We've trained ourselves to adapt to changing prices occurring week to week.

Weekly!? More like daily at this point, with a strong movement towards prices changing in real time, 24/7.

Trading without a smartphone has become tantamount to walking down the wrong alley in Mexico City with a stack of bills hanging out of your back pocket. Predicting the next series of spikes and crashes has become--for a number of players--a larger part of playing Magic than ... ya know, playing Magic.

I already talked about the idea of MTG Finance as a solved format--mostly as hyperbole--but you probably got the jist of what I was getting at.

There are deeper financial trends afoot than just the constant shifting of the sands. Entire continents are slowly and steadily being consumed beneath the glacial advance of an aging player base, yielding trends that were only obvious when viewed in hindsight.

After a few years, I've found myself on the winning end of these glacial shifts and feel really fortunate that my collection had matured into something substantial.

The Next Frontier

I came into Magic (for the second time) around the release of Conflux. I putzed around at FNMs for a few months with an inexpensive deck that I cobbled together featuring cards like Master Transmuter, Platinum Angel and Grim Poppet. As I became reobsessed with Magic and filled out my Standard collection, I looked to other formats to satiate my urge to collect and consume.

We are Borg.
Your cards will be added to our own.

It really began to change when I tagged along with a local band of hooligans to a couple PTQs during Extended season.

Yeah, that Extended season... the one that ended with the format warping around Dark Depths, Thopter Foundry and Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

I was hooked despite posting an abysmal record with the only deck I could cobble together on short notice--Scapeshift. I started buying into the format pretty heavily. Dark Confidants, Tarmogoyfs, Shocklands, Chrome Moxen, and essentially any card that appeared in any Extended deck anywhere. I had to have everything.

Endless Horizons

It didn't stop there. Of course it didn't stop there.

We are Borg.
Your collection will be assimilated and added to our own.

Before Extended season even rolled around again on the calendar, I became enchanted with Legacy. I acquired Wastelands and Aether Vials and everything else to play Goblins... aaaand then Merfolk.

After all, they were pretty much the cheapest decks to get in Legacy (back then). Then, having never played Legacy, I just started trading for dual lands and Onslaught fetches and everything else Legacy. I was pretty indiscriminate with my acquisitions, trading Standard cards for Legacy cards at every opportunity.

I hadn't even played Extended again, let alone Legacy. It was probably another year before I even had the opportunity to play Legacy for the first time but I had accidentally been making the best financial investments of my life. Those $65 Underground Seas were creeping up to a hundred dollars! A hundred dollars!

Legacy was taking off in a big way and I had apparently gotten in at the ground floor. I finished up playsets of cards I would never and have never used, and I started to amass sealed product. Anybody else from the Midwest remember the "bucket o' boosters" that Pastimes used to carry around with them? I bought 8-man draft sets of Ravnica-Guildpact-Dissension for $70 and threw them in the closet, not as an investment, but more as a novelty. How cool it would be to have a draft party and draft all kinds of formats?

So I bought into sealed product. Duel decks, booster boxes, Commander decks, Planechase decks, and From the Vaults all filled up chests, then closets, in my home.

What next?

The Final Frontier

I had dabbled in power once before, acquiring a Mox Sapphire and Black Lotus and flipping them for a quick $200 profit when I became nervous at how much money I had tied up in two cards.

If I had only known.

Early in 2013, I decided I "might as well" acquire Power in case I ever wanted to play Vintage. It had worked out for Legacy, right? Power had been sitting pretty stable for a few years, experiencing modest annual gains but nothing monumental.

"Might as well!"

Remember all that sealed product I had casually acquired? I ended up selling and trading off most of those booster boxes for Moxes. I traded those From the Vaults for Time Vaults, I traded Shards for Bazaars. By the end of Gencon 2013, I had acquired everything minus a Mox Sapphire, which I quickly snatched up when a local vendor offered to trade one for recently inflated Modern staples.

I was done. This is where I decided to get off the train and let those faithful few continue onward to destinations unknown.

Reflecting on Success

So here I am, sitting on a Magic collection worth well more than double what I've spent obtaining it. How did I get so lucky? Was I a trading and finance wunderkin? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was just riding a wave of inevitability.

It's no secret that Magic has been experiencing end over end growth for years now, and that wave really started to grow at Zendikar.

So picture a train that stops at the station once every three months, allowing players to get off and on. After years of players mostly choosing to stay on the train rather than quit, the average player has been on that train for a much longer time. This means that player tenure creeps up by a few fractions of a percentage point with every set's release. The longer a player stays in the game, the more likely they are to explore older formats.

So let's think about that for a second. We'll use hypothetical numbers because where can we even find that info?

Player tenure:

• <1 year: 50% Kitchen Table, 35% Standard, 15% Commander, 10% Modern, 4% Legacy, 1 % Vintage
• 1-3 years: 25% Kitchen Table, 80% Standard, 60% Commander, 40% Modern, 20% Legacy, 2% Vintage
• 4-7 years: 10% Kitchen Table, 95% Standard, 80% Commander, 70% Modern, 40% Legacy, 4% Vintage
• 8+ years: 5% Kitchen Table, 95% Standard, 80% Commander, 80% Modern, 80% Legacy, 5% Vintage

So as you see, a population that increases year after year and that player base's tenure grows longer year after year, the natural progression is that more and more players will explore and buy into older formats.

Even with a fraction of the total player base wanting to acquire Vintage cards, .5% of 10 Million players is still 50,000 people. I believe this is the major reason that we've seen the prices rising over the past few years.

Room to Grow

So where do players and collectors go beyond Vintage? There's always the followup goal to acquiring Power Nine, then getting them all converted to Alpha/Beta...

Then what?

Have you noticed how Summer Magic has become more and more desirable?

Sealed boxes of older sets. Reminiscent of how much fun drafting Rise of Eldrazi was? For $600, you and seven of your closest friends can relive the Magic once more.

Have you seen the prices on foreign foil cards? Russian foil Polluted Deltas from Khans of Tarkir are selling for $800+ on eBay. Those are completed listing, none of that "hehe look at this price I made up" people do to be cute.

How about the misprints and oddities community?

Take a look at how much original Magic artwork is going for these days. You'll probably be fairly astonished.

The player base is aging. Those high school and college kids that started playing with Zendikar are in the workforce making money and just can't spend it fast enough. It's a great time to be sitting on a pile of pretty cards.