Comments on: Insider: All the Other Old Cards Are Spiking, so Why Not the Power Nine?

By: John Grek

John Grek — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 07:49:27 +0000

Here’s an example. In 2014, I bought 2 Juzam Djinn’s for about $110 each. Maybe 2 years later (I’d have to research when I sold them), I sold them for double what I paid and thought I was such a smart speculator….Sadly, today they are worth $1800+, 18 times what I paid in 2014, in a mere 4 years. What other investment can give you 18X your investment in 4 years with near 0 risk. Housing markets collapse, stock markets crash, MTG has held steady…Are you convinced yet?

By: John Grek

John Grek — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 07:38:31 +0000

I have a different take on it. What I see is that savvy investors are seeing that MTG cards just go up over time and give a better than average return, so some investors are moving some of their investment dollars into MTG. If they can use their investment dollars to buy out a specific card every couple months and there are 40 or 50 investors doing this, it drives up the prices due to the investor demand, and all the other people who scoop up everything else in the rising path. As long as Hasbro and WOTC stick to their guns on not reprinting Reserve List cards, it’s going to continue to make them an increasingly popular investment commodity. Good for the game…good for Wizards, good for the market, great for those of us with thousands of RL cards….bad for the players if they aren’t investors themselves. If you sell enough non-power spiked cards, power is within your reach at what essentially cost you a fraction of the cost. So start buying up the lowest reserved list cards before they get out of reach too. How’s that for selling the hype?

By: Chris Ohara

Chris Ohara — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 21:25:14 +0000

My theory is partly commander, legacy and restricted list. You can play almost all the spike cards in Commander, you can not play power so those players have near zero demand for Power 9. Legacy is a format that players can still enter, albeit at a high cost. With players opening Masters Set Jackpot foils they tend to want to trade for Duals when they hit it. If you got 1 Sea, then you can save 2 more. Now you have a Legacy deck. With boxes of Masters hitting the $150-175 level and you can hit a $200-300 foil it made the gamble better. Masterpieces were the same thing only more frequent. So all those Dual’s that were collecting on store shelves got scooped up in trades for the latest and greatest. Last you only need 1 of any power 9 ever to play but you need 2-4 of all the spiking cards. Which means just by math those cards have double to quadruple the demand. Personally these spikes follow the trend of late 80’s/early 90’s sports cards. Everyone chased those cards at very inflated prices. The market crashed hard in the late 90’s as people realized they were overpaying for as many copies that were available. You see the same thing happening here, buyouts cause spikes but who is going to pay $200 for Master of the Hunt? Commander players will move on and it has near zero value in any other format. It’s purely a fake price that should head down. But it won’t. And that is the more interesting part.