Greetings, Extrapolators!

Sure does feel good to identify a price discrepancy, doesn't it?

What Feels Even Better

What feels even better is seeing someone else identify a price discrepancy and share it with you. I don't really put in enough hours analyzing all possible data to catch everything, and when a deck is not on coverage a ton, it's easy to forget about the need to track the prices. But MODO and paper have different metagames, don't they? Luckily, people in this community are super sharp and on the ball. That sounds like a dangerous place for someone sharp to be, but it appears to be working out okay so far.

This is a pretty huge discrepancy for sure. We've talked about the difference between MODO and paper prices and how a price jump in MODO is likely to be followed by a price jump in paper if you control for other variables. There are several reasons for the "lag" in between the two prices moving and why MODO is sometimes a good herald of things to come in paper.

MODO Never Sleeps

While there is usually a week between Standard tournaments with the events being held on the weekends and analysis and punditry filling the intervening days until the next event, MODO fires a lot more events a lot faster. With dailies occurring, well, daily, small bits of tech can proliferate much faster. Daily events may seem small, but with pro players and other notable deck brewers innovating and showing off their tech every day, MODO moves a lot faster.

Not only that, multiple events in a week will showcase how everyone is adapting to the metagame better than paper events where players may show up with decks that are ill-equipped to deal with last week's decks. While MODO certainly informs the paper meta, paper still moves slower. If you showed up perfectly tuned to beat the next new thing on MODO at the expense of losing to the deck that got Top 8 at a PTQ last weekend, how well do you think you will do? Metagaming is tough, and paying more attention than everyone else doesn't always guarantee good results. With the paper meta updating slower, it's no wonder prices can lag behind the MODO prices sometimes.

But lagging behind means they will usually follow the same trend. If the MODO price is ticking up, paper will tick up, but maybe at a faster rate (as people notice there is a big discrepancy and a buyout happens) a few days or weeks behind. That just makes sense. Prices are sticky in paper because selling is not quite as efficient as it is on MODO, so price decreases on MODO are much faster as well.

While TCG Player sellers aren't in a gigantic hurry to race to the bottom and they encounter few buyers when the price is decreasing because that is tied to a decrease in demand, selling out of MODO cards is as quick and easy as going to a bot. The cards are gone immediately with no waiting for funds to clear, no shipping costs and no delay while the order is processed and shipped.

Cards are conveyed instantaneously which means cards tailing down on MODO will tail more quickly on MODO. A precipitous MODO decline can be, but isn't always, a harbinger of a decline in paper prices due to the stickiness of paper pricing and the many disparate sellers, but it can herald a decrease in demand, which is useful for people who buylist as an out and can expect to see an increase in the spread when buylists lower their prices.

All of that helps illustrate the fact that we should see the prices travel in the same direction. What, then, do we make of the case we see now with Doomwake Giant?

There are two important things to note here. The first one is the obvious one.

Yep. That's a discrepancy all right. With the MODO card costing six times as much as the paper copy when MODO cards are typically cheaper, this looks like a card poised to go up.

But we're not seeing exactly what we're used to, looking at the graphs, are we? Let's look at another example of where a paper card rose to catch up to a soaring MODO price and what those graphs looked like side by side.

Ignore the prices now, but look what happened in Mid October. I'm pretty sure Stoke never sold for $12 - what's more likely is that it sold out and one jackwagon listed them for $12 each because, in his words "#YOLO". Let's pretend my doctored version of the graph is the real one because it illustrates our point better with a ridiculous outlier data point that doesn't reflect actual reality thrown out.

The result is the same. The MODO price of this card (an uncommon no less!) flirted with 4 whole tix several times in the leadup to Khans of Tarkir. It would come back down, probably because the set was still being heavily drafted and when people noticed an uncommon cost more than a booster, they would ship them to dealers for close to 3 tix and freewheel some more drats.

However, Goblin Rabblemaster was a real breakout card from M15, and its success coupled with how well it looked like it would integrate into post-Khans Standard (something reality eventually failed to bear out) pushed red to the forefront where Standard had been dominated by black and blue for months. Khans coming in meant Ravnica leaving, and with it a new era of Magical cards dawning.

The jump doesn't look entirely precipitous in the graph of paper prices, but the price of Stoke the Flames actually quadrupled. Over the same timeframe, the price of the MODO card, one that had flirted with 4 tix before, roughly tripled. Paper players were much more surprised by a $4 Stoke than MODO players were by an 8 tix Stoke as insane as 8 tix for an uncommon sounds.

While the price in MODO fluctuated a bit, the trend was overall upward. A line of best fit would have a positive slope, if you're picking up what I'm putting down. A positive overall trend despite micro-fluctuations fits with the narrative told by the paper price, which is a slow, meandering upward trajectory punctuated by an insane period of explosive growth when people finally got wise to how good Stoke was, how little M15 was really floating around, and how easy it is to wreck an entire economy by spending $200 buying out a card on TCG Player.

