Hypothetical anecdotal evidence from a chat room versus actual market prices from a major dealer – I think we’re better off sticking with the latter.
“Of course it holds water, people are spending more money buying the higher priced mythics, therefore dealers lower rates of less sought after cards to keep sales flowing.”
That’s not how supply and demand work. Remember that sellers do not set prices, the market does. If I offer an Ornithopter for 100 tix, that doesn’t mean it’s worth 100. I’m not a dealer myself, but I’m 99% sure that Pete doesn’t check the price of Baneslayer every morning and take a penny off Lightning Bolt if it goes up. Card value is determined individually based on supply and demand. Also, look to the decks Hamtastic posted for evidence of what you’re saying not happening.
“Doesn't this counteract your point? Of course there isn't a mythic to lower the price, if there were, then the mythic would be like $40 and this would be much lower.”
Remember that I’m not arguing that Mythics push the prices of other cards up, but that there’s no relationship between the two. They’re decoupled.
yes the fact that mythics are harder to get than rares as nothing to do with the obsceneness in price. Because 50-70 dollar cards is the norm for standard....mythic or otherwise, thanks for reminding us
being mythic and therefore more rare certainly doesnt help the price...
Thanx for reading! And everyone for commenting. I figure a good laugh now and then is good (actually if you want to read my humor more frequently you can check out my not necessarily mtgo related blog: http://www.wontchangetheworld.com )
PS: I did end up getting full credit, so thank you to the editors for taking a risk on me.
It gets old seeing people whine so much about mythics and prices. The fact is there are four ungoldy expensive cards (+30.00) and those happen to be mythics. Three of them are planeswalkers. Are these cards expensive because they are mythic? No, they are expensive because they are crazy good and every one wants to play a deck with all four.
The average MTGO Traders price of all other mythics is $4.10 and this includes the ones inflated by ROE being newly released (I'm looking at you Vengevine).
Yeah I remember the old days of MTGO it was sometimes impossible to get in if a certain number of players was reached. Also crashes were so bad that the Mothership's online/offline page was bookmarked for me, so that I could see if it was my isp keeping me off or the servers. Often more than not it was the servers.
I know they will never ever do this. but what if they just doubled your collection for you. people who have the cards will at least be able to sell them and still play with their origanals. people who want to buy them will be able to, cause there is twice as much of any given card. putting that many cards into circulation at once will also have a strong effect on the price of the card.
if fow were just duplicated in your collection. and suddennly there were like 10,000 for sale, wouldnt that lower the price to about 25?? lol.
Mythics rares push the price of rares down because of redemption. Because of Mythic rares, fewer sets are redeemed, a larger percentage of rares stay on the online market.
If you want concrete examples of this, look at the rare lands before Mythics compared to the rare lands after Mythics. I don't think this effects the price of commons and uncommons that much as Bloodbraid Elf and Path to Exile demonstrate.
The other factor is that a lot more limited players are playing now than before, which means a larger supply of cards in the system. Of course there are more constructed players now too, so demand is also up and I'm not sure how it stacks up to the increased supply of cards.
I too was confused by the fact that somehow the ROE prices had "jumped". When you know that you only have 2 data points, and one of them is arbitrary, "running the numbers" seems like a waste of time that only serves to confuse people when presented alongside your numbers for cards with actual price histories. This would be better presented by providing a text list of starting prices (and naming it as such).
I dont know if bloodbraid elf and PtE are examples of prices being pushed. BBE sees play in multiple decks and in multiple formats. Far more than any individual mythic sees play except maybe jace the mindsculptor. PtE is the same way. If im not mistaken there have periodically been that one uncommon that becomes a multi-dollar card. Magma Jet did at one point, so did Lightning Helix i believe. and I am pretty sure watchwolf did as well. And those were all from a pre-mythic era.
"I’m not sure that the “high priced mythics push down the costs of more common cards” argument holds water."
- Take this exact statement into the auction room and ask the people there what they think. You will hear the comment often times, "If it ain't mythic, it probaly isn't worth much."
- Of course it holds water, people are spending more money buying the higher priced mythics, therefore dealers lower rates of less sought after cards to keep sales flowing.
"Maelstrom Pulse, at rare, is $20. That’s expensive. There’s no analogous mythic to push its price down."
- Doesn't this counteract your point? Of course there isn't a mythic to lower the price, if there were, then the mythic would be like $40 and this would be much lower.
