Like some of you, I follow the “Magic finance” closely. Extremely closely, in fact. One of my first stops every day is MTGStocks.com, one of the best free resources out there for historically tracking cards.

My favorite feature, without a doubt, is the “Interests” page. On it, the biggest winners and losers for both the past 24 hours and the past week are displayed. This is a great tool for tracking movement of cards, and it’s also super helpful for predicting future movement.

What it didn’t do, ironically, is give a great historical reference. With that in mind, a few weeks ago I reached out to the website to compile an “Interests” page that encompassed all of 2014.

They delivered, and you can find the results here. Today, what I want to do is explore the implications of those results.

Gains Larger Than Losses

The top 250 gainers rose an average of 184%. The top 250 losers lost an average of 41%.

This is the first thing I checked, and honestly those are some staggering numbers. Of course percentages can be misleading when you consider stuff like Fatestitcher (+1,713%) or Blackmail (+691%) that started out at a quarter.

But even if you throw out some percentage outliers like that, you can still read quite a bit into the numbers. For instance, the bottom cutoff of the chart, Mystic Gate, rose 75%. On the flipside, the biggest loser of the year, Blood Baron of Vizkopa fell just 87%. Meanwhile, the bottom of the losers chart, Goblin Piledriver fell just 20%.

All of this matters because of the perception that WOTC had a down year. There was no blockbuster release like Modern Masters, and a smaller uptick in revenue than expected through the first nine months of the year had some people suggesting that perhaps the wild ride we’ve been on the last few years was over.

But if these numbers don’t make you think otherwise, I don’t know what will. I often say something that you see in finance, which is very important: Past performance is not an indication of future results. That said, when I invest I always look at past performance to inform my decision. Don’t you?

The point is this: even if the astounding growth Magic has seen over the past few years is slowing (and it is), those who are involved in the game are only becoming more invested. The numbers for 2014 bear that out, and I think 2015 will end up looking pretty similar.

Cheap Cards Preformed Better

The top 18 risers started under a dollar, and rose an average of 631%.

In case you’re worried about the low numbers throwing off our averages here, consider this: you could buy those 18 cards for just under $11 on Jan. 1, 2014. The TCGMid for those cards on Dec. 31 was $72. That’s a real gain.

This only furthers my belief that when it comes to speculating, cheaper is better. The first card to break the trend besides Battlefield Forge was Glittering Wish, which started at $2.50 and went to $12. What I find interesting is that investing $11 in Wishes would have, in terms of nothing but TCG value, resulted in less growth than investing the $11 in the other 18 cards above it.

Forge, of course, would have been a home run at $2 since it moved to $9. But that actually matches up only a little better against the 18 cards above it, since that $11 would end up being about $50.

Now, the point here is not that you shouldn’t speculate on cards that cost real money, because no one nailed all 18 cards at the top of the list. But it does reinforce my belief that cheaper is better, especially since some cards, like Forked Bolt, Orzhov Pontiff, Doomwake Giant and Stony Silence, were super predictable (and we did so in this column).

Obviously it’s hard to make a huge profit in real money when your 50-cent Doomwake Giants only go to $2.50, but you also lose practically nothing if they don’t hit, something that can’t be said for buying into $3-5 cards.

Heading into 2015, I’ll continue this strategy. Stuff like Rest in Peace fits the mold, and I’m sure we’ll see more of these come up as we move into 2015.

Safer Than You Think

We all have a newfound sense of fear when it comes to holding onto cards, thanks to WOTC’s aggressive reprint strategy of the past year or two. At times it seemed like nothing was safe.

And, to an extent, that’s true. We saw some unexpected reprints destroy value, like Misdirection and Stifle getting halved in value thanks to Conspiracy.

But with all that said, things are actually a little safer than they seem. To wit, only nine of the top 50 losers were the victim of a reprint. The rest were the typical Standard rotation drop we’ve come to expect. It may suck when something you’re speculating on gets reprinted, but when it comes strictly to the percentages it seems there are more specs that will hit than miss. Or, at the least, the ones that hit will largely make up for the ones that miss.

Of course, I’m simply analyzing the 2014 numbers, and what will happen in 2015 is not predicted by what happened last year. Still, the conclusions I’ve drawn from these numbers keeps me as confident as ever moving into 2015.

At least, that’s my take on it. What do you think?

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter