxes so that I can draft (I love limited). You can buy boxes as a MPS lottery ticket. You can buy boxes because cracking packs is fun. Don't ever buy boxes for value, or to chase certain singles.

Quote from KingAlanI »

When I last played a few years ago, I worked well with the adventuresON buylist so I sent some cards a couple months ago and never got the check.
I mailed on June 12th, it was marked as received on June 20th, and the check never came.
I sent 2 emails to customerservice@adventureson.com a few days apart that both bounced because their email server said they were out of disk space

Has anyone else had problems with them lately?

Tried a phone call? (916) 973-9064 is their listed contact info on their web site.

Quote from stormcrow_mtg »

I'm looking to invest in some Magic Player Rewards. As far as I know, they're promos that promoted DCI play, and they were discontinued in 2011. Some are foil, some aren't. Obviously these cards are very unique, which makes me want to think that they can't be reprinted with the art. The fact that these got discontinued in 2011 means that they most likely are dwindling in supply.

Are these promos profitable? What can the supply of these promos be compared to? Should I specifically target a subcategory of Magic Player Rewards?

Some of the cards have already been reprinted with MPR art (see M25 Disenchant, for example).

Personally I don't like them. Game pieces should say what they do.

I think that going in on them is a bad idea. The good ones are already expensive, and the bad ones have no market.

Quote from releasethedogs »

Curious as to what the value of these are.
A guy at my FLGS wants to trade them but I have no idea as to their value.

First: THANK YOU for the photoa! They make evaluation significantly easier.
Second: Mark Poole goes to GPs and conventions, and while he does charge $2 per signature, that's not really a game-changer. I'd value these like any other damaged Beta Counterspell (Market is $158, but there's only one for sale and the asking price is $250) and Island. Someone's bidding up a NM Counterspell to about $500 on eBay, but that's NM. The Island is probably closer to $15 - Market is $23, but there are multiple sellers offering HP, MP, and DMG copies of that exact Island (Island A, for the curious) for under $15 shipped.
Third: Point of clarification - I'm evaluating these as damaged because they're damaged, not because of the signature. A signature doesn't automatically ding the condition down to damaged. The big crease in the middle, however ...

PMAY4TH

15% off a cart of $50+. It is good until 4:00 PM PST and the cart can include multiple items.

Quote from drakeavril »

So i'm looking at the RL duals, especially for blue, they are crazy high...especially Underground Sea and Volcanic Island. Will prices ever drop or should I just accept they will just keep increasing forever?

Just gotta accept it and pick up whatever you need before they climb even higher.

Quote from sealteamfive »

I'm curious as what ya'll believe are the most versatile duals in terms of flexibility for future deck building? I currently have x3 Scrubland, x3 Badlands, x1 Plateau, x1 Bayou, x1 Underground Sea, & x1 Tropical Island. I had also planned on trying to complete the set of Bayou, so I could play Elves, but then I saw the price of Gaea's Cradle and quickly abandoned that plan. So right now I'm just trying to lay down some sort of mana foundation that I can build on in the future. I really appreciate any thoughts or suggestions; thanks, folks!

If I were you I would pick one deck you really like, and get that manabase. Your secondary decks will be relegated to mostly decks w/o RL lands (Burn, Fish, D&T, Manaless Dredge, Omnitell, Oops, etc). You have a lot of traders - so try to turn your mish-mash dual land collection into something actually playable:

• Trade into 4x City Of Traitors. This opens you up to Eldrazi, Moon Stompy, MUD, etc. Some Eldrazi lists can get away with just 2 or 3 (especially Big Eldrazi) if for some reason you can't get all 4.
• Trade into 4x Cradle and a second Bayou. This builds only Elves, but that's a fascinating deck with many deep lines of play. Ideally you would want a Taiga for splashing purposes. You might also want a Savannah and Trop for more thorough options, but these are not really necessary right now.
• You can go for the Green midrange package. If you can get the right combination of Savannahs, Bayous, and Taigas you can build Maverick, Nic Fit, Jund, etc. A single Badlands and Scrubland opens that up to Aggro Loam (but Moxen might be a problem).
EDIT - 2 or 3 Bayous will also let you play Depths combo.

• (mulitcoloured) Blue decks are trickier. For most Midrange or Tempo decks, you will need multiples of Trop, Volc, and probably Seas as well.
3-4 Tundras + ideally a Volc opens the door to Miracles (and possible Stoneblade). 4x Volc lets you play U/R Prowess (Delver). 4x Trop is all you need for Infect. 2 Seas, or 1 Sea plus a Trop, lets you play Death's Shadow.

Bottom line - you are going in too many directions right now. Pick something to focus on.
Best of luck!

SP at best. Whitening on the edges on the back means it's definitely not NM. It's a very clean card, the standard for NM is just very high.

A new one for today:

PLAN2SAVE

15% off $50+. I am not sure if this is by item or Cart (I haven't checked yet) and it expires at 1:00 PM PST (so, 4 hours from this post)and it looks like it only works from within the phone app.

Quote from Ashiok »

History of Benalia is mythic? Not really feeling the mythic aspect of the card.

The art is mythic.

These make me appreciate the vertical orientation so much more than Phyrexian Scriptures did.

Love the new Temple art!

Anything on the reserve list. Everything else is always at risk.

Can you post hi res scans? Pictures like the ones you've provided aren't going to rule out anything but the worst fakes and I can't watch the light test video now.