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I found myself with excess downtime this past weekendāa true rarity for someone with two young children. I caught up on some reading, practiced my chess (I seem to be stuck in a rating range now and itās requiring tremendous concentration to try and break out of it), and pondered one of my favorite time-killing activities of all: buylisting.
How can a simple buylist eat up so much time? Well, itās not the primary cards Iām sellingāthose that are worth real dollarsāthat take up the time. My collection isnāt that large these days, and the value is highly concentrated in my Old School collection. Instead, the therapeutic activity I like to implement while buylisting is the process of picking my bulk for nickels and dimes.
Most of my buylists contain a few hero cards alongside a small pile (5-50) of $0.05 commons and uncommons. I figure if Iām paying for shipping already, and I have the time, why not? If over time I could buylist the majority of my bulk for a nickel, that would equate to $50/1000, far in excess of the typical $2 or $3/1000 youād get from ābulking outā your collection to a vendor.
This week Iāll share the process I follow, in case there are some tidbits of useful tricks that will help you make your buylist process that much easier.
Prework: Organization & Sorting
When I started playing Magic many years ago, my collection was relatively small and it was inconsequential whether my collection was organized or not. As time went on, new sets came out, and I started having a difficult time tracking what I owned. I suspect this is even more a challenge for newer players as the number of new products being released has dramatically increased between 1997 (when I started) and 2021.
Over time, I came up with a pseudo-natural process for organizing. For a time, most of the new product I obtained was via drafts and the occasional bundle, so it was easy to at least keep my cards separated by set. One of the advantages of purchasing bundles is the lovely set-themed box you receive along with the packs. Whenever I purchased one, Iād organize all cards from that set within the box. If youāre in the habit of purchasing booster boxes or bundles, you could follow a similar practice. This eliminates confusion and the need to label the box since the box itself is already labeled with the set for you!
Set sorting is a huge step in organizing oneās collection, but itās not the final step. As I open new packs/product and my bulk accumulates, I make sure to keep cards sorted by color in addition to set. I find this natural delineation is the perfect balance between time/effort and utility.
You could go one step further and sort by commons and uncommons. You could go another step and sort alphabetically. The former is probably worthwhile (I have done this before), but the latter is a major time commitment. Unless youāre extremely particular and you plan on picking through bulk on a regular basis (i.e. weekly or more often), the color/set sorting is generally sufficient to implement my buylist strategy.
Finding the Needles in the Haystack
Once your cards are sorted in this manner, the process of finding your nickels and dimes becomes more manageable. To proceed, navigate to your prospective buyerās buylist page and filter to a single set, common and uncommon rarity, and non-foil. Below is an image of how to perform this filtering on Card Kingdomās site, my usual go-to store.
Here you can see Iāve filtered down to Throne of Eldraine non-foil commons and uncommons. There are currently only 22 on their buylist, and some wonāt apply because they are particular to the Brawl decksā¦since I didnāt purchase Brawl Decks, I know I donāt have any of those cards.
From here, you can scroll down and identify a couple of cards of the same color on buylist. With those couple in mind, grab the corresponding bulk cards you own and start picking. It doesnāt take too long (unless you have 1000ās of bulk cards of each colorā¦I do not).
After you finish looking through Throne of Eldraine, you can move on to other sets in your collection. One by one, you can cycle through and find any bulk you may have that can be buylisted for at least a nickel.
This may sound like a daunting process at first, but there are two factors with this approach that work in your favor over time. First, many of the obvious picks from your bulk will be easiest to remember and findāyou only need to dig through your bulk and find Drown in the Lochs once. After that, you know youāve already picked this card and you can skip it. The same likely goes for most of the top few cards in the set.
Itās highly infrequent for a bulk card to go from being worth three cents to worth a dollar, especially from newer sets. Therefore when I follow this picking process, I often skip over the top few cards if Iāve picked the set at least once already. Thereās no point in going back over the same ground.
In tandem with this, the second factor is that, over time, youāll begin to remember the cards you picked. This makes browsing one set to the next a faster and faster process. Card Kingdom is constantly cycling through different $0.05 cards on their buylist, so itās always worth checking. But you donāt have to check for cards you remember already picking. The more you practice this process, the faster it becomes!
