In terms of buying up mythics in order to sell back to redeemers, the window for specific cards to bottom is typically from August to November. Last year I was buying up the New Phyrexia Praetors in August. It seemed ‘too early’ to be buying rotating cards, but most of them were at or near their historical price floor already. The Praetors (minus Elesh Norn) quietly doubled up from the end of August to the start of December.

On the other hand, Koth bottomed in November. I didn’t time the bottom so well on this card and I bought most of mine in September and October. Nevertheless, my Koth position now shows a healthy profit, despite not timing my buys well.

In order to figure out which sets are cheap or hold the most value, I’ve found using my MTGO to paper ratio a great way to do this. If you look back to my Nov 16th and 30th articles, using the MTGO to paper metric, I correctly identified that MBS and SOM held more value than NPH. It’s not fancy, but doing these kind of relative comparisons can point you in the right direction.

Once you’ve identified which sets have value, buying a basket of mythics from those sets is the easiest way to make profits. If you drill down a little more, picking the cards with casual and/or competitive appeal can amplify gains. The really junk mythics are usually profitable, but tend to have limited upside. Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas has surprised me as having the biggest price increases from MBS. I could not have predicted that, but buying a basket of mythics ensures you capture the gains from a card like this.

I hope I’ve answered your questions, but if not, just ask again!

I like the breakdown in the Rule of Thumb section, I like knowing what the numbers say as a check against my gut feeling on a card. I always want to run scenarios like this, I’m a spreadsheet nut, but didn’t have a model to work off of so thanks for that.

I agree that it’s not glamorous to snap up mythics on rotation and sit on them, it kind of seems robotic and so on, but I like a safe play. So are you running that ‘rule of thumb’ spread analysis on rotation targets to determine which are cheap? Or do you compare where the price at rotation sits compared to historic highs and lows?

That’s correct. The MOCS promo reprint was a type of reprint I didn’t expect.