It makes a lot of sense, but I don’t believe it’s generally known (I’ve only heard rumors). I guess it’s up to you to decide if you want to discuss it ont he forum, however I do feel that that would make sense.

MCM has US buyers

Coolstuff Inc buys cards from me. SCG too.

Some of these shops make me send the cards to Karmacrow. So there is a clear deal there!

I don’t know if this information is known or not. If not, you think I should post it in the forum?

I keep adding, non-foil Cradles were about 10-15 guilders.

“The formats it could be played in are after all known for attracting pimps, so you might expect a larger percentage of the promo print run to see play.”

Just a little further elaboration here, Gaea’s Cradle was always a very popular kitchen table casual card. People would need to get a copy and it was always fairly pricey so they would get the cheaper version (I remember the foil being about 80-100 guilders when it just came out, to compare, Duals were 10-15 guilders and you could even get some of the Beta Duals for under 100 guilders). I think many Cradles are still hiding in casual decks and collections and a higher percentage of the non-foils are seeing play there. As such the reasoning used for the Intuition price discrepancy would not apply here.

We agree on the outcome, yes. “Teach a man to fish” though: with flawed reasoning a reader might start applying the same flawed reasoning in the future to other cards and mess up considerably, with sounds reasoning the reader should be able to extrapolate correctly for other cards. Now I don’t think it was all that bad in this case, but I did feel an elaborate reply was needed.

I agree the Intuition promo is not likely keeping prices down, I think lack of tournament play and print run size is. Should a card that breaks Intuition be printed (or discovered I suppose) I could see it double up and maybe over time even reach $100. A lot needs to happen though so I’m guessing we’re talking about at least a 5 year timeframe if not more. I think the promo is possibly rare enough for the price difference to make sense. The formats it could be played in are after all known for attracting pimps, so you might expect a larger percentage of the promo print run to see play.

I would not be surprised to see Autumn Willow drop back down to $0.5-$1, the guy who bought all those copies did not seem eager to keep buying (he posted on the misprints & rarities FB group). It will take a while, but only further demand is going to keep her price up and she simply isn’t good enough.

Chains or Moat are in a very different category, much more rare (about 20x as rare) and seeing both Tournament play and casual play (granted, casual play less so for the Chains). Those I think will stay high for a long time. Chains was bought out btw, as much was clear from posts on the QS forum. I got myself 6 copies at the time and I remember at least 1 person posting they got 13 copies. That’s 0.1% of all the copies just between us 2 and there were more people saying they were buying any copies they could find.

I agree with the main premise though. Reserved list cards don’t usually go down much in the long run. I’m always happy to get in on the more interesting ones.

I would’ve sworn I had already started a Winding Canyons topic, but the forum search can’t seem to find it. Regardless, I have mentioned my liking of the card is article replies and forum replies many times.

There are at most 22800 tournament legal Illusionary Masks in the world. No numbers are available on Urza’s Legacy print runs, but I think it to be likely that there are somewhere between 10x and 50x as many English Monoliths and also many more in other languages. Mask had a much higher starting price to get in on even before the unban and it did shoot up at the time to the point that many likely wouldn’t consider building a deck around it due to cost. I understand that they have overlap in when they were unbanned, but that’s unfortunately where the similarity ends.

The argument for Eureka is similar, there are only 19500 English copies. This is such a small amount that any interest at all is capable of propping up the price, be it casual play, collectors or minimal tournament play. There will also be so many more Intuitions than Eurekas that the comparison becomes invalid.

To make the argument you want to make you probably should ignore any cards before Ice Age because for those cards rarity is just too big a factor. I’m sure examples to which it applies can be found or at least will be found some day as with Magic’s growth even Tempest cards will at some point start to be rare relative to the number of active players looking for them. (I couldn’t think of any example off the top of my head).

Before I forget, I only compared Mask and Monolith because they were unbanned at the same time. It was my wish to compare their price performance since unbanning. The comparison was made only for this purpose.

As for Eureka/Intuition – this comparison was mostly one out of convenience. My intent was not to argue that Intuition should be $100 because it’s just like Eureka. Only that a Legacy playable card, even one with hype that comes and goes, can maintain an elevated price tag. This argument should also be sound.

