I was getting reaaaaalllly worried that Bolas would be undone by Gideon swinging a pointy evil maguffin at him... but the new Jace card suggests the writers might be after something more subtle. Something about Bolas not understanding the results of the Elder Spell perfectly. I've got my fingers crossed that they handle this well and it's more of Bolas' plan going flawlessly but his hubris undoing him than Beefcake McBlackBlade winning.
Something like the end of the Doctor arc from The Authority would be amazing.
Yes, condition can make a huge, HUGE difference in the value of higher end older cards. We can't help the pricing.
What I can say is this: the person who is buying this from you may be looking to sell it off in turn. If so, then they will not pay you what they will get from the end user. You won't get retail or even TCG Mid for your collection unless you were to sell it individually in those venues. The buyer will essentially want to discount the price for the value of his time spent doing all that work to move the set individually.
What I would do is look up the BUYLIST prices for your cards. Not the TCG Mid. That Buylist price should be a floor. Why? Because with a buylist you're comparing apples to apples: "What price could I get if I wanted to dump my whole collection on a vendor / reseller at once?" If you're using TCG, you're comparing apples to oranges, since TCG price actually answers a different question: "What price would I get if I sold all my collection as individual cards to individual players?"
You can explain to him that if you were hard up for cash, you could buylist the collection for X dollars (let's say $10k) and so if he's gonna buy the set, there's gonna have to be a premium involved. Splitting the difference between TCG mid and buylist (about $15k in this example) seems perfectly fair.
[quote from="ET1 »" url="/forums/the-game/modern/554992-modern-prices-discussion?comment=12503"]Given how Legacy and Vintage are dead beyond salvation, it's the Modern players the ones with the competitive motivation to buy product like this. They know it, it's obvious but they're doing a token attempt at pretending it ain't so.
Hey.
First off, we're not dead. We just have a hard time finding sanctioned play.
Second, casual people buy these things, too. EDH, Cube, and casual 60 like a lot of the same things that Legacy and Vintage do. I don't think it's fair to say that a majority of the buyers of this set are buying for Modern use.
Hopefully ya'll listened to me and DID NOT CHASE the card at $8.00!
I suspected the price would gradually decline to $5.00 even without a reprint. Now that it's being reprinted, I see a short term dip close to $1.00 again. I think price memory keeps it at least above 99 cents. However, given its past performance, I also think we will see this card recover back to a more reasonable 4-5 dollars in the medium term.
Once the price crashes, I'm gonna be gobbling up another 20 or so for my own use!
While not a perfect system, I think speculators should take a look at cube forums/discussions when looking at potential buys. There are meta-specific cards that cube doesn't predict for but certain general good-stuff like this always piques our interest and we tend to pick it up for cube before it makes gains.
Not necessarily just speculator-specific advice, either. It's just good general advice for picking stuff up at their floor.
I maintain a small army of casual 60 card decks for my kids, and I brew more occasionally. This means I need to collect multiple playsets of useful cards, like Ash Barrens, and I'm highly motivated to get them as cheaply as possible. I have found, in the past, that when I find a card useful for some wacky casual deck, eventually someone will stick it into a real deck or a rogue deck they play on a Twitch Stream or something, and eventually the card gets more expensive. Not all the time, but often enough that I try to act quickly when new printings produce cards I can use. Ash Barrens was one; Field of Ruin was another one.
Lesson being: if a card has a unique application or is sought after for EDH or Cube or casual, pay attention. It may have qualities that will eventually cause it to spike.
I concur that the storyline took a nose dive this last week. But, I don't know that I care much about a bunch of locals getting shown to be petty and expendable. If anything, Creative made a mistake in delving too deeply into the motivations and heads of some of the characters who are now just getting tossed around like rag dolls. We have to remember this has ALWAYS been a thing about Planeswalkers. They're the Ricks of the Magic universe, and they're traditionally seen as callously tossing non-walkers aside like they're worthless. So, why focus so much on them?
