When to buy cards
Economics forum
Posted on June 24, 2015, 11:25 p.m. by michaelmattel
When is the perfect time to buy cards? How do you know the ones that are gonna go up in price? The cards that are already on pre-sale on TCGplayer dot com, do you think any of them will go up in price from what they are now?
Epochalyptik says... #3
Please read the forum descriptions before posting. Economics discussions belong in the Economics forum. Moved.
June 24, 2015 11:35 p.m.
If anyone knew when the perfect time was, everybody would only buy cards then. Honestly, the best time to buy cards was about 20 years ago, when you could get Black Lotus for 100 bucks or whatever.
If you want to play the lottery or speculate, use any other means (your local lottery, stocks). MTG cards will at best get what, 200% value increase from presale. Going from a 10 dollar mythic to a 30 dollar one will not generate any kind of profit, unless you have a crap ton of those cards AND are able to move them.
tl;dr: No perfect time, unless you have a time machine.
June 25, 2015 3:01 a.m.
GeeksterPlays says... #5
Most cards drop in price after the set has been released as more copies of the cards get into the player base for trade/sale.
Cards like Planeswalkers are almost always most expensive when bought at pre-release/release date time, and within a few months most drop a bit (Narset Transcendent was upwards of 35GBP when DoT was released, now you can get her for 15GBP on eBay. Garruk, Apex Predator was 25-30GBP preorder/release, now he's under 10GBP in a lot of places).
How much a card is played in tournament-winning decks has an impact on cost too (Omniscience recently jumped up by quite a lot due to being in a winning Legacy deck I believe) but that won't be known until a set is in play for a time.
Lastly just judge the card yourself; will it work with an existing deck archetype? Does it offer a significant upgrade to an existing card/abilty? Or is it something new that only seems to fit in with a new strategy/type in the new set, and probably won't see consistent Top 8 play?
Ultimately, if you want to use a card, you need to own it, so the time to buy it is when you want to play it. Unless you plan on buying up thousands of copies of something in hope that it'll rocket and you can somehow offload said thousands of copies somewhere, you're not going to make sustainable profit.
June 25, 2015 7:39 a.m.
For what purpose (casual, standard, modern...etc?) the answer will depend.
DERPLINGSUPREME says... #2
right before orgins spoilers. Stupid f*ing Quickens
June 24, 2015 11:27 p.m.