The Wildcard Bin
I donāt submit new buylists all that often nowadays. A chunk of time may pass in between, where I may still be acquiring new bulk or finding the occasional nickel and dime while sorting through cards. When that happens, I have a special box where I place any cards I anticipate will be worth shipping for non-bulk at a given time in the future.
Not just anything goes into this box, mind you. This is for stalwart commons like Unsummon, Mana Leak, and Faithless Looting. These are the kinds of cards you know are playable in one format or another, and should be worth something more than bulk. This process is particularly helpful when picking out cards that donāt go in one of my pre-organized boxes. After all, I donāt have a box set aside for every single set and I donāt have enough bulk in most sets to justify following the process I outlined above.
This catch-all āWildcard Binā is where I store those cards I come across that I think should be above bulk. Then after I browse through some sets with my method above, I pull out some of these individual cards and run a search for them on the buylist Iām shopping. Inevitably, a few show up on the list and Iām able to ship them out.
Iāll admit this portion of the process can be a little more time consuming than the others, but itās the best way Iāve come up with to keep a watch on key cards that could be worth something, but donāt fit into one of my pre-organized sets. The procedure is effective, however, and I find the process calming in its own right. Perhaps if I found the task obnoxious or tedious, I wouldnāt bother with this stepāsometimes I am in a rush and this is the step I will skip (after all, the same cards have the same likelihood of being relevant the next time). But with a mission of shipping out as many cards for a nickel as possible, this is a necessary step because Iām not going to set sort my entire bulk collection when many sets would have just a couple cards in their respective pile.
Wrapping It Up
Since I find the process of picking bulk relaxingāeven rewarding at timesāyou can see why I spend so much time optimizing the process. For full transparency, last weekend I spent about 60-90 minutes going through an extensive combing of my bulk. In that time, I probably found about $6.50 worth of cards to ship to Card Kingdom.
On a dollar per hour basis, this is horrendous at best. Surely, there are more productive activities one could do with their time. The key here is that I enjoyed the activity. If the task looks daunting and unenjoyable to you, by all means skip it and move on to bigger and better things. For me, it feels like Iām being paid to a) relax, b) organize my collection, and c) cull back my collection to streamline it. The concept of exchanging 70 cards for one Iāll actually use is something I appreciate. As a minimalist and one who likes to consolidate, this is a big motivator.
If youāre like me and also appreciate trading a bunch of nickels for something of actual value and use, Iād try organizing your collection in the minimal way I proposed above. It works fairly well, and also doesnāt demand excessive amounts of time alphabetizing. You never know what youāll find. This last time around, my big find was an Impact Tremors, which I had no idea was worth as much as it is. That alone made the activity worth it.
The best Modern card revealed from Midnight Hunt is also one of the most innocuous. I've already 
Once Consider is in Modern, expect to see more attempts to revive Arclight Phoenix. 
multiformat all-star because it draws up to two cards. The same will be true of Consider for many decks. Dredge and Reanimator would never stretch into blue for Opt. But they both might for Consider, though Reanimator is far more likely.
So as I was saying, Wizards is printing more graveyard enablers inĀ IMH, and consequently there will be an upswing in graveyard decks soon. And they won't be in the expected colors, so stop relying on Sanctifier en-Vec. Specifically, it's a new Faithless Looting. Which is multicolor, an instant, and has lifegain tacked on so it can be white. Meaning that it's actually not very much like Looting at all beyond sharing some text. But it does explain why Careful Study wasn't in MH2, disappointing plenty of Phoenix hopefuls. And s
decks that don't normally get card velocity. A two mana UW velocity card is competing with far more than Looting did, which will limit playability.
reanimation may be their chance to win. Mending offers the deck a way to burn through the air and set up for another attempt. However, it doesn't make the deck faster. The lifegain makes being slow less problematic against aggro decks, but I don't know if that's enough.
And now for something completely different. Glimpse of Nature has been banned since 
other creature combo deck, but it might be something to build around with flash and Collected Company. It also has flashback, but that costs enough that it's a late-game desperation move. Rite also triggers off enchantments, only lightly broadening the scope of which decks can play it. Enchantress already draws all the cards, it doesn't need a temporary boost. So, again, what's the big deal? Simple. Rite is white rather than blue.
gameplans. And I'm also not certain that Storm- or Elves-style combo is viable in Modern, and if it is, that it's better than existing Company decks.
