Gift of Immortality just gives modern its own Angelic Renewal type card for Sun Titan loop, aye?
Why muck about with EoT triggers when titan can just plop the aura right back on itself.
Still gets exiled or hit with instant removal of course.
What I mean is, people kept saying "if you had bought (x card) it would have gone up 800% by now!" And he'd have to patiently explain literally every week to a new batch of people that hindsight wasn't a usable trading strategy, and he was trying to see if we could predict what would rise in price beforehand. (Among other complaints from people who couldn't be bothered to actually read the articles, but that was one of the more common ones.)
Thanks for putting in the effort to do that investment project! I found it highly interesting. The barrage of inane comments you got along the way was also highly interesting, despite being annoying I'm sure. Apparently people are good at missing the (cearly and repeatedly stated) point.
They won't be .05 or anything, but "Budget" to a Modern Player is different than a Standard one. Oblivion Stone costs around $20.00 Curse of Swine will probably go no higher than 4.00 and that seems unlikely. Supreme Verdict is sitting around 2.00 now and in Standard it's almost always better than Curse of the Swine. When RTR was being heavily drafted, Verdict was only around $1.00.
Swine is unique as a Mono-Blue "wrath", but those 2/2's it leaves behind can keep swinging for damage. I just can't see Curse being THAT expensive. Any UW deck is going to have Verdict and UR decks will probably use more Anger of the Gods before they would go full out on Curse.
The Devotion land could go higher, if a deck is found for it, but as I said in the article, it doesn't have a home in Modern right now, so the price on it could be totally moot for Modern players?
I want to chime in here on the investment project, which I have enjoyed following for a while now. One of the most important things to follow IMO when it comes to speculating, is the metagame. When you said there is no way to predict whether or not Craterhoof Behemoths would spike as opposed to Misthollow Griffin (Mistmoon?) you were absolutely right. While you can guess, and hope to pick correctly on these kinds of splits, it really is a crap-shoot situation, and you're likely not going to come out ahead. When you are in the habit of checking winning deck trends, or hot tech in popular author's articles on a consistent, regular basis, you are putting yourself in a much better position to succeed. Had you been playing in more events online I feel like you would have had a better understanding of cards that had potential to see more play. (Or even just talking with players who grind events about specific cards)
Not only do you need to have a strong understanding of the formats in which you are speculating, you also need to be aware of quite a few other outside influencing factors, like banning/restrictions. The moment I read Cloudpost and Temporal Fissure were getting banned, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of which Pauper cards were going to spike, based on how I felt the metagame would evolve.
Reprints showing up in spoilers, pack payout structuring for each format, changes in draft formats (old formats being reintroduced) and special sales such as the FTV or Commander sets, all play a big part in price trends as well. GOODGAMERY has an excellent MTGO speculation thread that I haven't seen talked about much, and there are a couple others that have been helpful out there. QuietSpeculation also comes to mind. I enjoyed reading your take on speculating, and am a little disappointed to hear you are giving it up.
Daily: I was on Noble Fish with Green Sun's Zenith. I'm pretty sure playing Landstill is a suicide note in the current meta. I went 2-2, losing to Dredge in the final round despite having 4 Cages and 3 Rest in Peace in my board. :(
Dredge v. Affinity: I don't have a lot of experience with either. I think you guys probably were pretty accurate in terms of Dredge having more difficult mull decision as opposed to Affinity having more difficult board decisions. I agree that they are both pretty linear.
In terms of playing against them as a Fish pilot, I find Dredge harder because with Affinity as long as you can land your hate it will usually wipe their board and they will have difficulty recovering. However, with Dredge you have to stop them from Dredging even a couple times because even if you can prevent them from Dread Returning, they can still overwhelm you with Bridge tokens, Bloodghast, etc, which means you have to have either multiple pieces of hate in your opener or hate + counter backup.