Maybe I'm misreading your post, but how can prices not be affected by high priced Mythics. Thats like saying Legacy isn't skewed due to the price of Force of Will.
>>
"If you read the MTGO Message boards, it's pretty safe to believe that V3 is the worst thing WOTC has done to MTGO. It's missing a lot of functionality and the posters there (myself included) call attention to the myriad of missing features from V2.5 to our current system."
>>
It's amazing how quickly people forget how unstable the previous versions of Magic Online were. Yes, V3 is missing a lot of features that the older versions had, but the older versions were very unstable. You could almost count on them crashing whenever a new set was released because the older versions couldn't handle to increased player load. I'd much rather have the much more stable V3 or v2.5 any day.
As for the whole Mythic debate, well, it was a way to increase the value of certain cards in a set and create a "lottery" type effect where anybody regardless of skill could open a card that is worth at least a couple of free events. It gives a big incentive to new players, even if most of us old timers grumble and complain about it. I think WotC did a reaonable job with mythics in the Alara block, however they have noticeably gotten more greedy with which cards become Mythic rares in Zendikar block. Vengevine and Lotus Cobra are fine examples of cards that flavorwise don't need to be Mythic except for the fact that they are really good cards. Jace TMS is a rather sad case because it basically means you can't play an entire color competively without spending $200 on him.
I’m not sure that the “high priced mythics push down the costs of more common cards” argument holds water. Other factors seem to be at play, like whether a card is a staple, reprint, niche, or what have you. Unless a Mythic card and an uncommon are fighting for the same slot in a decklist, it doesn’t make sense to put them on the same cost curve. It would be like saying that the existence of Champagne makes the price of water go down.
Let’s take a closer look Jund. Like with Burn, it makes sense that a deck made out of power uncommons wouldn’t cost that much. As for the rares in Jund, their general low-cost can be traced to different factors, but the existence of Mythic Rares elsewhere in the environment doesn’t seem to be one of them:
*Rare lands are not what they once were: gone are the days of $10 Rav duals, cards that were known to be staples in every format early on. But now every block has its own cycle of rare lands, and their ubiquity pushes down the price. There’s no reason for the M10 lands to reach $10 since we know we’ll just have another cycle (or the same cycle) in that year’s Block and another in M11. Modern rare lands are also arguably nerfed from the Rav duals. And since there’s no cycle of Mythic staple lands, there’s no way for their (hypothetical) high price to affect the price of rare lands.
*Maelstrom Pulse, at rare, is $20. That’s expensive. There’s no analogous mythic to push its price down.
*Siege-Gang has been reprinted several times, which explains why it is under $5. It has no Mythic analogue, no mythic card you’d play in its stead, so no cost pushing is going on. The sideboard rares aren’t played in other decks AND there’s no Mythic analogue, so they’re cheap.
*The Mythic Chandra is the crux of the argument for me. Chandra is cheap because demand is low and it’s been preprinted once. To me the existence of relatively inexpensive Mythics says supply/demand curves exist for individual cards, but not for entire rarities as a whole.
But really, compare the Craig Jones deck (listed first) to Jund: the Jones Deck has 40 rares (!) versus Jund’s 25 (counting Mythic Chandra). Seems like the existence of Mythics in other decks isn’t pushing down the price on Jund when compared to Jones’s deck, it’s the fact that it plays almost half as many rares. It makes sense to compare the prices individual cards of comparable utility/popularity/supply to determine if Mythics are really affecting their price.
But even when we do that it doesn’t seem to prove the “Invisible Hand of Baneslayer Angel” hypothesis. What about Path to Exile and Bloodbraid Elf? They’re both worth at least twice what the most expensive uncommons of the Pre-Mythics decks cost. Again, my argument is that the costs are independent of the existence of Mythics, but even if we grant your premise that Mythics affect the price of other cards, PtE and Bloodbraid would indicate that prices are being pushed UP, not down.
Can I get the other half of the credits for reading it?
Lol, this was very funny. I did chuckle a few times, I'll admit it. Asking out Grul is classic, but I think Jhoira seems more your style. There is just something about her look that screams Metal and Dominatrix!
Looking back over the last list, I would think about these changes.
