…or Playing and Speculating?

This is a common dilemma that many players and speculators face. Maybe you've been a competitive player mostly and now want to use part of your tix as an investment. Maybe you've been mostly speculating and now that your bankroll is bigger you are wondering how to balance speculation and play without spending too much.

The question is probably the following: Can you reconcile competitive play and profitable speculation on MTGO? The answer may seem easy but if you want to extract the most tix from every single of your specs, do you have any room to play competitively?

Chose One: Play or Speculate

Player and Speculator

For the rest of this article I'll use "play" with the idea of playing competitive decks with the goal to win prizes. For this purpose a person that I would consider a "player" would always try to acquire and keep the best decks/cards as long as they're legal in a given format. The price of the cards doesn't matter to him or her--buying high and selling low is not a problem.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a "speculator" is a person that would strictly dedicate his/her MTGO account to buy and sell cards in order to maximize profit at all time. This means that there's no sentiment about keeping such or such card to play with it. Buying at the lowest point and selling at the highest point is only what matters. He or she would never spend a penny buying cards to play even casual decks, let alone buying expensive cards to enter tournaments.

And there's everything in between.

Also, as fun as playing can be, if you are a grinder on MTGO and your bankroll is big enough, you should probably be making more tix per hour speculating than playing.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

In my experience, if you want to do both you have to compromise. You can't really play competitive decks all year long and have all your specs yield the highest returns. If you want to play for a MOCS season or for a series of online PTQs you may have to sacrifice some tix. And if you want to get the most out of your specs you won't be able to use some cards for tournaments because the time to sell has come.

Sometimes new members on the forum ask "I'm mostly a Standard/Modern player, what is the best period of the year to buy/sell?".

Especially with Standard, prices vary significantly from October to October one year later. If you are a Standard player but want to reduce the cost of your play and optimize your buy/sell you'll find yourself playing Standard only four to six months a year. For older Standard sets prices start declining as early as April. If you hold these older sets' cards after April you are probably losing money.

You may also have to delay your purchase when a new set is released, as new cards are very expensive the first days and weeks compared to three or four months later. Given this, when do you buy or sell? And when do you get to play with the decks you wanted to build?

Goblin Rabblemaster is on track to become one of the best speculations of these past years. If the goblin sees enough play at Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir it might well be worth around 15 tix very soon. If you are a speculator  you should consider selling it quickly in the hype of the PT and get a nice stack of tix back. If you are a player you may want to keep your playset of Goblin Rabblemaster even with the risk of a slight decrease in price.

With eternal formats, this might get a little bit easier. Following cycles in Modern, for instance, should help you build your deck(s) at minimal costs. But watch out for reprints and Masters sets as they might seriously decrease the value of your cards. In such a case should you sell and rebuy, or should you keep your cards anyway? It all depends on how you position yourself on the speculator-player spectrum.

Reconciling Playing and Speculating

Sure you could try to do a little bit of both, playing and speculating. If you have a big bankroll most of it can be dedicated to speculating while you keep a playset of the cards you want independently of their speculative value. With a smaller bankroll you'll have to make choices if you want to grow your portfolio.

Since this is called QuietSpeculation.com and not QuietPlay.com, let's attack the issue from the speculation perspective first--you want to generate some profit speculating on MTGO cards first and foremost, but you also want to play Tier 1 decks as often as possible. Today I'll discuss a range of options you can use to speculate efficiently while trying to get some play.

Avoid What's Trendy

If you want to enter competitive tournaments but are not ready to spend full price on top trendy decks you still have the option to play Tier 2 decks or even your own brews. Playing decks that are not front runners of the current metagame will probably allow you get the cards you need at a reasonable price.

You are not spending a lot of tix to play here but you are not playing optimal decks either. This might be enough to win though if you know both the metagame and your own decks well.

There might be a good news here. If the rogue/Tier 2 deck you are playing with does perform and if other players also have successes these results may change the metagame. Soon you might be holding a deck that is worth more than what you paid for. As a speculator this might be a good time to sell these cards, and find another deck.

Save a Percentage of Your Specs

You want to get the most out of every tix you invest but you also want to play competitive decks when you enter tournaments on MTGO. The solution for you may be to use a percentage of your profit and buy the cards you want with these savings.

This could be a well defined goal (besides making the most tix) for what to do with the tix you generate if you didn't have one. For every gain or loss from your specs build yourself a "saving account" and once in a while buy the cards you need for the top decks.

By doing this you don't mix business and pleasure, you finally play the decks you like and you make sure that you bankroll is still growing. Nonetheless, if you don't have a bankroll big enough to start with it might take some time before you complete your first Standard decks.

I'm currently applying a variant of this to try to build my Cube on MTGO. For every spec that generates profit I keep one copy of the given card and set it aside for my Cube. It's probably going to take me a year to finish it--I want to pay as low as possible for every card.

Wait for Lowest Prices, Reprints and Seasons

Pretty much the same way you wait for cards to be at their lowest prices to buy them when you invest, you simply do the same but with cards you plan to play with. The only difference here is that you don't plan on selling them. At least you get to build your decks as cheaply as possible.

Again, this might require a long period of time to finish decks as not all cards are cheap at the same time. This strategy is not going to work well with Standard decks as you may have to wait up to a year before specific sets get to their lowest prices. However this will get your Modern or Legacy decks at low cost.

Take advantage of Modern cycles, flashback drafts and other promo cards to build your favorite decks at reduced costs.

Still with the Cube I'm trying to put together, I'm patiently waiting for reprints, flashback drafts and MOCS promos to gather expensive cards at the lowest price.

Play With What You Have

If you have decided to dedicate your MTGO account to speculation alone and to extract the most out of your specs, you'll have little to no room to build competitive decks. And it's actually fine because you are not looking to grind 8-man tournaments, MOCS points or PTQs.

However, from time to time you may still want to pack together 60 cards and play some games.

Playing with your specs is very unlikely to have you end up with competitive decks. At best you'll have 75% of competitive Modern decks. Standard being much more volatile and unpredictable you should not hold, in theory, cards that are spiking and that are de facto part of popular decks.

So what are you left with? Mostly casual decks and rogue decks. If your account is truly dedicated to speculation and to make the most out of them then you are probably not holding enough "good" cards to make a Tier 1 deck in any format. This is however the perfect set up to build decks for the casual room and simply have fun playing odd decks.

As far as I'm concern I'm a 99% speculator and I don't play any tournament at all, or only if WotC is providing free phantom points that can be used for Cube drafts or special sealed events. But I do play frequently in the casual room with whatever I'm speculating on, and it has its part of fun. Once in a while I buy one or two tix of cheap cards I would need to complete a casual decks, no more.

Concluding Remark

Whether your goal is to speculate or to play competitively on MTGO, it's always a good idea to know the goal of your MTGO account. If you have decided to invest some of your tix in cards but are still playing frequently it can be difficult to extract the most from your specs, especially when you use the same cards both to play and speculate on. You may want to make the distinction between the two activities clear.

Maybe you could use only the profit from your specs to buy cards for your decks? Maybe you can create another MTGO account specifically dedicated for speculations or decks to play? You will also gain a lot of satisfaction if your investments on MTGO perform really well rather than being diluted by tix you spend to play.

Thank you for reading,

Sylvain Lehoux