Thank you for the thorough feedback! I had a feeling I would be hearing from you – your knowledge of the Reserved List, older cards, and EDH far surpasses my own. While your arguments are stronger than my own, I believe we agree on the final conclusion. The Reserved List cards I identified above are likely safe investments with higher likelihood for upside than downside.

There may be many more promo printings of Intuition, but those promos are $150! I highly doubt these promos are what’s keeping non-promo prices down. Minimally this gap should close a little bit.

I did mean U1’s, you’re right. I confused the two!

Reserved List cards can go down in price – they just don’t do it too often. I believe the trend (especially going forward) will be up much more frequently than down. If garbage like Autumn Willow gets bought out, I’m sure the price can come back down (although not so quickly as its still a very old card). But when something like Chains or Moat rises, I don’t expect these to drop in price at all. Especially if the rise isn’t from an overnight buy-out. That’s why I think Reserved List cards are such good plays. They have low downside but decent upside, especially in the longer term.

Sorry, Winding Canyons will have to wait another day. Or you could post a thread about the card in the forums! Get the discussion going 🙂

I do think the Autumn Willow fan will have to worry about the card coming down again. It’s unclear if you were sarcastically referring to the myth that reserved list cards don’t really come down after they’ve gone up?

I’ve been quite surprised at prices in Europe lagging behind on reserved list cards. I have noticed many discrepancies on high value cards between the markets and I would expect that if the difference is big enough a big shop in the US could arrange for a 3rd party to buy for them on MCM for example. City of Traitors is one such card I’ve noticed it for, but it does seem to be rising now. There are still quite a few EX or better Volcanic Islands in the €105-€135 range.

Gaea’s Cradle’s spike coincided with the Legend rule change. Increased Legacy play was not relevant to it, it was simply the most expensive card that benefitted from the change.

While there is indeed a Gaea’s Cradle promo it’s from the first batch of foil promo’s to be released and it was always pretty hard to obtain one. The Intuition promo is much less rare.

Eureka is considerably more rare than Intuition. There are less than 20k copies per Legends rare. yes, it is seeing less Legacy play than Intuition, but, I think you can expect it to see more EDH play. While you may be right that Intuition could hit $100+ under the right circumstances I highly disagree with the Eureka comparison being valid. I can only see this happen if something is released that is highly synergistic with Intuition and even then some serious tournament results will be required.

Why make the Illusionary Mask – Grim Monolith comparison? Both availability and function are completely different. Also, yes, EDH players love their artifact mana aceleration, but, this is not the kind of card they’d be looking for in that context. The card gains you 1 mana this turn or 3 in a later turn and allows you to change 4 now into 3 later. This means either combo or a weird deck that aims to generate a ton of mana in a single explosive turn. This is a small subset of EDH decks. Normally the artifact mana acceleration love is limited to accelerators that are simpler and do their thing all the time, like Darksteel Ignot or Chromatic Latern. Monolith is just too much work and much harder to see the benefit of.

Don’t want to say the Monolith is bad to pick up, but the reasoning provided just isn’t sound. If anything I’d consider the City of Traitors rise as better indicator of what can be expected from the Monolith as both have similar functions (+1 mana) and are likely being pushed up by the same format (Legacy).

I like Island of Wak-Wak, have long felt it should be more expensive. No love for Winding Canyons though? That’s my preferred Reserved List land to pick up. Way too cheap for it’s power level in EDH. I am yet to run into an EDH deck where I wouldn’t want to play it. It’ll likely be more widely played than the Island, does provide mana, is cheaper to get into and was a 3rd set rare. For these I like to look at Volrath’s Stronghold as an indicator and both the Canyons and Island compara favorably on (likely) rarity and amount of decks that could play them. I believe they both only need better PR, but Canyons are considerably easier to get into and even if they double in price still wouldn’t cost so much that most EDH players would feel uncomfortable paying for them.

I’ve picked up a few extra Duals and am working on a deal with my preferred store where I’ve locked in the old price they had Trops and Tundra’s listed at. I’ve done this with them before, getting 2 Chains of Mephistoteles for about half of what they were going for at the time about 3 months after the rise when we completed our deal. Should work out nicely, particularly because I’m trading in store credit for it and they pay me very well in credit.