Power: I don't know how they will release it, but I wonder, beyond the mystique factor, how much demand for Power there will actually be. I mean, it's not legal in anything other than Vintage, so if you aren't interested in playing that format (and many people will try it out and be turned off by it) I'm not sure quite sure what use you would have in acquiring it and holding on to it (outside of financial reasons, if it ends up being worth a lot).
Community Build: Ajani Vengeant was actually going to be my Planeswalker pick, so I'm glad you mentioned him. I don't know why you'd want sweepers in a weenie creature deck that has no other victory conditions, so cards like Balance and Pyroclasm seem really bad here. If you want some type of mass removal, maybe try something like Bonfire of the Damned that just hits their side. As for artifacts, I think Cage is good, at least in the board. Cloister is kind of interesting, but maybe too expensive if you aren't going the Welder route. If you do go that route, however, you should definitely include Ensnaring Bridge, because that is a pretty nice combo. Also, if you are going back and adding Goblin Welder, I'd also recommend Faithless Looting. Can help filter through your library and dump artifacts in to the yard to Weld back up.
I went back and read your review (tried not to get to deep into it when it was published because I hadn't finished mine and I try to avoid other reviews until I'm done) and I think we approach things differently. I certainly didn't even contemplate the possiblity of infinite tokens with Master of Waves and the other devotion guys that make dudes, but I guess it's out there. However, we definitely agree that Prophet of Kruphix is lazy design.
Speaking of lazy, that's my only excuse for messing up the pronouns for the Triad. I do it in my game play vids also. I'm just used to thinking of individual cards as dudes for some reason. I'll try and clean it up in the future.
Sad times about Ashiok, it pays to read the card I guess. I'm sure he'll be added to mill decks anyways.
How did you get 6000 views on your review? That's huge, congrats!
Sure, I don't disagree with you that everyone had a chance to suggest lots of picks.
I just don't know how this is relevant to what I am saying (ie. that Pete's experiment doesn't really tell as anything about how profitable MTGO investing can be. It just tells us the results of a particular investing method that he used.)
EDIT: Oh, I see now. It is related to my negation of your statement "Anyone claiming to reliably make money by shot calling had a chance to proof it." I thought by that you meant that everybody had a chance to prove it by making such predictions that the final, collective result will be positive. But, yeah, of course they had a chance to prove it by simply offering enough suggestions and then in the end show that those suggestions alone made money.
Few people has something interesting to say :-) but you are right. However, I regard all puremtgo articles as being of high quality. And I would not expect the average magic player to start a writing career.
The personal statisfaction from writing articles and contributing to the community should not be factored in if you want to use "the money making" from writing articles as a benchmark.
Like making money from drafting. That is not why Pete drafts - I guess?
Player that do "shot calling" could also argue that they get an entertainment value from doing it.
The subjective value of these 'factors' makes them difficult to use as benchmarks. It would require specification of some kind of utility function?
"You also compare the profit to writing for puremtgo, but few people can do that."
Actually, any reasonably literate person with something interesting to say CAN write for puremtgo. Pete's columns have the highest traffic on the site, and so I expect he is paid more than most people would be paid. But even so, considering the amount of work that goes into producing good weekly content, writing Magic content is likely not much better than the burger-flipping he also mentions as a comparison point. You are spot-on with that assessment, at least in my experience. With the number of hours I put into each article I have written, here or elsewhere, I am making less than minimum wage -- albeit I was earning money to do two things (writing and playing Magic) that I love to do anyhow. You have to produce content because you like producing content for the community, and look at the payment as a nice bonus for committing to a schedule and keeping to it week after week.
I agree that if you want bragging rights for reliably being able to make money, you should have made a lot of correct predictions. Or suggested a general strategy which have made money.
Again: Anyone had the chance to do just that.
It seems like people collectively were able to predict increases if Pete came out $50 ahead before he went to the passive strategy.
