Beginning at the start of next year, PTQs for San Juan will be in full swing. These are extended constructed tournaments, and you should expect a lot of people to be talking, writing, brewing for and playing extended for the first quarter of next year. This includes – we presume – the first ever contructed PTQs on MTGO. So, given we know about this buzz one month in advance, how can we turn it to our financial advantage? Buying extended staples at their current depressed prices, of course!
The Circle of Life
Formats are always changing. There are set rotations, rule changes, bannings and restrictions, meta changes and so forth that affect what cards people want to have. This change in level of desire is why prices change, and this change in prices is where we stand to make a few extra dollars through trading. The important change to consider now is the change in what PTQ format is in season. Currently it is limited, which means a lot of people are opening a lot of packs, and nobody needs to tune up their competitive decks for anything more important than FNM or States, both normally standard. Extended card prices are not as low as they might be thanks to PT: Austin and Worlds, but they are still lower than they were last time it was the PTQ format, and lower than they will be come January. How about some examples, to illustrate?
I’ve looked through the archive of Hamtastic’s brilliant State of the Program series over on Pure MTGO, and grabbed some card prices from back in January and February. I’ve then compared these to the current prices on Mtgo Traders. If I was clever I’d put this into a table, but instead you get plain text formatting.
. Jan/Feb Now
Engineered Explosives 32 14
Chrome Mox 21.75 11
Arcbound Ravager* 22 10
Steam Vents 11 5
All numbers are in event tickets. The * against Ravager indicates that Affinity as a deck has taken some serious hits to playability in the new extended meta, so I’d be wary of buying the mighty Ravager even at this comparatively low price. I know this is not a very large sample size but it illustrates my point. Black Lotus Project‘s handy graphs shows the same effect for paper cards, though it unfortunately also shows us we’ve missed the boat for extended paper cards thanks to PT: Austin. I’ll leave the investigation of this as an exercise for the reader.
So what to buy? Well, a quick study of the top Extended decks from Worlds will be educational. The two biggest decks are various Thopter combo decks, of which LSV’s Gifts Ungiven version seems to be the strongest; and Rubin Zoo piloted to PT glory by Brian Kibler. All in Red was also quite succesful, and seems like an easy deck for new extended players to pick up. Expect all of these decks to be popular on MTGO come January, though perhaps Thopter less so than the other two for the intimidating complexity of the deck. Rubin Zoo, unfortunately, plays a ton of well known money cards already, like Tarmogoyf, Baneslayer Angel and hundreds of dollars worth of nonbasic lands.
One thing I noticed about the other two lists is how often Chrome Mox and Chalice of the Void show up in both, despite them being virtually opposite decks – one a slow, grinding control deck and one an ultra fast aggro/combo deck. We can see how low Chrome Mox is by looking at the figures above, and Chalice of the Void is currently under 4 tickets from stores despite being one of the most powerful disruption tools in the format. Blood Moon is another powerful disruptive tool that features in Rubin Zoo and All-In Red, and though it has never been a high priced card it could be ready for a breakout PTQ season. Blood Moon is one for the gamblers among us.
If I were looking to double my tickets in a months time without knowing much at all about extended, I’d be investing in these two powerful cards on Magic Online. Dark Confidant is also a mere 4 tickets, however it seems to have fallen out of favour with the metagame, especially now Zoo has moved largely to 3 colours. The only advice I can offer to paper players at the moment is to rewind time two months and invest before PT:Austin, but with any luck I’ll still be writing in a year’s time and I can warn you about the same plan then 🙂
Recommendations
Buy: Magic Online extended staples, especially:
Chrome Mox
Chalice of the Void
Blood Moon.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jonathan Medina, Russell Tassicker. Russell Tassicker said: Doubling your money in extended: http://wp.me/pGKg9-2y All thoughts welcome! […]
Very insightful. Thanks for the post.
I think the biggest takeaway is it looks like we will have extended contructed PTQs on MTGO. That should drive the prices even higher since there is much more at stake. Instead of just using MTGO as a practice tool, players can actually qualify without buying real cards.
I can see a small but passionate subset of players that make it a goal to just qualify online. They will look to save money so they won’t even buy real cards. These people could drive the extended staple prices pretty high.
Regarding the Gifts Ungiven Thopter combo lists especially LSV’s, I think there might actually be a lot of people that will look to play that deck even though it is pretty complex. There are a lot of wannabe control players that like playing control even though they may not be good enough to win with a complex deck. Sadly, I’m probably one of them lol.
Anyways, I sent you a tweet about your recommendations for the best place(s) to buy tix. I want to make a play pretty soon on the extended staples you mentioned.
I think online PTQs are going to be a big hit in non-US countries especially, I get one paper PTQ a season within 3000 miles of home but the online ones are only a click away!
You are probably right about the bad control players, I think Gifts Ungiven is a particularly skill-testing card as you have to understand exactly why each card is in the deck. I love playing control as well but at the moment I’m rocking Boros in standard – its a lot easier to drive.
I will ask around and see if I can find a good place for you to buy tickets – mtgotraders and cardhoarder are both very reliable stores but there may be another place with better prices.
Thanks! And I totally forgot that mtgotraders and cardhoarder also sold tix.
[…] how did I do with my predictions? I was spot on with my predictions about extended staples back in November, all the cards mentioned there have doubled or tripled in price online – […]