Also, the nature of making public recommendations for a broad audience is that they have to have a high expectation of success, ie they have to be low risk. We cannot control what people do with the information we provide and the recommendations we make. Therefore, we have to consider that a new reader might follow a recommendation with a large percentage of their available tix. If that recommendation doesn’t work out, or they lose patience with it, the whole exercise will end up being frustrating for that person. The recommendations have to be able to accommodate the newest speculators, which means that more experienced speculators could feel that the recommendations are not aggressive enough. We don’t want people to have a bad experience.

Hi Xing,

Thanks for commenting. There’s a fair amount of truth in what you say and I understand your “frustration”.

To corroborate your critics, buying/selling recommendations in this report are nice but far to be perfect.

Still on your comment, I would even say that the 3 picks of this week have NO chance of being played anywhere. With these, you are playing on a price trend not on playability. And if you want to talk about ROI (so % and not absolute Tix value) these 3 mythics may actually have a much better ROI than most specs you can spot in 10 sec.

Recommending cards once a week (and keep in mind that we are writing these lines 1, 2 or even 3 days prior to publishing date) is often not optimal. We really want to recommend what we consider has the best chance of profit, in % at least. A great pick on Sunday easily turns into a borderline pick by Wednesday. Same is true for selling, I have many time thought about recommending selling a card on Sunday to realize that the price is already not adequate by Tuesday.

We also try to put cards for all bankroll sizes, which increase the complexity of the choices. Many specs I “give” for free with the 100T1Y project would not be suitable for a 500+ tix bankroll. Cheaper cards often fluctuate faster and with more amplitude, making the process of recommending them obsolete easily. For more expensive cards the spread can sometimes be a problem.

We also try to be accountable for our picks and even the model we chose to monitor that is far from being perfect. At the end of the day if our recommendations (within the evaluation model we decided to follow) only increase by 5% at the end of the year then some might say that our recommendations are not worth much, so we try to only put the best of what we see and try to make it as relevant as possible for people who follow them.

Finally both Matt and I have other obligations that limit the time we can spend searching the MTGO market for specs. We are trying to emphasize trends, news, general and seasonal price movements so they can make the most sense for speculators. Hence our frequent recommendations for speculators to monitor prices fluctuations, Movers & Shakers, etc. In the end this report reflects our views and beliefs on different sections of the MTGO economy.

To be our own critic and moving forward I think for instance that the Pauper market fluctuate in general to rapidly to recommend anything in a weekly report such as this one. Although Pauper is great for speculators (as it has been for the 100T1Y project for instance) it’s very difficult to be efficient recommending buying/selling Pauper cards only once a week. I also think that the recommendation system as we know it may not be as efficient as we initially thought. We would probably be better citing more potential targets in the text, leaving more power decision to our readership and deleting the targeted recommendations section.

Thanks for the comment!

Each week we do our best to cover all the best targets and we generally have to agree on the picks together. Sometimes this means we have no picks to offer. We do our best to scan all the opportunities, but the MTGO market is deep enough that we often miss out on many cyclical modern specs.

As for entry prices, I will generally talk about acceptable prices in the written section. Ultimately though, it’s up to every speculator to decide what a reasonable price is for themselves since the market changes so quickly.

Hope that helps!

Who cares about these 3 standard mythics that have almost no chance of being playable in the current Meta, and MIGHT be slightly profitable in a rotation or two?

Even spending 10 seconds on MTGGoldfish I can count the speculative targets that have much higher ROI potential… uncommons such as Exarch, Witness, Ghostly Prison from PZ1 prize packs, Sulfur Falls and certain shock lands that are trending down, etc…

I love both Sylvain and Matt as writers, but come on guys you can do better than Sire of Stagnation. And there should be absolutely ZERO weeks where there are “no” targets. Additionally, you should list the acceptable entry price for the targets.