Whoever made predictions did have the chance to prove themselves, correct, but only if they made enough predictions. Just correctly predicting one card to make profit doesn't mean anything about your predicting ability, as it's too small samplesize.
So I don't agree with your claim that if someone suggestions made money they have the bragging rights.
If the fourth paragraph is directed at me: I never made any claims about me correctly predicting anything. I just criticized Pete's logic.
Nice writeup. We've got different perspectives on cards so it's nice to see the other side. Pet peeve though is you calling females "him. Triad of Fates is not a "guy"! I mean, you can never know for sure, but it's highly likely that they are a trio of females.
Ashiok's +1 exiles, doesn't mill, btw. No happy GY times.
There are basically infinite investing strategies. Pete's strategy was to follow the advice of people who made comments under his articles. I suppose he did so selectively too, and I also suppose he sometimes used his own judgment as to when to sell the cards. That was his strategy, and apparently it didn't work. It doesn't follow from that that all investing strategies don't work.
Anyone caliming to reliably make money by shot calling definitely didnt have a chance to prove it, since Pete didnt only listened to them, but also to other people, which affected the final results.
I do not get your point? Could you explain it further?
What do you mean by investing in MTGO cards then? Everyone who had a suggestion for investments could chip in. People did, and Pete followed their advise.
Anyone claiming to reliably make money by shot calling had a chance to proof it.
Your investment project only confirms that by investing the way you did, you lost money, but not every player invests the way you do (I for one, definitely don't, I don't understand the logic behind lot's of your buy/sell decision), so your experiment doesn't tell us if it is possible to reliably make profit by investing in MTGO cards. It just shows us what you bought and what you sold and that in the end you lost money.
Otherwise I enjoy these series and read it every week.
Thank you very much for having done the investment project and for the final wrap up. Excellent work! I read the conclusion in a different way than you do.
It seems like you are forcing the conclusion to confirm your initial belief, which is not really different from speculators forgetting their failures and only remembering successful investments.
Before you stopped maintaining the portfolio you had a surplus of $50 (on the high side). Hence, the average person could actually “shot call” cards (...sadly I cannot). The loss in the latter period is not surprising. So you could also say that by actively managing your portfolio you can at least maintain its value. By doing nothing you get a huge loss – like most players. The loss that you avoided is also a very real surplus.
In your experiment design the project had only been a success if you had turned $300 into $300 + 43 hours x $7.25 / hour = $611.75. Did you really expect that? And had that been fulfilled would the argument then have been: It makes less money than my daytime job? Etc.
You also compare the profit to writing for puremtgo, but few people can do that. You compare to earnings from your drafting. But do those two income sources make you more money than flipping burgers? I doubt it.
That being said, I do agree that it seems be a lot of work for a small reward.
I doubt Curse of the Swine will be budget in any sense of the word. I expect it to be the highest priced non-mythic (followed closely by the devotion land.) This is because in STANDARD there aren't ever enough wrath effects to go around, and blue is where it's at right now. The devotion land will also find plenty of homes in Standard so the pricing will be fairly high. Don't expect to pick these cards up super cheap just because their relevance to Modern is low.
Merfolk of Bladehold cracks me up. I agree that he will be powerful and swingy and standard and too slow/unreliable to make it in Modern, just like the Hero.
I'm super excited for Soldier of the Pantheon in Death and Taxes. Much better than the Dryad Militant in the current meta. Protection from Electrolyze makes me so happy!
Gift of Immortality just gives modern its own Angelic Renewal type card for Sun Titan loop, aye?
Why muck about with EoT triggers when titan can just plop the aura right back on itself.
Still gets exiled or hit with instant removal of course.
Think it works with Evershrike as well no?
What I mean is, people kept saying "if you had bought (x card) it would have gone up 800% by now!" And he'd have to patiently explain literally every week to a new batch of people that hindsight wasn't a usable trading strategy, and he was trying to see if we could predict what would rise in price beforehand. (Among other complaints from people who couldn't be bothered to actually read the articles, but that was one of the more common ones.)
