I definitely understand your position. I too try to pick up temples in trade whenever I can, but it appears people have learned their lessons on rare standard lands and are weary of trading them off. That purchase was me finally saying “I want to accumulate a stockpile and people aren’t selling to me…and they happened to be on sale”. One of the mind sets I’ve had to get over is the “trying to buy ONLY when the prices are lowest”, while you never want to overpay for anything, if you have a strong feeling that a card will be $5-8 and the current price is $2.50 it’s ok to buy them then even if they drop to $2, your end goal is the same. Your profit margin is slightly lower, but still very good.

Fair enough, thanks for the explanation. I’m also on the Dictate of Erebos plan, I just didn’t consider it for standard. I haven’t picked up many copies yet; I try to pick up cards with a buylist on magictraders.com, but I haven’t had too many nibbles on Dictate of Erebos. I may have to buy a chunk off TCGplayer to get into enough of them. The enemy color temples stand to be in the highest demand since enemy color pairs show up more than allied color pairs in the new wedges, so I’m trying to pick up as many of those as possible. For some strange reason, people have been reluctant to sell the Temples of Mystery even though I’m offering a good price on them. I may just have to buy those on TCGplayer as well.

Your pickups of M15 souls could pay off big if they do hit considering how cheap they are right now. I think it just depends a lot on how the metagame shapes after rotation. I’m personally allocating my funds into other cards, but they don’t offer as big of a gain if they do hit.

Thanks for the reply. I did repeatedly mention that the gains/loss were a bit off because of that “It’s far more likely that if I were to sell out of my cards I’d be very much in the red.”

I did pick up quite a few near release and I agree that 95% of the time that’s a no/no (and these picks were no exception). I did state in the Understanding your Gains/Losses section that I pre-ordered the Soul’s because they were cheap mythics and while there was a liklihood that most would drop, if one did break out, it would likely cover and beat the “red” from the others. This obviously did not occur, however, I felt there was potential and I took the risk. The same can be said of Dictate of Erebos (which I mentioned above the Slaughter Pact/Hurkyl’s Recall charts) that I felt it had the potential to be a star (given it added 2 devotion to black, serves as a card that turns all opposing removal spells into 2 for 1’s (unless they have no creatures) and that Grave Pact’s price of $10 meant that it had solid long term potential. I quite honestly figured the floor on it was probably $1.50 (due to it’s casual appeal) and was simply off on that.

As for Temple of Mystery, it’s printing in the clash pack will obviously affect potential gains in the future, but as you can see compared to what I paid for them it’s reprinting hasn’t lost me actual money (potential money almost assuredly, but it’s impossible to calculate that).

I plan on playing a more active roll in my cash purchases moving forward so I will definitely be revisiting this spreadsheet in future articles.

Fair points, but Krenko/Odric etc. weren’t characters we previously had cards for (like Avacyn and Ob-Nixilis), so most players wouldn’t know any of that (only the ones who read the literature), whereas, a lot more players recognize the characters that had previously been different cards.

I know a lot of these haven’t reached the time where they are expected to pay off yet. Maybe revisit this in October. I do notice a lot of cards you picked up at or near release, and that seems like a violation of the rule that 95% + cards go down after release. The odds are so stacked against making gains on cards when they come out that I generally wait at least a month or 2 before I even attempt to pick up anything from a new set for speculative purposes. I would have to be very sure of myself to go in on a card when it comes out.

I know it’s old hat, but I like seing explanations as to why each card was being speculated on.

Also, how do you feel about Temple of Mystery as a spec with the Clash pack version out.

It is NOT a change. Core sets have ALWAYS had plane-specific cards. Most were reprints, but even ignoring those, we’ve had plane-specific cards for YEARS at this point:

M14 had Into the Wilds (Zendikar), and anything “Thune” or “Xathrid” and all the slivers are all set on Shandalar, specifically. M13 had odric, krenko, and so on – characters from particular planes. Even M11’s Elixir of Immortality had Baron Sengir in the flavor text.

(Also, “wary”)