-4 Contaminated Ground
-2 Death Denied
-4 Breath of Malfegor
+4 Lightning Bolt - This card can help clear a path for your allies and hit the head, serves dual purpose which is better than something singular such as Breath or even Lava Axe for that matter
+1 Mountain
+1 Swamp - You need more land in this deck as your curve is high
+4 Burst Lightning - another card with dual purpose that can end the game when needed.
Also try this guy, Kiln Fiend - might work well with your sorceries and instants. And don't forget to cut the poisons in the sideboard.
Good job on creating the deck, now improve on it 80)
Hi Amar!
I'm guessing you missed the fact that I ran two sets of numbers (I even said as much in the article). One with Rise in them and one without Rise in them.
imo my ignorance to a deck doesn't mean it's a bad one, DnT is well seated in a group of decks that have been proven competitive, here's what I was trying to get at with the other post... even if you don't consider it T1 or if it isnt T1 in paper you're not concerned with that, look at what's winning online and that's what matters, with so many showings in the money you might as well accept it as T1 because you can buy in with it and earn yourself those more expensive decks through winnings, I can only imagine what someone like Blazelix has accumulated (actually I have the numbers he's won 88 packs after an initial investment of $200 selling those at even just 4 each thats $352 before taking out the entry fee, more then paying for the deck cost)
Once again I feel it's worth commenting that a price with no volume is not a price. (In fact technically speaking, the price of something you can't buy is "infinity".) Therefore, the $4 Rize comparison prices are completely fake and throw things off.
I'm sure that's not intentional. You have them because you gather automatically from MTGOTraders. And Heath puts them in because he needs to get cards in the system in advance of playability. Nevertheless, every time a new set comes out it makes your data invalid the first week.
While your statement is true, minimal amounts of people utilize it for that purpose.
Baseball cards are collectible, but outside of that they are boring. This is what makes Magic so unique.
I would forfeit some degree of collectibility if it meant helping the format online, notice I said some. This is why it is difficult to satisfy all parties involved. Lowering card prices isn't a viable solution that would satisfy everyone.
Hypothetical anecdotal evidence from a chat room versus actual market prices from a major dealer – I think we’re better off sticking with the latter.
“Of course it holds water, people are spending more money buying the higher priced mythics, therefore dealers lower rates of less sought after cards to keep sales flowing.”
That’s not how supply and demand work. Remember that sellers do not set prices, the market does. If I offer an Ornithopter for 100 tix, that doesn’t mean it’s worth 100. I’m not a dealer myself, but I’m 99% sure that Pete doesn’t check the price of Baneslayer every morning and take a penny off Lightning Bolt if it goes up. Card value is determined individually based on supply and demand. Also, look to the decks Hamtastic posted for evidence of what you’re saying not happening.
“Doesn't this counteract your point? Of course there isn't a mythic to lower the price, if there were, then the mythic would be like $40 and this would be much lower.”
Remember that I’m not arguing that Mythics push the prices of other cards up, but that there’s no relationship between the two. They’re decoupled.
oh dont get me wrong im not a collector...but making cards too available would suck for reasons that should be obvious to everyone
hehe :) I guess I was too swooned by Guul to notice the goblins the didn't make it to the party.
yes the fact that mythics are harder to get than rares as nothing to do with the obsceneness in price. Because 50-70 dollar cards is the norm for standard....mythic or otherwise, thanks for reminding us
being mythic and therefore more rare certainly doesnt help the price...
Thanx for reading! And everyone for commenting. I figure a good laugh now and then is good (actually if you want to read my humor more frequently you can check out my not necessarily mtgo related blog: http://www.wontchangetheworld.com )
PS: I did end up getting full credit, so thank you to the editors for taking a risk on me.
It gets old seeing people whine so much about mythics and prices. The fact is there are four ungoldy expensive cards (+30.00) and those happen to be mythics. Three of them are planeswalkers. Are these cards expensive because they are mythic? No, they are expensive because they are crazy good and every one wants to play a deck with all four.
The average MTGO Traders price of all other mythics is $4.10 and this includes the ones inflated by ROE being newly released (I'm looking at you Vengevine).
Yeah I remember the old days of MTGO it was sometimes impossible to get in if a certain number of players was reached. Also crashes were so bad that the Mothership's online/offline page was bookmarked for me, so that I could see if it was my isp keeping me off or the servers. Often more than not it was the servers.
umm your decks two cards short of 60, you missed out on two goblin slots there lol.