Repeating something does not make it true ;-)
Repeating something does not make it true ;-)
Thanks for putting in the effort to do that investment project! I found it highly interesting. The barrage of inane comments you got along the way was also highly interesting, despite being annoying I'm sure. Apparently people are good at missing the (cearly and repeatedly stated) point.
That seems like cheating! :p Just kidding. Smart. Wish Id thought of it. I don't reddit or do much of any networking.
They won't be .05 or anything, but "Budget" to a Modern Player is different than a Standard one. Oblivion Stone costs around $20.00 Curse of Swine will probably go no higher than 4.00 and that seems unlikely. Supreme Verdict is sitting around 2.00 now and in Standard it's almost always better than Curse of the Swine. When RTR was being heavily drafted, Verdict was only around $1.00.
Swine is unique as a Mono-Blue "wrath", but those 2/2's it leaves behind can keep swinging for damage. I just can't see Curse being THAT expensive. Any UW deck is going to have Verdict and UR decks will probably use more Anger of the Gods before they would go full out on Curse.
The Devotion land could go higher, if a deck is found for it, but as I said in the article, it doesn't have a home in Modern right now, so the price on it could be totally moot for Modern players?
Thanks! My scret is:
www.reddit.com/r/magictcg
If you get a post that makes it to the front page for an hour or so, boom 5k+ views. It's the fastest way to reach more readers.
I want to chime in here on the investment project, which I have enjoyed following for a while now. One of the most important things to follow IMO when it comes to speculating, is the metagame. When you said there is no way to predict whether or not Craterhoof Behemoths would spike as opposed to Misthollow Griffin (Mistmoon?) you were absolutely right. While you can guess, and hope to pick correctly on these kinds of splits, it really is a crap-shoot situation, and you're likely not going to come out ahead. When you are in the habit of checking winning deck trends, or hot tech in popular author's articles on a consistent, regular basis, you are putting yourself in a much better position to succeed. Had you been playing in more events online I feel like you would have had a better understanding of cards that had potential to see more play. (Or even just talking with players who grind events about specific cards)
Not only do you need to have a strong understanding of the formats in which you are speculating, you also need to be aware of quite a few other outside influencing factors, like banning/restrictions. The moment I read Cloudpost and Temporal Fissure were getting banned, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of which Pauper cards were going to spike, based on how I felt the metagame would evolve.
Reprints showing up in spoilers, pack payout structuring for each format, changes in draft formats (old formats being reintroduced) and special sales such as the FTV or Commander sets, all play a big part in price trends as well. GOODGAMERY has an excellent MTGO speculation thread that I haven't seen talked about much, and there are a couple others that have been helpful out there. QuietSpeculation also comes to mind. I enjoyed reading your take on speculating, and am a little disappointed to hear you are giving it up.
Daily: I was on Noble Fish with Green Sun's Zenith. I'm pretty sure playing Landstill is a suicide note in the current meta. I went 2-2, losing to Dredge in the final round despite having 4 Cages and 3 Rest in Peace in my board. :(
Dredge v. Affinity: I don't have a lot of experience with either. I think you guys probably were pretty accurate in terms of Dredge having more difficult mull decision as opposed to Affinity having more difficult board decisions. I agree that they are both pretty linear.
In terms of playing against them as a Fish pilot, I find Dredge harder because with Affinity as long as you can land your hate it will usually wipe their board and they will have difficulty recovering. However, with Dredge you have to stop them from Dredging even a couple times because even if you can prevent them from Dread Returning, they can still overwhelm you with Bridge tokens, Bloodghast, etc, which means you have to have either multiple pieces of hate in your opener or hate + counter backup.
