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The Nutt Draw – Buy Lists and More

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Welcome to another action packed edition of The Nutt Draw! I’m starting to come down with a cold or flu or something, so you better sit further away from the monitor than usual… I don’t want you to get sick too.

After the last article I took in all the data and answers and start working on tuning things a bit more toward what the folken are clamoring for and came up with some new things that I think you’re going to like. There are going to be a lot of instructions and caveats, but please read them all, it will make things go a little smoother.

First off we have the obligatory barrage of data. My usual source data for prices has been corrupt for weeks and it’s forced me to do some re-imagining. For now, I can’t generate the data for the Demand Index numbers or the Womby List, but I’ll have those back online as soon as I can. Because the survey indicated that the most interesting articles were those centered around Buy Lists I’ve taken that on as my first rebuild. My spreadsheets were getting too large, so for now I’ve decided it would be best to only present information for the Standard format. I intend to bring Extended online sometime before the Extended season officially kicks off. It will just come down to having the time to expand the sheets. Our first chart is of the top 30 cards in Standard sorted by their average buy price.

[iframe https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AukC5EWiTvOpdGREaGlyaHhfOWU0OXBRWmVhUDItbWc&hl=en&single=true&gid=1&output=html&widget=false 567px 600px]

There aren’t really any surprises on this list. Well, there were some surprises but they turned out to errors so I had to fix them… AdventuresOn/BlackBorder lists their prices a little strangely (I had to correct for the fact that they list the cards below $1 in whole numbers with no decimal point, so Haunting Echoes was coming up at $20 instead of $0.20.) I hope you are all pleased to see that I am now tracking 10 buy lists which makes the chart very wide. Currently being calculated we have, in no particular order, Cool Stuff Inc, AdventuresOn, Troll and Toad, Starcity Games, Channel Fireball, Card Haus Games, AlterReality Games, Stike Zone, MTG Mint Card, and ABU Games.

I’ll link to the full printable list below (as well as these other charts) but I wanted to embed the charts that I divided by rarity. These can be pretty interesting to look over and might also be a bit useful. We’ll start off with Mythics.

[iframe https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AukC5EWiTvOpdGREaGlyaHhfOWU0OXBRWmVhUDItbWc&hl=en&single=true&gid=3&output=html&widget=false 567px 600px]

Across the 10 vendors being tracked, every single Mythic card is on a Buy List somewhere. ABU games seems to be the only one currently buying them all, but several others are acquiring nearly all of them. I can’t imagine why Starcity might not need any Cast Through Time cards right now…

[iframe https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AukC5EWiTvOpdGREaGlyaHhfOWU0OXBRWmVhUDItbWc&hl=en&single=true&gid=5&output=html&widget=false 567px 600px]

At the time of writing this 229 of the 247 Rare cards in Standard are also present... so all you Rare drafters out there are hate drafting a gold mine.

[iframe https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AukC5EWiTvOpdGREaGlyaHhfOWU0OXBRWmVhUDItbWc&hl=en&single=true&gid=7&output=html&widget=false 567px 600px]

[iframe https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AukC5EWiTvOpdGREaGlyaHhfOWU0OXBRWmVhUDItbWc&hl=en&single=true&gid=8&output=html&widget=false 567px 100%]

There also seems to be a decent amount of cash available in Uncommons with 120 of the 280 on the list as well as Commons with 109 of the 463 listed. (By the way, I think my sheet is cutting off the commons at 100, but I’ll get it fixed.) Maybe one day I’ll be able to incorporate so many buy lists that every card will be accounted for?

Here is that link I promised you so you can view and print them all on one page…

All of Standard on one page

And now with the appetizer out of the way I bring to the two final courses in this article. These are far from perfect, but I think they are still very useful, and it’s the best I can do using Google Spreadsheets at the moment.

First is a template that allows you to enter in card names and get back a printable sheet with all the current prices on them. The idea is that you can enter in some of the key cards in your trade binder as well as some of the cards that you’re looking to acquire and bring the list with you to your FNM or other event. You can of course use this online as well, but data entry on Google Docs isn’t very good on the mobile phone platforms right now. You could always enter them from a computer and then just look them up on your phone though I suppose.

The second and last bit of new hotness is a similar tool I whipped up that deals with buy lists. On this one we can really see the limitations of complex online spreadsheets. It’s a bit finicky, you’ll have to wait for it to load and if you enter things too fast it might not catch it in the update. Enduring these little hitches though will give you two sorted lists. The first is a list of the best places to sell your hate drafted treasures for the most money, and the second is a list that details out the most money you can get if you’d prefer to deal with fewer buyers.

I can think of a lot more features I’d like to add to these sheets but I’m pretty limited by the abilities of the online sheets.

