Bannings

Last night we got our updated banning announcement, and there were some unexpected developments.

One note is that Griselbrand and Sundering Titan were banned in Commander, so adjust your values accordingly. Griselbrand was a huge player in Commander, so now we’re left with his access to Unburial Rites decks in Standard and Reanimator and Show and Tell decks in Legacy. Sundering Titan may see some Tron play in Modern, but nowhere else.

Land Tax is unbanned in Legacy. We should see this card immediately in the $30+ range, but until the card sees play, it will be hard to pinpoint a number. Black border will be in high demand, especially with its playability in Commander. This will likely produce some new decks, but I dont see how it helps anyone beat a Grislebrand. I talked about the impacts of Griselbrand in the Legacy format a few Weeks ago. Disruption has to come back. Cards that play well in Hymn to Tourach decks will be seeing more play soon.

No Changes in Standard.

Snapcaster is going to shoot back up a bit, especially on buylists. Some places were flooded as people feared its banning. Look for it to return to its mid-twenties. Other than that, no changes on the Standard front.

AVR Set Redemptions

Last week I mentioned mtggoldfish.com as an awesome resource for analyzing price changes in MTGO singles. I spent some time looking over data and doing some research and something has become readily apparent.
If you act quickly enough, there is money to
be made in AVR sets on MTGO. Looking over each card, and the set as a whole, I looked at the downward trend since the sets release. This, in itself, is not unexpected. As more packs get opened, prices drop as people sell their singles for tickets or boosters. Set redemptions are just opening up in a couple days on MTGO, so there may not be a very long window of opportunity on this, so if you plan to act on this, do so quickly. Normally, these sets do stay afloat because of their redemption value, at least early on while the paper versions are still in high demand.

Bot sell prices, for the entire set of Rares and Mythics is $117.30. Wizards will charge you $10 for redeeming this set to paper for shipping, and complete sets sell on EBay for $150-$165 looking at completed listings from the last 24 hours. This is the factor that will likely decline sooner, rather than later. As set redemptions release, these full set prices may fall a bit on EBay, but not too much. As it stands, in a worst case scenario, and after EBay and shipping fees, there’s a profit of $15/redemption.

Not that exciting, especially if you have to manually hunt around bots for each card. There’s a better solution. Instead of hunting around the bots, you can simply create your own buy list in the MTGO classifieds. I would set your buy list just above bot buy lists, and preferably in even ticketed quantities (at least for the itemized listings in the classifieds).

Your listing might be like this:

HUMAN buying ALL AVR cards (Mythics, Rares, Uncommons and Commons), Griselbrand 5tix, Restoration Angel 7tix. Bulk Rares at X for 1, Uncommons at Y for 1, and Commons at Z for 1.

I've also seen people use a more typical Paper dealer strategy. Just make a listing that says, "Human Buying all AVR cards, Private Message me." Have them make tradeable all cards they are interested in dumping, and you can make offers on the rares and mythics one by one, and then make an offer on a chunk of commons and uncommons. This gives you a chance to find even better deals, and not get stuck with even more copies of commons/uncommons than you actually need.

I would try a few different versions of this until you’re getting the volume of responses that you want. Also you want to periodically pull down your listing and repost it so it will be closer to the top of search results. Players will be good at looking for the best buy prices, so do your best to stay competitive.

You should be able to complete as many sets as you want, as long as you have time to sit by your MTGO account while you do other things. I expect this method to reduce your cost per set by about $20-25, adding straight into your profits. If you can gather a handful of sets over the next couple of days, it's a quick profit pickup.

Secondly, you’ll have to wait a couple weeks to receive your redemption sets once they become available on Thursday. I would still start Auctions now. Create a 7-10 day Auction to get people bidding on it early before they realize the price on these may begin to decline. Further let the auction be longer to allow you some time to receive your shipments. I would also make a point in the EBay listing to allow for additional shipping time also.

There is definitely a balancing act to watch for here. As single prices continue to fall, you can get in cheaper, but complete set prices may also decline during that time frame.

I don’t have data on Foils, to know if a Foil set is worthwhile to attain and redeem, but it is certainly possible. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen only one listing sold for a foil set at $600 in the last few days.

I’m hoping to get a couple sets like this together, I’m just not sure if I’ll have the time before prices on EBay fall, but I could be lucky and they will take longer than I think. Hopefully, we wont all be competing with each other.

Next week, we should have a bulk of the remaining spoilers to look at and dive back into Standard speculation for the remainder of the Summer. Let me know below if you have any other techniques to maximize the value of the AVR set redemptions.