Power: I don't know how they will release it, but I wonder, beyond the mystique factor, how much demand for Power there will actually be. I mean, it's not legal in anything other than Vintage, so if you aren't interested in playing that format (and many people will try it out and be turned off by it) I'm not sure quite sure what use you would have in acquiring it and holding on to it (outside of financial reasons, if it ends up being worth a lot).
Community Build: Ajani Vengeant was actually going to be my Planeswalker pick, so I'm glad you mentioned him. I don't know why you'd want sweepers in a weenie creature deck that has no other victory conditions, so cards like Balance and Pyroclasm seem really bad here. If you want some type of mass removal, maybe try something like Bonfire of the Damned that just hits their side. As for artifacts, I think Cage is good, at least in the board. Cloister is kind of interesting, but maybe too expensive if you aren't going the Welder route. If you do go that route, however, you should definitely include Ensnaring Bridge, because that is a pretty nice combo. Also, if you are going back and adding Goblin Welder, I'd also recommend Faithless Looting. Can help filter through your library and dump artifacts in to the yard to Weld back up.
I went back and read your review (tried not to get to deep into it when it was published because I hadn't finished mine and I try to avoid other reviews until I'm done) and I think we approach things differently. I certainly didn't even contemplate the possiblity of infinite tokens with Master of Waves and the other devotion guys that make dudes, but I guess it's out there. However, we definitely agree that Prophet of Kruphix is lazy design.
Speaking of lazy, that's my only excuse for messing up the pronouns for the Triad. I do it in my game play vids also. I'm just used to thinking of individual cards as dudes for some reason. I'll try and clean it up in the future.
Sad times about Ashiok, it pays to read the card I guess. I'm sure he'll be added to mill decks anyways.
How did you get 6000 views on your review? That's huge, congrats!
Sure, I don't disagree with you that everyone had a chance to suggest lots of picks.
I just don't know how this is relevant to what I am saying (ie. that Pete's experiment doesn't really tell as anything about how profitable MTGO investing can be. It just tells us the results of a particular investing method that he used.)
EDIT: Oh, I see now. It is related to my negation of your statement "Anyone claiming to reliably make money by shot calling had a chance to proof it." I thought by that you meant that everybody had a chance to prove it by making such predictions that the final, collective result will be positive. But, yeah, of course they had a chance to prove it by simply offering enough suggestions and then in the end show that those suggestions alone made money.
Few people has something interesting to say :-) but you are right. However, I regard all puremtgo articles as being of high quality. And I would not expect the average magic player to start a writing career.
The personal statisfaction from writing articles and contributing to the community should not be factored in if you want to use "the money making" from writing articles as a benchmark.
Like making money from drafting. That is not why Pete drafts - I guess?
Player that do "shot calling" could also argue that they get an entertainment value from doing it.
The subjective value of these 'factors' makes them difficult to use as benchmarks. It would require specification of some kind of utility function?
"You also compare the profit to writing for puremtgo, but few people can do that."
Actually, any reasonably literate person with something interesting to say CAN write for puremtgo. Pete's columns have the highest traffic on the site, and so I expect he is paid more than most people would be paid. But even so, considering the amount of work that goes into producing good weekly content, writing Magic content is likely not much better than the burger-flipping he also mentions as a comparison point. You are spot-on with that assessment, at least in my experience. With the number of hours I put into each article I have written, here or elsewhere, I am making less than minimum wage -- albeit I was earning money to do two things (writing and playing Magic) that I love to do anyhow. You have to produce content because you like producing content for the community, and look at the payment as a nice bonus for committing to a schedule and keeping to it week after week.
I agree that if you want bragging rights for reliably being able to make money, you should have made a lot of correct predictions. Or suggested a general strategy which have made money.
Again: Anyone had the chance to do just that.
It seems like people collectively were able to predict increases if Pete came out $50 ahead before he went to the passive strategy.
I didn't make any predictions in the comments.
Whoever made predictions did have the chance to prove themselves, correct, but only if they made enough predictions. Just correctly predicting one card to make profit doesn't mean anything about your predicting ability, as it's too small samplesize.
