I was thinking about this and it seems that the GTC shocklands generally hold a small premium over RTR shocklands. That’s the first thing to keep in mind. This might come from the relative amount of drafting between the sets. I doubt it’s due to relative playability of the lands.

Next, the other thing to consider is the supply of the original lands. Prior to the release of RTR, Dissension shocklands could routinely get to 30+ tix during Modern season, while Ravnica shocklands often struggled to get to 10 tix. Guildpact shocklands were somewhere in the middle. Combined with the historic playability of blue, this meant that Hallowed Fountain and Steam Vents were two that I liked to favor as targets.

With the original Ravnica draft structure and relative prices in mind, this suggests to me that the RAV shocklands have some excess supply compared to the others (Overgrown Tomb, Temple Garden, Watery Grave and Sacred Foundry).

Overall though, playability in current Standard will be the primary driver of current prices. So don’t over think any position here. If you can predict what the top decks in Standard will be, then go with that info! For me, I am not smart enough to predict this type of thing.

Thanks for commenting!

Not sure if you covered this already, but do you have a POV on the most expensive shocklands by color? Fetches obviuosly skew towards blue b/c of legacy / brainstorm. I was wondering if there was teh blue trend for modern, but it doestn seem like the case.

If we’re going off of popularity, I’d say invest in OG tombs as jund/rock/melira pod are dominating GPs. But RTR is one of the most opened sets ever so I’m skeptical about tombs – I’d look at either breeding pool or watery grave from Gatecrash because they’re less opened.

Obviously it’s just good to evenly diversify your portfolio but do you think any colors are more profitable than others?

Well, the way I think about is like this. And it’s important to note that supply and demand are somewhat ambiguous terms. Usually when I am talking about these, I am talking about available supply and current demand. If there’s someone (bot, speculator, player) who is looking to buy a card, that is part of current demand. If there’s someone looking to sell a card, that is part of available supply.

The bot chains operate in such a way as to move volume over time. They try to be reliable suppliers of cards in order to win customer satisfaction and repeat business. In order to do this, they need to maintain their inventory.

When demand is high, they raise prices in order to keep enough copies in stock. When supply is high, they lower prices in order to sell excess stock. When demand and supply are roughly equivalent, they maintain prices. Competition among bots keeps the spread between buy and sell prices small, but the spread is where they try to make their money.

Ok, so what happens when you mix speculators in? Then, as current demand increases, pushing prices up, available supply increases as speculators sell their copies in order to catch the price increase. All of a sudden, bots are seeing more copies coming in than going out, and prices start decreasing.

This is roughly how things work, I think.

But, over time, speculators will have less and less of their own stock to unload. Eventually there will be current demand that is not met by supply from speculators. This is when prices will start spiking more aggressively.

The things we cannot know are a) how many copies speculators are putting into the market and b) what demand will look like. These things we just theorize over, but have no real data. As long as a > b, prices will not move very high. If a > b into the Spring, there will be a shockland recession as their is always available supply to meet current demand. If a < b, then demand will push prices higher.

I think that a) will fall over time, and the last speculators will make higher profits than the early sellers. Again, there is no data to support this, it's just my thought on the matter.

Hope this helps! It will be a very interesting winter in MTGO Finance!

Now we all know speculators are holding thousands of shocklands; if half of them sells to bots, how can botsupply get scarcher ? The usual-suspects-answer of ‘new players’ doesn’t convince me on this one.

I know there are a lot of players who don’t think ahead and just buy the cards they need for their deck-of-the-week, but seeing that number overrun the supply when speculators start selling seems a bit radical.

Time will tell…

(and I’m happy I sold on the spike of first week of september; for your payroll i hope you’re right!)

Basically, there were a lot more unique cards printed then. Ravnica has 88 different rares! So you had a 1/88 chance. You have a 2/121, or about 1/60 chance of opening a given RTR rare.

Exactly this…the time to speculate on these has passed, but if you need them to play they will be more expensive later…just not a lot more.

I definitely think the time is past to be actively acquiring these for speculation, both in paper and on modo. If you need to fill out your paper play sets though, the risk is that you’ll be paying higher prices down the road. If you are a player, grab them now so you don’t pay more when Standard starts warming up, and definitely before the Standard PTQ season.

I guess the simple explanation is that Magic wasn’t as popular 5 years ago as it is today. Therefore, print runs (and online availability) was much lower.

This is a big reason why we see Modern cards pre-Alara spiking so hard on the back of any kind of playability.

Thanks for clarifying! And Matthew, if you google, “magic list of sets” the top link is a nice wikipedia page detailing all the sets that have been released, including number of cards and rarity breakdown.

For instance, 5th Edition was a whopper of a set with 449 cards, with 132 distinct rares!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magic:_The_G…

Thanks, that makes sense, I was assuming the same number of rares were in every set.

There are 53 rares in Theros, so the odds of getting any rare are 1:53 because you obviously get one per pack. Because not every booster has a mythic, the odds are 1:8 of opening a mythic, making the odds 1:120 of pulling a specific mythic.