Greetings, Exasperators!

Maybe I'm not the guy to be writing about buying foils, but I probably am the guy to write about not buying foils, and that's what I want to talk about today.

Don't Buy (Khans) Foils (Yet)

You want to get a good discussion going about buying foils? There are a lot of compelling reasons to do so, and Derek Madlem already wrote a pretty compelling piece about it on this selfsame internets site earlier.

I won't be upset if you pause this reading experience to make sure you fully appreciate his arguments before you finish this one. Don't worry about my feelings about abandoning my article before it even really got rolling--I sanctioned it after all. I don't necessarily want to build on it so much as point out all of the arguments I won't be making. Someone should make them, and since someone already did, go read it.

Back? Good, let's sally forth.

If I had to summarize Derek's and other good articles about foils in one sentence, I imagine this would be it:

Foils Are a Good Investment

Well, sure they are. Foils have a "multiplier" compared to non-foils. That means if an unplayed $1 card is available for $2 in foil and it suddenly sees a lot of play and becomes worth $15, the foil won't be $16, the foil will be more like $30. Am I really explaining the concept of a multiplier to QS Insiders? Sorry. You know what a multiplier is, let's move on.

Foils are less affected by reprints because not every possible way a card can be reprinted will have foils. Derek covered this. What he didn't really talk about is when to buy foils and that isn't because he didn't write a comprehensive article, but rather because that's outside the scope of what he was talking about.

It might not even bear talking about except I see a lot of comments online from budding financiers and I think there is a lot of misinformation being circulated and we don't actually have to guess. Not when we have the power of the internet!

So how is the internet supposed to help us talk about foils? Well, I think I'm going to help myself out by narrowing the scope a bit and focusing on Khans foils.

So what inspired me to even bother talking about foils when I saw it was covered quite nicely already?

"What Should We Do About Foil Treasure Cruise?"

Do you have a facebook account? Then, congratulations! You've probably seen the above phrase at least four times in the past month. What do we do with Foil Treasure Cruise? Is Foil Monastery Swiftspear a sell or hold? Is Foil Narset going to come down?

Folks, let's calm down. I am not super bullish on buying any Khans foils right now, and I'll tell you why.

The Set is New

The set has only been out for two months. While two months is a long time and we're getting another set in two months' time, we're still looking at a relatively new set. While innovation happens quickly and even the MODO market is shifting a bit more dramatically, the paper market tends to be stickier and slower to move. We're not at absolute minimum supply, but we're hardly at peak supply right now.

There is a lot of product containing Khans of Tarkir cards that has been on shelves for roughly ten minutes, not the least of which is the Holiday Gift Set and the Fat Pack. With Christmas approaching, those items will go on sale and they will inject a lot of copies of cards into the market.

While a 10-year-old kid isn't liable to list a foil Swiftspear on TCG Player on Christmas morning, those cards make their way into trades and that funnels copies to the market. The people about to open the largest amount of product are the people least interested in hanging onto foil Eternal-playable cards. They'll need more copies of Ankle Shanker for their FNM decks, not pretty foils to finish a grindy Legacy deck.

Not only that, MODO redemption is hardly in full swing. With a set like this one with plenty of sweet foils and good cards, MODO redemption promises to inject a significant number of copies of cards onto the market the way it always has.

While MODO is becoming a pain in the butt to play on, trade on and generally tolerate, there are still a large number of intrepid users who swear by the platform and the relative ease of assembling sets of digital facsimiles to redeem for cold hard cash by way of selling full sets on eBay or locally. In addition to the difficulties surrounding Version 4, the increase in redemption price has had a marked effect on MODO redemption, but Khans is a super fun set to draft and bots are still buying and selling.

While MODO redemption won't be quite what it was in its heyday, I still expect a greater effect than we saw even in Theros block. With a lot of foil copies still in digital form, waiting to be transformed, it's easy to say we're nowhere near peak supply.

How much does peak supply matter?

Well, let's find analogous cards to Treasure Cruise and Swiftspear. I think irrespective of rarity, Cruise and Swiftspear are relatively unique in that their desirability for eternal formats were known practically before the cards were available for purchase. Even if we compare these cards to rares or mythics with similar desirability profiles, the trend lines will be instructive because all we really care about is the price trajectory, not the amount. So is there anything we can glean from a similar card?

Pyromancer isn't the best analog considering everything we said about the fat packs, Holiday Gift Box and to a great extent, MODO redemption, doesn't apply. If we are solely basing what we should do with Swiftspear on what happened with foil Young Pyromancer it would seem like we should pick up our Swiftspears now. They won't fluctuate by more than a dollar for a few more months until the total lack of them or a little more adoption in older formats makes them shoot up.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we expect Swiftspear to fall off or maintain its playability. Pyromancer's playability in Vintage, a format where playing with a non-foil uncommon from a core set next to your power and black-bordered duals is unheard of, has had an effect on the price of Pyromancer out of proportion with what we expect to see with Swiftspear. Still, if we expect Swiftspear to continue to see play to the extent that it is now, we can expect the price at least not to drop in the near term.

But Khans of Tarkir and a core set aren't exactly analogous sets. Return to Ravnica is, though, and that set contains a card that may be instructive.