So I don't agree with your claim that if someone suggestions made money they have the bragging rights.
If the fourth paragraph is directed at me: I never made any claims about me correctly predicting anything. I just criticized Pete's logic.
... But if you want to see how my matches are playing out, you can watch them at my Youtube playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlARYZzRiAuv-4KvjG0rint_dXJQ5EjMA
Nice writeup. We've got different perspectives on cards so it's nice to see the other side. Pet peeve though is you calling females "him. Triad of Fates is not a "guy"! I mean, you can never know for sure, but it's highly likely that they are a trio of females.
Ashiok's +1 exiles, doesn't mill, btw. No happy GY times.
It is very easy to go back and check the predictions you may have made in the previous articles to see if YOUR predictions were good?
In that sense everyone did have the chance to prove themselves.
Should your suggestions have made money then you certainly have the bragging right.
If you did not make any suggestions then claiming to make money reliably over time is just that: a claim.
There are basically infinite investing strategies. Pete's strategy was to follow the advice of people who made comments under his articles. I suppose he did so selectively too, and I also suppose he sometimes used his own judgment as to when to sell the cards. That was his strategy, and apparently it didn't work. It doesn't follow from that that all investing strategies don't work.
Anyone caliming to reliably make money by shot calling definitely didnt have a chance to prove it, since Pete didnt only listened to them, but also to other people, which affected the final results.
I'd be fine with that card. Heck, you can even make it an instant and have it draw a card if you want. It's just so over the top as is.
I do not get your point? Could you explain it further?
What do you mean by investing in MTGO cards then? Everyone who had a suggestion for investments could chip in. People did, and Pete followed their advise.
Anyone claiming to reliably make money by shot calling had a chance to proof it.
Your investment project only confirms that by investing the way you did, you lost money, but not every player invests the way you do (I for one, definitely don't, I don't understand the logic behind lot's of your buy/sell decision), so your experiment doesn't tell us if it is possible to reliably make profit by investing in MTGO cards. It just shows us what you bought and what you sold and that in the end you lost money.
Otherwise I enjoy these series and read it every week.
Thank you very much for having done the investment project and for the final wrap up. Excellent work! I read the conclusion in a different way than you do.
It seems like you are forcing the conclusion to confirm your initial belief, which is not really different from speculators forgetting their failures and only remembering successful investments.
Before you stopped maintaining the portfolio you had a surplus of $50 (on the high side). Hence, the average person could actually “shot call” cards (...sadly I cannot). The loss in the latter period is not surprising. So you could also say that by actively managing your portfolio you can at least maintain its value. By doing nothing you get a huge loss – like most players. The loss that you avoided is also a very real surplus.
In your experiment design the project had only been a success if you had turned $300 into $300 + 43 hours x $7.25 / hour = $611.75. Did you really expect that? And had that been fulfilled would the argument then have been: It makes less money than my daytime job? Etc.
You also compare the profit to writing for puremtgo, but few people can do that. You compare to earnings from your drafting. But do those two income sources make you more money than flipping burgers? I doubt it.
That being said, I do agree that it seems be a lot of work for a small reward.
I doubt Curse of the Swine will be budget in any sense of the word. I expect it to be the highest priced non-mythic (followed closely by the devotion land.) This is because in STANDARD there aren't ever enough wrath effects to go around, and blue is where it's at right now. The devotion land will also find plenty of homes in Standard so the pricing will be fairly high. Don't expect to pick these cards up super cheap just because their relevance to Modern is low.
Merfolk of Bladehold cracks me up. I agree that he will be powerful and swingy and standard and too slow/unreliable to make it in Modern, just like the Hero.
I'm super excited for Soldier of the Pantheon in Death and Taxes. Much better than the Dryad Militant in the current meta. Protection from Electrolyze makes me so happy!