Anyway, Angrath was done fine here. His motivation is simple. His actions make sense. What was atrocious was Jace and Vraska. What was the dilemma, again? Bolas is bad and now Vraska knows it, and knows his plan? Okay, great, so now Vraska can send off the artifact and she can run off with Jace and join his clubhouse or whatever and fight against Bolas. Wait, no, we can come up with something much more complicated instead. Instead, we're gonna (1) wipe her memories; (2) send her back to Bolas and trust he doesn't notice because Jace said he won't; (3) hope Jace gets to give her back her memories; and (4) hope she believes that those memories coming from a man who messes up peoples' heads for a living are real when they come back in some high-stress situation? These characters are dumb as a bag of rocks.
But, gentle reader, don't forget the second part of my advice earlier: since this card has gone above $5.00, there is definitely speculation going on - DO NOT CHASE!
We're talking $8.00 in paper, folks. Pauper has generated a spike that is pushing this even above the City of Brass threshold. This price is insane unless Pauper becomes the real deal on a permanent basis. I suspect it will not, at least not at this level, and we get back closer to $5.00 sans reprint.
Still, orange you glad you bought them back when they were $1.00?
This card is better than people are giving it credit for.
It's like 1/2 of a Control Magic. For 4 mana, you:
1. Remove the opponent's threat until they remove your answer;
2. Get the opponent's p/t as your own on the attack.
But you don't get:
3. To use abilities of the stolen creature;
4. Get the opponent's p/t on defense or against removal.
Or, to think of it another way: what if Duplicant only cost 4 mana?
The Achilles heel to this card is that Control Magic doesn't die to Shock, and this does. Still, this card is quite good and I'm surprised to hear people poop all over it.
But, still, better this than they print blocks like Theros / Homelands / Masqueses / Kamigawa only so that they avoid having to ban anything. Risk taking is good for all eternal formats.
It seems silly to have come this far. People didn't like a combo on combo metagame, so everything better than Energy kept getting banned. Copycat, Emrakul, Marvel, Copter... and now a bunch of dorks that turn sideways and a card that fetches a land for G.
I mean, kudos to Wizards for aggressively using the ban-hammer to improve their game. That's cool. I drastically prefer this to printing weak, safe cards or issuing errata. Still, one has to wonder whether they would have been better served by letting a combo metagame exist rather than starting down this silly road.
Yeah, Stooge, you're complaining about spread. Stores offer to pay on a buylist at the lowest they can in order to get the stock they need. They're not trying to legitimize ripping people off, they're trying to get inventory. If no one sells at 4.00 and the demand is there (or the store thinks the demand is there) then the buylist goes up.
You're about halfway there. Here's my brew, and it works pretty darn well.
I believe that this is the most broken card in the entire set. It does two things. First, it restricts you as to what order you can play the cards in your hand. Second, it refills each players hands to 5 at each end step. Like Balance, the effect is so insanely powerful that breaking the symmetry makes this into a real game-breaker of a card.
I found three vectors to abuse this card. 1. Use cards with abilities you can activate from your hand, like cycling, because these can be used from the back of the program. Using an ability is not "playing" those cards! 2. Use Meddling Mage to lock a bunch of cards in the opponent's hand -- if they can't cast the first one, they can't cast anything behind it in the program! 3. Use a deck that wants to empty its hand constantly so that you can maximize the cards you draw.
The difficulty was that most hellbent decks are red or black, and this one was gonna be at least Blue and White. And, I didn't have Cities of Brass and Mana Confluences to spare. The breakthrough came when I realized that Peace of Mind is completely insane when you're re-loading to five cards every turn. From there, I went the control route. But, a specific kind of control. I needed control cards that operated from the battlefield, so that I could dump my hand quickly each turn.
Here's what I came up with so far:
The best card advantage engine ever printed.
4x The Grand Calcutron
Control Cards
4x Soul Snare // We need cheap removal that we can play BEFORE we know what we need to remove.
2x Seal of Cleansing
4x Waterfront Bouncer
4x Meddling Mage // Just name the first card in their program. Effectively makes them discard 1-5 cards!
3x Reflector Mage // The best at what he does. Once Calcutron is active, where do they put it in their program, knowing they can't cast it right away again?
2x Stronghold Machinist // You need to protect your permanents, and if you're replacing cards you discard every turn...
Win Conditions
2x Thopter Foundry
2x Sword of the Meek
2x Eternal Dragon
Stayin' Alive
3x Peace of Mind // Why yes, I will gain 15 life a turn if I feel like it.
1x Feldon's Cane // I was out of Elixirs of immortality...