It would be cool to see some games played with the deck, now that would be funny.
Strangely enough Id have +11k junk cards to sell mostly :p
I know they will never ever do this. but what if they just doubled your collection for you. people who have the cards will at least be able to sell them and still play with their origanals. people who want to buy them will be able to, cause there is twice as much of any given card. putting that many cards into circulation at once will also have a strong effect on the price of the card.
if fow were just duplicated in your collection. and suddennly there were like 10,000 for sale, wouldnt that lower the price to about 25?? lol.
Mythics rares push the price of rares down because of redemption. Because of Mythic rares, fewer sets are redeemed, a larger percentage of rares stay on the online market.
If you want concrete examples of this, look at the rare lands before Mythics compared to the rare lands after Mythics. I don't think this effects the price of commons and uncommons that much as Bloodbraid Elf and Path to Exile demonstrate.
The other factor is that a lot more limited players are playing now than before, which means a larger supply of cards in the system. Of course there are more constructed players now too, so demand is also up and I'm not sure how it stacks up to the increased supply of cards.
i think your index is out of date as all of ROE has crashed....hard
anything on lifetime points yet?
I too was confused by the fact that somehow the ROE prices had "jumped". When you know that you only have 2 data points, and one of them is arbitrary, "running the numbers" seems like a waste of time that only serves to confuse people when presented alongside your numbers for cards with actual price histories. This would be better presented by providing a text list of starting prices (and naming it as such).
I dont know if bloodbraid elf and PtE are examples of prices being pushed. BBE sees play in multiple decks and in multiple formats. Far more than any individual mythic sees play except maybe jace the mindsculptor. PtE is the same way. If im not mistaken there have periodically been that one uncommon that becomes a multi-dollar card. Magma Jet did at one point, so did Lightning Helix i believe. and I am pretty sure watchwolf did as well. And those were all from a pre-mythic era.
"I’m not sure that the “high priced mythics push down the costs of more common cards” argument holds water."
- Take this exact statement into the auction room and ask the people there what they think. You will hear the comment often times, "If it ain't mythic, it probaly isn't worth much."
- Of course it holds water, people are spending more money buying the higher priced mythics, therefore dealers lower rates of less sought after cards to keep sales flowing.
"Maelstrom Pulse, at rare, is $20. That’s expensive. There’s no analogous mythic to push its price down."
- Doesn't this counteract your point? Of course there isn't a mythic to lower the price, if there were, then the mythic would be like $40 and this would be much lower.
Maybe I'm misreading your post, but how can prices not be affected by high priced Mythics. Thats like saying Legacy isn't skewed due to the price of Force of Will.
>>
"If you read the MTGO Message boards, it's pretty safe to believe that V3 is the worst thing WOTC has done to MTGO. It's missing a lot of functionality and the posters there (myself included) call attention to the myriad of missing features from V2.5 to our current system."
>>
It's amazing how quickly people forget how unstable the previous versions of Magic Online were. Yes, V3 is missing a lot of features that the older versions had, but the older versions were very unstable. You could almost count on them crashing whenever a new set was released because the older versions couldn't handle to increased player load. I'd much rather have the much more stable V3 or v2.5 any day.
As for the whole Mythic debate, well, it was a way to increase the value of certain cards in a set and create a "lottery" type effect where anybody regardless of skill could open a card that is worth at least a couple of free events. It gives a big incentive to new players, even if most of us old timers grumble and complain about it. I think WotC did a reaonable job with mythics in the Alara block, however they have noticeably gotten more greedy with which cards become Mythic rares in Zendikar block. Vengevine and Lotus Cobra are fine examples of cards that flavorwise don't need to be Mythic except for the fact that they are really good cards. Jace TMS is a rather sad case because it basically means you can't play an entire color competively without spending $200 on him.
I’m not sure that the “high priced mythics push down the costs of more common cards” argument holds water. Other factors seem to be at play, like whether a card is a staple, reprint, niche, or what have you. Unless a Mythic card and an uncommon are fighting for the same slot in a decklist, it doesn’t make sense to put them on the same cost curve. It would be like saying that the existence of Champagne makes the price of water go down.