We're not really seeing the same trend with Doomwake Giant, are we? What's going on?

An Odd Case of Divergence

When we see a MODO card inching up (at least with respect to the slope of a line of best fit, which price fluctuations or checking prices only periodically can do a good job of obfuscating), and we expect a similar amount of play in paper, it's probably a good buy, especially if there is a perceptible increase in the slope of the paper price. Speculators buy a store inventory at a time but Standard players buy a playset at a time, and if tech is heating up the slope of the price graph will increase based on the degree of acceptance. Innovators aren't going to move the needle much at all with their 4 copies and it could take a week or two for their tech to get noticed.

It's harder to dump paper cards, so it takes a card being basically abandoned or due a price correction for the price to go down, which means you won't see those same micro-fluctuations in paper prices. What causes a paper price to go down?

And why do I ask what it takes to make a paper price go down? Well, let's take a look at the graph of Doomwake Giant in paper again, because if we can't explain why the paper price is diverging with the MODO price (whereas Stoke the Flames' graph converged with the MODO graph right before it went up) then we can't say Doomwake is a good buy.

Why Do Paper Prices Go Down?

The way I see it, there are two main reasons, one is the obvious one that is a major factor and the other is...I guess it's also obvious but it's a different thing because it's a smaller factor? Look, I have to get through this if we're going to figure out what happened with Doomwake, so let's just buckle in and get this done.

1) A Race to the Bottom

Prices are determined by supply and demand. If the demand is low or people simply won't pay the higher price, sellers will lower their prices in an attempt to get the merchandise clear. As no one buys at those lower prices, someone else lists even lower in the hope of being the first person to have their copies purchased.

When the price gets to the right level, the cheaper copies get bought up before another seller notices that someone else is selling for cheap so the price stays at the level where people are buying. When people aren't buying, the price will continue to fall as people undercut each other. A card falling out of favor, approaching rotation or becoming obsolete due to a better card in its role being reprinted will hurt its demand and therefore its price.

2) A Price Correction

If a card is inflated artificially due to a temporary shortage caused by the card being very new or some artificial buyout or some other reason for a shortage of supply irrespective of demand, the card could be due a price correction. Failed buyout operations tend to lower supply but can't always affect demand without a playability component.

Which do we think happened here?

Well, to me it seems like Doomwake's price is going down more to the second aspect than the first one. The price is down only because it's coming off of a very precipitous increase. Graph shapes matter in cases like this, and if we see a "sharp" uptick but a "dull" downtick, that means the price went up unnaturally and down naturally.

It's meandering down to a lower price and I think that means that people who had their copies at a high price from the last time Doomwake tech was in vogue and didn't see the sustained demand necessary to keep the price high are undercutting each other in a race to the bottom in an attempt to still get out at a profit. However, is this enough to explain why the MODO price is going up and the paper price is going down?

Verdict

I think the cycle of a card's use can be cyclical. Doomwake tech wasn't necessarily the greatest at every point in its legality. However, I think Doomwake is in a good spot right now for several reasons.

First of all, I think its height of usage was to combat Goblin Rabblemaster decks. The price decline of Rabblemaster likely corresponds to the same event that saw Doomwake go up, but the graphical data won't bear that out because, as we've said, it takes a lot longer for prices to go down than it does for them to go up. Let's still look at Rabblemaster's graph anyway.

Boom. Look at that. Right at the same time Doomwake's price peaked sharply, Rabblemaster's price began to tail off. Rabblemaster is still a great card, but it's not the Tarmogoyf of Standard it appeared to be when everyone was discussing splashing red into decks that had no business having red just to jam Rabblemaster in. As Rabblemaster's share of the metagame fell, so did Doomwake's because it was less of a wipe against decks that didn't spit out a bunch of small tokens.

Could there be a reason why we'd see Doomwake high online? One reason is that Rabblemaster has fallen out of favor on MODO to a lesser extent.

Rabble's still a real thing on MODO, and that could be because red decks are cheap, except for the Rabblemaster and Stoke, I guess. That's a funny irony of "cheap" decks on MODO. The cheaper the components are, the more appealing the deck is and the more expensive certain key cards can be as people scramble to find 4 Rabblemasters to buy a "cheap" deck.

The other reason that Doomwake could be headed up on MODO?

Hornet Queen farts out tokens, too. Doomwake is getting a lot of play in Sidisi Whip decks, and since other Whip decks are running Hornet Queen, Doomwake seems like it would be great tech against Queen shenanigans.

So earlier in the season we saw that Doomwake's price was pegged to Rabblemaster's price. Does that means late in the season in paper we could see the paper copies of Doomwake pegged to the paper price of Hornet Queen?

Could be. If that's the case, that little upturn at the end on a paper graph that seems devoid of micro-fluctuations indicates Queen is on the upswing. With Doomwake six times the paper price and Hornet Queen on the way up, I think we may be able to explain the divergence in the price of Doomwake, and maybe it's not such a bad pickup after all.