3x EXTRA SLOTS! MIX AND MATCH!
Lands
2x Ash Barrens
2x Lonley Sandbar
2x Secluded Steppe
4x Adarkar Wastes // or whatever
2x Scavenger Grounds // We're a control deck, after all.
6x Island
6x Plains
This deck, unlike another deck I'm working on based on Yet Another Aether Vortex + Split Screen, works really well in practice as well as in theory. I think it's pretty close to ideal for what it is!
Azurhawk has it right. Since you put the new cards whereever you want in the "program," if you're playing an aggressive deck with lots of cheap spells that doesn't really care what the opponent is doing, this basically is a howling mine that draws you 1 to 5 cards each turn, depending on how many you play. It's a 2 casting cost Recycle. Power level is totally off the charts.
It's "symmetrical" sure, but we know how easy it is to break that.
I've got a playset of this card to incorporate into 60-card-casual. I'm looking for a deck like burn to put it in, where reloading to 5 cards every turn is backbreaking. I think what I'll end up doing is putting it a white weenie shell with a blue splash. Unless your hand is stuck with 5 plains, this basically guarantees an unreasonable stream of bodies.
Something like the end of the Doctor arc from The Authority would be amazing.
But, it's a really great card for Black Devotion. Devotion confirmed to be a returning mechanic in 2018?
What I can say is this: the person who is buying this from you may be looking to sell it off in turn. If so, then they will not pay you what they will get from the end user. You won't get retail or even TCG Mid for your collection unless you were to sell it individually in those venues. The buyer will essentially want to discount the price for the value of his time spent doing all that work to move the set individually.
What I would do is look up the BUYLIST prices for your cards. Not the TCG Mid. That Buylist price should be a floor. Why? Because with a buylist you're comparing apples to apples: "What price could I get if I wanted to dump my whole collection on a vendor / reseller at once?" If you're using TCG, you're comparing apples to oranges, since TCG price actually answers a different question: "What price would I get if I sold all my collection as individual cards to individual players?"
You can explain to him that if you were hard up for cash, you could buylist the collection for X dollars (let's say $10k) and so if he's gonna buy the set, there's gonna have to be a premium involved. Splitting the difference between TCG mid and buylist (about $15k in this example) seems perfectly fair.
Hey.
First off, we're not dead. We just have a hard time finding sanctioned play.
Second, casual people buy these things, too. EDH, Cube, and casual 60 like a lot of the same things that Legacy and Vintage do. I don't think it's fair to say that a majority of the buyers of this set are buying for Modern use.
Hopefully ya'll listened to me and DID NOT CHASE the card at $8.00!
I suspected the price would gradually decline to $5.00 even without a reprint. Now that it's being reprinted, I see a short term dip close to $1.00 again. I think price memory keeps it at least above 99 cents. However, given its past performance, I also think we will see this card recover back to a more reasonable 4-5 dollars in the medium term.
Once the price crashes, I'm gonna be gobbling up another 20 or so for my own use!
Not necessarily just speculator-specific advice, either. It's just good general advice for picking stuff up at their floor.
I maintain a small army of casual 60 card decks for my kids, and I brew more occasionally. This means I need to collect multiple playsets of useful cards, like Ash Barrens, and I'm highly motivated to get them as cheaply as possible. I have found, in the past, that when I find a card useful for some wacky casual deck, eventually someone will stick it into a real deck or a rogue deck they play on a Twitch Stream or something, and eventually the card gets more expensive. Not all the time, but often enough that I try to act quickly when new printings produce cards I can use. Ash Barrens was one; Field of Ruin was another one.
Lesson being: if a card has a unique application or is sought after for EDH or Cube or casual, pay attention. It may have qualities that will eventually cause it to spike.
Anyway, Angrath was done fine here. His motivation is simple. His actions make sense. What was atrocious was Jace and Vraska. What was the dilemma, again? Bolas is bad and now Vraska knows it, and knows his plan? Okay, great, so now Vraska can send off the artifact and she can run off with Jace and join his clubhouse or whatever and fight against Bolas. Wait, no, we can come up with something much more complicated instead. Instead, we're gonna (1) wipe her memories; (2) send her back to Bolas and trust he doesn't notice because Jace said he won't; (3) hope Jace gets to give her back her memories; and (4) hope she believes that those memories coming from a man who messes up peoples' heads for a living are real when they come back in some high-stress situation? These characters are dumb as a bag of rocks.