Let’s take a closer look Jund. Like with Burn, it makes sense that a deck made out of power uncommons wouldn’t cost that much. As for the rares in Jund, their general low-cost can be traced to different factors, but the existence of Mythic Rares elsewhere in the environment doesn’t seem to be one of them:
*Rare lands are not what they once were: gone are the days of $10 Rav duals, cards that were known to be staples in every format early on. But now every block has its own cycle of rare lands, and their ubiquity pushes down the price. There’s no reason for the M10 lands to reach $10 since we know we’ll just have another cycle (or the same cycle) in that year’s Block and another in M11. Modern rare lands are also arguably nerfed from the Rav duals. And since there’s no cycle of Mythic staple lands, there’s no way for their (hypothetical) high price to affect the price of rare lands.
*Maelstrom Pulse, at rare, is $20. That’s expensive. There’s no analogous mythic to push its price down.
*Siege-Gang has been reprinted several times, which explains why it is under $5. It has no Mythic analogue, no mythic card you’d play in its stead, so no cost pushing is going on. The sideboard rares aren’t played in other decks AND there’s no Mythic analogue, so they’re cheap.
*The Mythic Chandra is the crux of the argument for me. Chandra is cheap because demand is low and it’s been preprinted once. To me the existence of relatively inexpensive Mythics says supply/demand curves exist for individual cards, but not for entire rarities as a whole.
But really, compare the Craig Jones deck (listed first) to Jund: the Jones Deck has 40 rares (!) versus Jund’s 25 (counting Mythic Chandra). Seems like the existence of Mythics in other decks isn’t pushing down the price on Jund when compared to Jones’s deck, it’s the fact that it plays almost half as many rares. It makes sense to compare the prices individual cards of comparable utility/popularity/supply to determine if Mythics are really affecting their price.
But even when we do that it doesn’t seem to prove the “Invisible Hand of Baneslayer Angel” hypothesis. What about Path to Exile and Bloodbraid Elf? They’re both worth at least twice what the most expensive uncommons of the Pre-Mythics decks cost. Again, my argument is that the costs are independent of the existence of Mythics, but even if we grant your premise that Mythics affect the price of other cards, PtE and Bloodbraid would indicate that prices are being pushed UP, not down.
Can I get the other half of the credits for reading it?
Lol, this was very funny. I did chuckle a few times, I'll admit it. Asking out Grul is classic, but I think Jhoira seems more your style. There is just something about her look that screams Metal and Dominatrix!
Looking back over the last list, I would think about these changes.
-4 Contaminated Ground
-2 Death Denied
-4 Breath of Malfegor
+4 Lightning Bolt - This card can help clear a path for your allies and hit the head, serves dual purpose which is better than something singular such as Breath or even Lava Axe for that matter
+1 Mountain
+1 Swamp - You need more land in this deck as your curve is high
+4 Burst Lightning - another card with dual purpose that can end the game when needed.
Also try this guy, Kiln Fiend - might work well with your sorceries and instants. And don't forget to cut the poisons in the sideboard.
Good job on creating the deck, now improve on it 80)
Hilarious I actually laughed out loud. Thanks!
But don't let it be so long next time!
imo my ignorance to a deck doesn't mean it's a bad one, DnT is well seated in a group of decks that have been proven competitive, here's what I was trying to get at with the other post... even if you don't consider it T1 or if it isnt T1 in paper you're not concerned with that, look at what's winning online and that's what matters, with so many showings in the money you might as well accept it as T1 because you can buy in with it and earn yourself those more expensive decks through winnings, I can only imagine what someone like Blazelix has accumulated (actually I have the numbers he's won 88 packs after an initial investment of $200 selling those at even just 4 each thats $352 before taking out the entry fee, more then paying for the deck cost)
Once again I feel it's worth commenting that a price with no volume is not a price. (In fact technically speaking, the price of something you can't buy is "infinity".) Therefore, the $4 Rize comparison prices are completely fake and throw things off.
I'm sure that's not intentional. You have them because you gather automatically from MTGOTraders. And Heath puts them in because he needs to get cards in the system in advance of playability. Nevertheless, every time a new set comes out it makes your data invalid the first week.
While your statement is true, minimal amounts of people utilize it for that purpose.
Baseball cards are collectible, but outside of that they are boring. This is what makes Magic so unique.
I would forfeit some degree of collectibility if it meant helping the format online, notice I said some. This is why it is difficult to satisfy all parties involved. Lowering card prices isn't a viable solution that would satisfy everyone.