So here are some things you need to keep in mind with these spread sheets.

  • 1. Access to these will require a (free) Google Docs account.
    2. None of the editions are required to enter, but I included the functionality to deal with reprints.
    3. If it seems like they glitched out, refresh the page, your entered data should be safe.
    4. They are not very fast, so be patient.
    5. I have written them in such a way as when I refresh my source data, the templates associated with your personal Google Docs account will be refreshed too. If I add vendors or features (or you find it broken) come back and get a new template. I’ll continue to advance the version numbers.
    6. Edit only the YELLOW cells. There isn’t a way for me to protect the formulas in the other cells so I have marked the safe ones in yellow and hid as many of the others as I could.
    7. If you’re having any issues I didn’t cover here, please let me know in the comments, I’ll respond as fast as I can.
  • [iframe https://docs.google.com/embeddedtemplate?id=0AukC5EWiTvOpdHpkY3ljQ2pXRGlkRVd2RURKNnRLUFE 567px 210px]

    [iframe https://docs.google.com/embeddedtemplate?id=0AukC5EWiTvOpdGljVTRBeHpXQVpzNUVfaWF6Nnk3SVE 567px 210px]

    Chris McNutt

    Born in Seattle, Washington, Chris McNutt has been playing and collecting Magic: The Gathering since Unlimited Edition. As an active player, tournament organizer and judge he regularly scrubs out of Pro Tour Qualifiers but inexplicably cleans up at the local draft tables. When not net decking Chris is either busy working as an Information Technology Sales Rep or spending time with his family. Other non-magical pastimes include playing guitar and an unhealthy number of video games. Cursed with an undying love of generating spreadsheets purely for “fun”, he’ll be crunching the numbers each week in order to serve up delicious data burritos to the salivating, hungry readers of Quiet Speculation.

    View More By Chris McNutt

    Posted in Feature, Finance, FreeTagged

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    12 thoughts on “The Nutt Draw – Buy Lists and More

    1. This is a promising start to what could be the most important spreadsheets any of the QS readers will use. Time to do some testing on the netbook I take with me to FNM.

      I've been waiting for tools like this for years – Apathy House, I'll miss you. But there's a new kid in town with a helluva lot more sex appeal.

      1. There, now you've done it… you've gone and made me cry…

        I'll update the data again on Friday just for you and I also want to mention that I found some errors in the TCG pricing data (it said that a Sphinx of Jwar Isle had a median price of $33) so I added in a filter to eliminate card prices with too large of a pricing deviation. They will still come up on the buy lists though.

    2. Truely amazing, it's all the info I could ask for. The only other thing left is foil buy price lists, and promos. Also an idea I had would be to do a staple list, as in when edh and legacy staples are discussed a standard list of say 30 staples from each could be compliled and the relative prices for each list updated rather than a whole sections of non standard cards.

      Although just an idea.

      Thanks for all your very hard work.

    3. Still have some issues unless Strikezone is really buying ratchet bombs at $45 each in which case they can have all of mine and I'm buying more boxes of SoM right now.

      I wonder how different it would look with a Median Buy list price over an average. Do you think that would be more accurate?

      1. Oddly enough, yesterday Strike Zone did have it listed for $45. I went all the way through the data chain on that one and that price came from their buy list site so it was probably an error but it's since been corrected (to $4.5). I'll upload a new dataset shortly and it will correct the issue. (It will correct the issue even on your spreadsheet).

        If they change the way the median price is calculated then all cards will have more accurate pricing. Right now the median is established by the mid point between the highest and lowest instead of on the average of all available prices for similar card conditions. In some cases it will be very different, but always more accurate.

    4. Amazing! The spreadsheet templates are what I had been wishing for ever since I read your first article. Thank you for all your work in putting this together.

      I would subscribe to QS just for this column!

      1. It looks like the validation on those cells got clipped. I fixed it and uploaded a new version. you'll need to get a new copy of the template to fix the issue.

    5. This is freaking sweet. Your lists keep getting better and better.

      I did notice you removed White Lion Games. I think I know why, since I'm in the middle of a sale with them and it's been a hassle. It took them a month after I shipped the cards to do anything, and they just sent my an updated quote at a severely reduced TOTAL price. That means they didn't even bother to give a card-by-card quote, or whether the reduction was due to condition. And if I don't agree with their price now, they're going to charge me for shipping.

      Did you leave White Lion Games off this time due to similar issues? Or due to technical reasons?

      1. Thank you.

        I didn't so much remove them as not include them in the rebuild. They were kind of included at random in the last build, but I'll keep your experience in mind as I build in more stores. It might have been an isolated incident that could occur with any online store, or something more typical to them, I just don't know. I'm sorry that it didn't work out, we will all learn from your sacrifice.

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