But, gentle reader, don't forget the second part of my advice earlier: since this card has gone above $5.00, there is definitely speculation going on - DO NOT CHASE!
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Commander 2016/Ash Barrens#paper
We're talking $8.00 in paper, folks. Pauper has generated a spike that is pushing this even above the City of Brass threshold. This price is insane unless Pauper becomes the real deal on a permanent basis. I suspect it will not, at least not at this level, and we get back closer to $5.00 sans reprint.
Still, orange you glad you bought them back when they were $1.00?
It's like 1/2 of a Control Magic. For 4 mana, you:
1. Remove the opponent's threat until they remove your answer;
2. Get the opponent's p/t as your own on the attack.
But you don't get:
3. To use abilities of the stolen creature;
4. Get the opponent's p/t on defense or against removal.
Or, to think of it another way: what if Duplicant only cost 4 mana?
The Achilles heel to this card is that Control Magic doesn't die to Shock, and this does. Still, this card is quite good and I'm surprised to hear people poop all over it.
But, still, better this than they print blocks like Theros / Homelands / Masqueses / Kamigawa only so that they avoid having to ban anything. Risk taking is good for all eternal formats.
I mean, kudos to Wizards for aggressively using the ban-hammer to improve their game. That's cool. I drastically prefer this to printing weak, safe cards or issuing errata. Still, one has to wonder whether they would have been better served by letting a combo metagame exist rather than starting down this silly road.
I believe that this is the most broken card in the entire set. It does two things. First, it restricts you as to what order you can play the cards in your hand. Second, it refills each players hands to 5 at each end step. Like Balance, the effect is so insanely powerful that breaking the symmetry makes this into a real game-breaker of a card.
I found three vectors to abuse this card. 1. Use cards with abilities you can activate from your hand, like cycling, because these can be used from the back of the program. Using an ability is not "playing" those cards! 2. Use Meddling Mage to lock a bunch of cards in the opponent's hand -- if they can't cast the first one, they can't cast anything behind it in the program! 3. Use a deck that wants to empty its hand constantly so that you can maximize the cards you draw.
The difficulty was that most hellbent decks are red or black, and this one was gonna be at least Blue and White. And, I didn't have Cities of Brass and Mana Confluences to spare. The breakthrough came when I realized that Peace of Mind is completely insane when you're re-loading to five cards every turn. From there, I went the control route. But, a specific kind of control. I needed control cards that operated from the battlefield, so that I could dump my hand quickly each turn.
Here's what I came up with so far:
The best card advantage engine ever printed.
4x The Grand Calcutron
Control Cards
4x Soul Snare // We need cheap removal that we can play BEFORE we know what we need to remove.
2x Seal of Cleansing
4x Waterfront Bouncer
4x Meddling Mage // Just name the first card in their program. Effectively makes them discard 1-5 cards!
3x Reflector Mage // The best at what he does. Once Calcutron is active, where do they put it in their program, knowing they can't cast it right away again?
2x Stronghold Machinist // You need to protect your permanents, and if you're replacing cards you discard every turn...
Win Conditions
2x Thopter Foundry
2x Sword of the Meek
2x Eternal Dragon
Stayin' Alive
3x Peace of Mind // Why yes, I will gain 15 life a turn if I feel like it.
1x Feldon's Cane // I was out of Elixirs of immortality...
3x EXTRA SLOTS! MIX AND MATCH!
Lands
2x Ash Barrens
2x Lonley Sandbar
2x Secluded Steppe
4x Adarkar Wastes // or whatever
2x Scavenger Grounds // We're a control deck, after all.
6x Island
6x Plains
This deck, unlike another deck I'm working on based on Yet Another Aether Vortex + Split Screen, works really well in practice as well as in theory. I think it's pretty close to ideal for what it is!
It's "symmetrical" sure, but we know how easy it is to break that.
I've got a playset of this card to incorporate into 60-card-casual. I'm looking for a deck like burn to put it in, where reloading to 5 cards every turn is backbreaking. I think what I'll end up doing is putting it a white weenie shell with a blue splash. Unless your hand is stuck with 5 plains, this basically guarantees an unreasonable stream of bodies.