Shock Lands value?
Economics forum
Posted on Oct. 22, 2014, 12:59 a.m. by KB2187
Is it worth it to start loading up on Shock Lands for Modern now that they've rotated out? Thinking that they'll become rarer to get since more people will hold...?
Shocklands used to be insanely high in price. At certain key intervals they were between $25 and $40 each, though that was a long time ago. If you can get them for around $10-$15 each then you'll be ok, but it's worth noting that a year or so ago you were easily able to get them for the lower end of $10. In the future I don't think they'll ever hit the astronomical $30-$40 price tag again but I can see them doing $20-$25.
October 22, 2014 3:12 a.m.
WhiteEyesCloudedbyH8 says... #4
I think they will stay around $10 a piece for at least the next year, the only exception being Modern Master's 2 releasing and an increase in Modern play overall for about 6 months til a new block comes out, especially with the block changes happening around then, things are gonna get interesting, but I think shock lands from RTR will be chilling at the current prices for the near future, imo.
I have actually been trading mine to players eager to get them at roto, thinking they'll get an immediate return on their investment. I only play standard, so unless I suddenly win the lottery, I can't afford a real modern deck like Pod, G/R Tron or even affinity, and having 'some shock lands' is not even close to a foot in the door, so I have been moving my shocks for new khans standard and it's actually quite nice, there's almost always at least one guy at every fnm who wants some of my shocks and is willing to give up standard staples for them. I havent had to pay cash for any khans yet and I have 3x Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker , 3x Siege Rhino including a foil, and other sweet stuff, it's hard to make good trades sometimes, like when you don't have much cash to buy a bunch of product and boosters to then have trade fodder. It's cool I get to take last season's investment and make new standard investments with little to no hit, as compared to something like trading-in to a Local Game Shop for store credit at like %60, gross, thats like only getting $5-6 for each shock land. getting a full $10 in trade value through people I meet at fnm for my spare Breeding Pool 's is exactly the kind of thing I need to stay current in standard.
October 22, 2014 3:13 a.m.
But if you kept your shocks for over a year you could probably trade them away for lots more cards. It would be worth holding onto them and then trading them away for standard stuff in the future when they're worth more.....
October 22, 2014 3:22 a.m.
WhiteEyesCloudedbyH8 says... #6
yea but for me personally, i wouldn't get to play standard til then, the only format I can afford to play, barely. The value I'll get from playing cards like Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker now equates to what would otherwise be lost time not casting the high powered spells of new standard.
For me, although there is likely to be a net loss over time monitarily, I'll get value out of actually casting these new spells.
October 22, 2014 3:28 a.m.
Servo_Token says... #7
For me personally, I am starting to dump my 80 shocks into other cards that will have a better time selling immediately. As it turns out, i'm not the type to just sit on a pile of money and wait, i'd much rather trade into hype (in this case, those people that want to pick them up to sit on them for a decade) and get something that I either need right now, or can sell right now. Shocks aren't the best cards to sell in terms of immediate profit because the market for them is quite small. Most modern players right now either have their needed shocks (because, ya know, RTR just happened), or only need the meiser's copy. I feel as though i'm much better off trading a couple of them for a playset of Stormbreath Dragon , or into some Arcbound Ravager s (both of which I recently acquired via shocks) because these cards have immediate resale value to a much broader audience.
But hey, if you want a Sacred Foundry imprinted on your left butt cheek, that's all fine and dandy. You won't lose value by waiting to trade.
October 22, 2014 6:30 a.m.
JakeHarlow says... #8
Yeah...I really don't trade shocks. There's still space on my butt cheeks to imprint them.
October 22, 2014 6:57 a.m.
The problem is that immediate resale is a tumultuous and fickle market whereas long term investment carries lower risk, but it also carries the same potential profits. More so really. We know that shocks will rise and we know that they'll probably get to around $20 comfortably. That's reasonable. A 100% net profit on a $10 shock is amazing. If they hit $30 you're seeing 200% net profit. These are figures that are comparable to most short term flips anyway so why take the risk?
The problem with standard speculation is that a card thats $30 can literally become $15 overnight (see Boros Reckoner as one example). I believe Aurelia's Fury is another. In reference to Stormbreath Dragon that's an iffy one because a lot of people are shunning that kind of thing (see Kibler's recent article explaining why it's not a great card as an example). The problem with the short term strategy is that standard doesn't stagnate for as long as modern which means that everything's relatively less stable and certain. There is no way I'd trade a certain investment for an unstable one. Even if the unstable one threatened to give a 200% net profit. In fact, this phenomenon of buying into short term, risky but potentially lucrative deals is a massive flaw in basic human reasoning from a mathematical, psychological, and economic perspective, but I'm sure none of you guys care about the academics. I just happened to have literally done research into this.
The point is - in the long term, smaller profits from near certainty are way better than lots of attempts to make large profits on unstable predictions. I would urge people to consider this if they are interested in investing in magic. HOWEVER, if you just want some quick cash then obviously that's fair enough haha.
October 22, 2014 8:40 a.m.
I honestly think it comes down to a very simple question. What do you play with? Magic is a costly game and there isn't much point in holding onto $400+ dollars in lands you aren't going to enjoy using. I personally, have picked up what shocks I can but Modern is my preferred format and the shocks are the best dual lands available right now.
October 22, 2014 10:19 a.m.
Servo_Token says... #11
@Chief
Well, with the backing of being a part of the only shop in the area, I also have the freedom to take some risks like the ones that i've mentioned, because I'm both able to pick things up at a decreased value and put them out at a relatively reliable rate. This means that making what seems to be "bad" deals in the favor of short term cash means that I can rotate that cash (value) more times in the same amount of time (If I spend $20 to make $25 as a constant, the more times I spend $20 in a year, the more times i'll be able to make $25, to boil it down to a simple example). This is one of the keys to running a business, being able to rotate your money as many times as possible in a given amount of time.
So while I completely agree with you that taking risks with your cards isn't the best idea for the average econ man working on his own, if you're backed with a business, you have the liberty to have these risks work for you.
October 22, 2014 5:04 p.m.
If your job revolves around buying and selling on a daily basis its a bit different because you have a large amount of capital to offset risk. You also obviously, as you mentioned have increased selling power because you pick up cheaper.
unholycookies says... #2
There's already been a few discussions about this. The time to stock up on them was a year ago roughly. They rose in price since then. We didn't see the full rise of shocklands since they were reprinted so quickly compared to fetchlands, in my opinion at least. I don't know what the value of the shocklands were before RTR, but I'm going to assume higher than at the moment.
October 22, 2014 1:53 a.m.