Speaking of Humans, there are a number of Humans cards with potential inĀ IMH. Which makes sense. This is the plane that spawned Champion of the Parish, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, and Thalia's Lieutenant, after all. The catch is that, so far, most have catches to their playability. The biggest problem is that almost all are three mana or more. They're very good three mana cards, but cost is a huge factor in playability.
quite good and I know from experience that it will be easy to make live. The problem is that I doubt it will ever save Sentinel from removal. Smart players will just kill the other creatures first. Or sweep the board. It would be very good at breaking board stalls, but those are very rare. In other words, it's a good card for a different metagame.
Chaplain of Alms is another one that might be playable in the right metagame and the right deck. A 1/1 with first strike and ward 1 isn't much, but disturb makes me want to get down with that sickness. Getting a dead creature back transformed is decent value, and protecting every creature with ward 1 is pretty good. It's very fragile and costly, but in a very grindy meta it might work out.
catch is that Dawnguard doesn't trigger on entry. Instead, the trigger is tied to the Day/Night werewolf mechanic and only triggers when night becomes day or day becomes night. Which means that Dawnguard can trigger multiple times, but unless it was already night when she entered, it will be down the line.
However, it's not too far from possible. There are a number of new Day/Nightbound werewolves that would get the ball rolling for Dawnguard. Tovolar, Dire Overlord is the most playable creature so far, but it is quite early. And there are a few non-creatures that reference day and night, so there may be enough cards to get the ball rolling for Dawnguard. In an actual werewolf deck she'd be quite strong, but such a deck is likely a bad Domain Zoo and more for Standard than Modern.
The average is my estimate for how many results a given deck āshouldā produce on MTGO. Being a tiered deck requires being better than āgood enough;ā in July the average population was 6.44, meaning a deck needed 7 results to beat the average and make Tier 3. This means that the cutoff is the same as 
But unlike June, August's total decks were more like 
Tier 2's composition is the result of the weirdness of August's metagame shift. At the end of July, Elementals was having a huge resurgence. It had just won a Challenge and had become the It Deck, getting results everywhere and surging from obscurity to upper Tier 3. This continued into August and for the first few weeks it looked like Elementals would just dominate the postings. Then it just stopped. By mid-August Elementals just stopped putting up results. It seemed inexplicable initially, but then I heard that two other (re)surging decks, Burn and Tron, had good Elementals matchups. Both decks had been low Tier 3 at best this year but were suddenly right in the hunt. If they were preying on Elementals, then it fits that they'd fall off when Elementals did, and that was the case for Tron. Both decks had strong upward trends that just flatlined mid-August.
relative strengths of each deck within the metagame. The population method gives a decks that consistently just squeaks into Top 32 the same weight as one that Top 8ās. Using a power ranking rewards good results and moves the winningest decks to the top of the pile and better reflects its metagame potential.
squeaked over the line to Tier 2. Creativity has distinguished itself from predecessor Lorehold Turns by keeping the strategy of Indomitable Creativity into big creature but ditched the turns package to just win with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and sometimes Iona, Shield of Emeria or other big finisher. Which seems like a huge upgrade to me.
BG Yawgmoth beatdown/combo was the best average deck. This is probably because of it just barely making the population Tier 3. A lot of good results not getting spread around much does that. However, I think Cascade Crashers must be declared August's Best Deck. It outperformed not only the baseline but other Tier 1 decks by quite a bit. The winner of both the Population and Power standings, Hammer Time, is pretty average here, though the baseline isĀ really low thanks to all the singletons that only earned 1 point. And Grixis Channeler still managed to fall way under the baseline. A clear underperformer.
Consider Wild Nacatl. It was 
Consider Jace, the Mind Sculptor. When he was 
Phoenix decks. 
Consider a typical 
Start with turn 1 DRC into four Mishra's Baubles. Then on turn 2 let's chain all the Manamorphose into four Gut Shot and finish on two Lootings. That is 14 surveil triggers and 12 cards drawn. That is an opening hand, draw step, and 26 chances to see Phoenix's, for a hypergeometric probability of seeing one Phoenix of 97%, and the probability of seeing all four is now 9.5%. In this most extreme case, the opponent has taken four damage from Shots, and will be attacked for 15 leaving them at 1.
