The Thruns are a go, but he did run a bit short on 2 of the other cards I ordered (Jarad @$1.50 & Linvala @$15) for which he could only supply 1 & 2 respectively.

I did order those, but, the shop does not have an online ordering system. I have sent an e-mail to them with a list of cards I’d like to get from them, they didn’t confirm the order yet.

Great comment WeQu, you are absolutely right. The QS community can be an excellent sounding board for movers and shakers. We can keep each other grounded to ensure we invest in the right cards and ignore the stupid ones.

Speaking of stupid ones, anyone want a set of Hall of the Bandit Lord? I can do $12 shipped 😛

If you don’t check other sources when seeing a sudden spike on mtgstocks.com you deserve to get burned!

You don’t only need to read the data, also understand, make relations, check, validate, …

Image this = One seller has a few cards at $4 and puts one of them at $10 – day by day he increases the value of the expensive one ($10 -> $20 -> $30 …) This results in the average going up and it will be visible in the trends. Average goes above $4, goes to $5 and becomes $6 -> Will you buy the $4 cards he has available? I do hope not! It’s easy to manipulate the market if your buyers are not looking around and just don’t think about what they see!

Let’s help them notice these things. That’s what QS community is for, right?

I would snap-buy at $4.55 too. Especially since I just sold one for $12.99 on eBay earlier this week. Almost can’t lose.

I don’t check buy prices, simply aren’t enough buyers in these parts, however, I do only buy at prices below TCGPlayer low and only when I have faith in the card myself. I’d probably get a $4 Thrun based on this. In fact, let me check what the cheapest Thrun I can find is.

Apparently the cheapest I can find is $4.55. I believe that is a very reasonable price for the card and think I’ll be buying a few. Next cheapest I could find was $7.58 and many above that.

the print on 9ºth edition it’s almost irrelevant. No one drafted it, just kids bought those packs

Great idea, I do the same, for MTGO though.

Don’t tell too many people though, if you do there will be no room for speculators!

I like mtgstocks but it is not the only site I check daily. I also look at eBay, Card Shark and Amazon whenever I notice a card spiking at any of these sites. So if you bought out Mirror Gallery on TCG Player, I’d first look at mtg.gg to see what the highest buy price is. Then I’d go to the above-,mentioned sites and see if I can find any copies in the range of the highest mtg.gg buy prices. I act accordingly.

For example when Thrun tripled, I went through this exercise and I found a $4 copy on Amazon. I figured since this wasn’t much above buy list and since they were getting crazy attention of late I would grab the copy.

Does everyone else do all this research? I highly doubt it. So those people would definitely fall for your hypothetical scenario. I’d like to think most subscribers to this site would know better.

Of you work out how to stop this sort of thing you would get a Nobel prize, isn’t this how the financial crisis started?

When I buy stock my buying power is severely limited. My purchase is hard to see on the ticker. But when I buy Magic cards I can corner a market for a short time, cause a panic, spike the price, sell before the pullback, and reliably turn a profit.

Let’s take a real world example. There are currently 45 non-foil Mirror Gallery (a $4 card if there ever was one) available for purchase on TCGPlayer. If I wanted to buy them all it would cost me $174.71 before shipping costs and $205.62 after shipping costs. If I bought out ALL of TCGPlayer and then get together with a few friends who are also sellers on TCGPlayer and we put up the 45 Mirror Galleries for $10-12. In the meantime, everyone sees that giant spike on the MTGStocks indicator, and they all go crazy looking to buy. Speculators try to figure out why it spiked. They buy if they think it’s a real thing. One could make the argument that Mirror Gallery is played on all sorts of kitchen tables and its from an underdrafted set years and years ago. I don’t even have to sell half of what I bought to break even, and then i can lower my prices back to around $4 to sell the rest.

The websites that tell you how much a card is worth simply do not pull enough data. Relatively small sets of vendors like TCGPlayer have way too much influence.

Think of this heinous example: What if I knew an influential writer who could throw together a column on a Mirror Gallery deck or two? What if I had some friends who began posting Mirror Gallery decklists on mtgsalvation, here, the mothership boards?

It’s too easy to spike MTGStocks, and too many people use it as a true barometer for what cards are worth – or, more importantly, how much cards should cost.

It would take more than just one or two disgruntled buyers to impact eBay in this regard. Even if the whole QS community made a concentrated effort with eBay I’m not confident we’d succeed. I’m open to ideas if anyone has any.

But the problem isn’t really inability to file a claim (though that would be a TOTAL nightmare): the problem is that filing a claim is *exactly what the seller wants*. They’re totally fine with just refunding you your money for the card you preordered that blew up to a much higher price; that’s what’s so insidious.

So: beyond *checking feedback* and not buying from bad sellers, what can we do? Sigmund suggested in the thread that we should try to get eBay to do something about; but how??? When this happened to me with Angel of Serenity, I opened a case and explained exactly how the seller was screwing me over, but eBay just closed the case the moment the seller refunded me.

It’s the real deal in EDH. I win nearly every game I get it into play. Many players underestimate its power. Perhaps those players are starting to want to add it to their green decks, but then again, this is a rather sudden increase.

The foils have been expensive for a while, so no surprise there.

The last printing for Bribery was 10 years ago, For Greater Good it was 8 years ago. For their original printing it’s swapped the other way around, but, Saga was more popular than Masques. Bribery was a higher profile card, which I believe might cause fewer to get lost over time. I think Bribery has a somewhat higher power level and is better for “good stuff” decks. Greater Good on the other hand needs a strategy with large creatures, however, that’s something its color pretty much does by default. Green is also a more popular EDH color than blue. Unfortunately what they do for their decks is not all that comparable. Bribery is a quick advantage kind of play, while Greater Good is gradual.

On he whole I would expect Greater Good to be cheaper than Bribery, but not all that much. I definitely felt like I should complete my playset now that they are still fairly cheap.

Greater Good may be strong in EDH, but it was also printed twice. But I know Bribery was also printed twice and it sustained a higher price tag. So I suppose you have a good point there.

My 1 copy of Thrun is still listed on eBay, but hasn’t sold yet. Come on, someone bite! 🙂

I do have high respect for mtgstocks.com.

Look at Thrun go, today he has doubled again.

Marrow-Gnawer is just strange. I could maybe see it worth $8-10 if that. Fortunately I caught its movement late December and got a few copies then for below TCGPlayer low at around 2 euro each.

Mtgstocks is great!