What the hell even happened with that spike? Just like Swiftspear and Treasure Cruise, Lantern's applicability to formats where foils matter (in this case, EDH) was known right out of the gate. Every EDH player knew the foil was going to be desirable, but with the exception of that huge spike, the price is largely normalizing around twice its pre-spike price. Having pricing data that went all the way back to the card's release would obviously be much better, because if I remember correctly, the card was initially closer to $15-$20 when the set first released.

What happened was people clamored, everyone got what they needed, more copies came out and the price held until someone attempted a buyout. The buyout price didn't stick exactly, but the price isn't approaching the pre-spike price, but rather twice that price.

Could we see something like that with Swiftspear? I don't have the data to back it up, apparently. but there was a "wrong" time to buy these, and that was before they sank to $7 and after they rose to $40 and stayed around $14. While Pyromancer looks pretty flat until its big spike and Swiftspear could do the same, there is precedent for foils everyone clamored for initially to go down.

The fact that Lantern is used in a one-of format and it's easier for people to get the copies they want matters to an extent, but how many EDH players do you know with fewer than 4 decks? Not many, and "not many" is also the number of EDH decks I have that don't run a copy of Chromatic Lantern. As much as it would appear on the surface that a one-of format matters 25% as much as a four-of format, let's all try and remember people with one Legacy deck will have five-plus EDH decks. Still, this isn't the best analog and I don't know whether we'll see a similar price dip with Swiftspear.

You have to be careful with EDH foils! I have a graph that shows why.

See the Unwritten may be one of the coolest EDH spells ever printed. I immediately wanted to jam this in Riku, Maelstrom Wanderer, Omnath--you name it. If it's green, you consider this card, and if your EDH deck isn't green, well, sorry you're not using the best color.

Still, my initial excitement over this card (which is well documented on podcasts and in articles) didn't make me too zealous. I knew pre-ordering a card everyone was excited about was probably a bad idea. While you can jimmy the numbers and figure out how many cases to buy to get eight of each mythic or however much you're ordering to fulfill preorders, it's harder to count on foils so foil preorder prices are silly.

Still, in the case of Swiftspear and Cruise, they stuck. That's not all that common, and those prices may hold as much out of scarcity and stubbornness as anything else. The initial price of Swiftspear at around $10 preceeded it finishing better than anticipated in Legacy and that initial jump made a lot of people willing to buy in at $10 some money. Swiftspear had to prove itself.

What about a card that didn't have to prove itself?

Let's talk about this card strictly in terms of its playability in a universe where no one is talking about banning it, first of all. Isn't it weird that the price held at basically $20, the same as Swiftspear? People are willing to pay the same amount for a common as an uncommon but not much more for the uncommon.

Swiftspear seems less broadly applicable and Cruise is Vintage-playable whereas Swiftspear hasn't really emerged in that format, but it almost feels like the prices are arbitrary. The market found a price people were willing to pay for Cruise right off the bat and it's barely fluctuated.

Conclusions

We looked at a lot of data; now what? Now I guess we should answer the question everyone is asking. What should we do about foil Swiftspear and Cruise right now?

As supply increases, there will be downward pressure on the card prices. I'm not sure to what extent, but it will be there. Does that mean I expect prices to go down? Not exactly.

Remember when I said it seemed like the prices were somewhat arbitrary? I think that's true to an extent. If a price is somewhat arbitrary, it's much harder for increased supply to drive the price down than it is for decreased supply to drive the price up.

If people are okay paying $20 for Treasure Cruise with 15 sellers, they'll gladly pay $25 with three sellers. But while the 16th seller can get away with charging $18.50, it's unlikely they'll want to charge $15. If another seller doesn't snap it up, they will run out of copies before the market runs out of the will to charge $20. So while I don't see the price going down anytime soon, I don't think there is any rush to buy.

Why?

Because the price is unlikely to go up soon, either. M15's draft cycle was interrupted by Conspiracy drafts, which impacted supply quite a bit. Not to mention how boring it is to draft core set online (We're learning so much about core sets that we can apply exactly one more time) and how terrible the labor-to-fruits ratio is for MODO redemption of a set where the fifth or sixth most expensive card is an uncommon burn spell.

Khans is going to be interrupted by the next set in the block and nothing before that. If you look at Pyromancer, it took a long time for it to spike. I think we have time, and buying in could upset the apple cart and make the cards more expensive.

Why not slowly chip away at places like Pucatrade and trades at the LGS? You can amass more copies before a spike that way if you don't run at the market. Remember, the spike on a card like Swiftspear (if it sustains Legacy play long enough for that to happen) is scheduled for months out if Pyromancer is to be believed, and Pyromancer's spike had even more going for it with its attenuated draft cycle. I would take my time with Swiftspear and anticipate a spike, if it happens, in a few more months at the earliest. We have a lot of more Khans coming.

Treasure Cruise is in a different boat. While Swiftspear is not likely to be banned, Treasure Cruise is making some people nervous. Its banning seems imminent to some, and that uncertainty has artificially capped its price.

In fact, they are trading for less than their retail price, uncharacteristic of multi-format staples with a lot of confidence behind them. While Cruise and Swiftspear have set-specific keywords making their reprinting, especially in foil, unlikely, a banning would eviscerate the price of a foil Cruise.

I would make like Warren Buffet right now. Be greedy when others are fearful. You're taking a risk, albeit a small one, by picking up those copies, so make sure you're compensated. Don't buy in for cash and don't trade for them at retail. While they aren't super likely to go down in the near term, I don't see them going up, either, giving you plenty of time to target them in trades.