Just a quick forward, I’m doing something a bit differently this week, and talking about some of the financial aspects of the game, particularly MTGO Legacy and the effects of “reprints” on staples . I’m not giving financial advice, per se, but just bringing some things to light for any folks that may have been giving thought to buying into MTGO Legacy in the near future.
There’s a storm a-coming! I’m quite excited to see a Legacy archetype that I’ve long been wanting to try is about to become a lot more accessible, at least on MODO. For all the crap we’ve given MTGO (does it count as “giving crap” if you’re actually just corroborating facts?), they’ve been doing a great job with the MOCS promos, as of late. For those not in the know, Lion’s Eye Diamond is currently the most expensive card in MODO (which I will often use interchangeably with MTGO; don’t let that confuse you!) and it is about to be released as this month’s MOCS promo. The MOCS, or Magic Online Championship Series, is a monthly tournament series, which requires qualification. Qualification requires earning 15 QPs, through various events (QP stands for qualifying point). Everyone who qualifies will earn a copy of that month’s promo. Cards that are awarded as the MOCS promo will have their value reduced, at least in the short term, due to basic supply and demand. Look, here’s an example of another instance when they released a big-ticket item as the MOCS promo:
What we’re looking at is a price chart for Force of Will. This was once the most expensive card in all of MODO. The announcement of the promo took place on Dec 18, where the descent from $100 begins. The promo is released on Jan 11, and the card hits bottom on 1/29 at $72.5. If we look deeper, we can see a more dramatic dip. Here is the chart of the promo from its release until it converged to within $2 of the regular version, at the end of April ’13:
The promo had actually dipped as low as $56!
Lion’s Eye Diamond, like Force of Will, is an expensive card that’s only really played in Legacy (and I suppose Vintage “Classic”). It’s probably a safe wager that there are more copies of Force in a typical Legacy top 16 than Lion’s Eye Diamond, so an influx of MOCS LEDs would likely cause a more significant impact than what we’ve seen with Force. Looking at the LED price-chart below, it should be fairly obvious when the announcement was made that it would be the MOCS promo for this month.
LED fell from $185.9 to 125.8 before a single new copy was injected into the system. On the very last day of the chart (3/19), the price falls further, to 118.8, and now, we ARE getting new copies of LED… but they aren’t MOCS promo copies. Not only are we getting a promo version of LED, but we’re also getting Mirage block as the flashback draft, this week. How will that factor in? A recent example that comes to mind of an expensive rare from an older set getting hit with the flashback discount is City of Traitors.
I don’t have the date when the draft was announced handy, but I do know that the draft ran from 11/27 through 12/4. City fell from a high of $70 to a low of $35.8 on the last day of the flashback drafts. I will caution that this 50% dip is a bit high and might be partially attributed to Thanksgiving weekend and the Wasteland gold rush (Wasteland is even more highly sought-after, and easier to open, at uncommon). Still, it would not be crazy to expect a 50% drop from the high on LED if we factor in the combined effect of, both, the promo and the flashback drafts, and I feel like that’s being conservative. Because LED is played far less than cards like Force of Will, City of Traitors, and Wasteland, we might see a much larger dip.
Ok, Tim, that’s great and all, but I don’t really care about LED. Alright, what about Force of Will? Because they’re re-issuing it as a promo again, next month. This is very exciting news, as it increases the number of Forces in circulation, which effectively increases the number of people that can play Legacy on MTGO. I already own Forces, and the value of mine will go down, but I’m still stoked by this news! By aggressively knocking down the prices on expensive Legacy cards, we might even get enough new blood in the format that we can start getting the weekend Premiere Events to fire on a regular basis! All that being said, I think that if you’ve been toying with the idea of buying into MODO Legacy, there is a window of opportunity coming, that I wanted to alert you all about. I’m personally looking forward to finally getting my own playset of LEDs so I can try such hits as TES, ANT, Dredge, and maybe even a little ‘Belcher! Expect to see some of those archetypes on the stream in the near future.