The arrival of Modern Masters 2015 last weekend provided me with the opportunity to reassess the way that I think and feel about physical, paper Magic cards. Modern Masters mania was impossible to avoid even if you wanted to. I was a hundred miles from nowhere at my family cabin in the woods and I was bombarded with selfies of Magic players posing with their newly opened Tarmogoyfs via social media.

The set is a big deal and an important element of the fabric of the Magic community. It creates a touchstone.

Magic players are gamers and gamers are always going to game. The biggest reason that MM2015 is so popular is that no matter how you slice it, whether you crack packs or horde up boxes, the set creates the illusion that everybody gets to win the lottery. Of course, any intelligent person knows that the biggest winner of the Lottery is the Lottery.

In today's article I'm going to discuss the purpose that reprints serve from the standpoint of Wizards of the Coast. They are the principle way that Wizards stabilizes the prices on non-reserve list cards, cashing in at the same time.

Nostalgia for Staples

It is kind of strange to me (and I suspect for others trying to understand the MTG singles market as well) that people get so nostalgic for Modern cards in the first place. For starters, the cards are specifically tournament staples and geared toward tournament players. If you play Modern already, chances are that you already own most of the cards in MM2015 that you care to own. Not to mention that people who actually play Modern get to play these cards in Modern tournaments pretty much whenever they please.

Let's be honest with one another: Is there any real reason to feel nostalgic about Tarmogoyf? It isn't really that interesting or fun of a card to play with. The reason it commands such a bloated price tag is because it is ubiquitous. Pound for pound, there isn't another card that provides that much board presence for that casting cost--so any deck that wants that effect must play Tarmogoyf or opt for a less effective, less cash-expensive option.

The reason that Tarmogoyf exists isn't to be the most efficient beater of all time--that is what it does--but to be a $200 bill and a symbol for players that they have arrived as a serious competitor. When a player buys into their first set of Goyfs it means they are taking the game seriously enough to make a very large investment in themselves as a tournament player.

Imagine, how seriously would you have to take skiing before you were willing to invest in a $1000 set of skis? $5000? $10,000? Goyf is the most expensive card in Modern and anybody who wants to play with them has made a sizable investment in their future playing the game.

The point is that Wizards of the Coast has never been interested in selling nostalgia (just like Coca Cola isn't in the business of selling happiness)--the entire point is to sell packs. In the case of the Modern Masters series they have essentially created a booster pack that costs two-and-a-half times more than a typical booster pack, that people will line up out the door and beg to purchase.

The big point I'm building to here is that the most effective way for Wizards to sell packs is simply to sell reprints, and they are very good at it. This is paramount to understanding how modern MTG finance works.

All They Want Are Reprints

There is an upper tier of card that everybody needs in order to play the Eternal and Modern formats, primarily lands but other staples as well. Once these cards get a few years removed from their tenure in Standard (when they're still being cracked in packs), the natural law of supply and demand kicks in and they become very desirable and thus very expensive.

All that Wizards ever needs to do is to wait for this natural phenomenon to occur and then repackage these cards over and over again.

Return to Ravnica block brought us shocklands again. Khans of Tarkir block brought us Onslaught fetchlands again. Modern Masters and Modern Masters 2015 brought us, well, most of the desirable Modern staples again.

On top of that there are still dozens of Commander decks, From the Vault sets, and other promo boxed sets that provide the same function.

I doubt anybody who is really tuned into the unfolding of these trends over the past four years could or would make a compelling argument that the Zendikar fetchlands are not coming back to Standard sometime in the next year and a half.

I remember watching a clip from when the fetchlands were revealed to be in Khans of Tarkir and the people in the room were literally behaving like a convention of die-hard Elvis Presley fans who just found out he wasn't really dead. "Oh my God, thank you God, thank you WotC." Seriously, on the verge of tears.

Honestly, fetchlands are among the worst designed Magic cards of all time. I don't mean to say that they are not overpowered, because they certainly are. I've said it a million times and I'll say it again: all they do is make every match of Magic take 15 minutes longer than it ought to because they create a necessity for excessive shuffling and tedious life tracking. Also, if you think that fetchlands being in Standard and an epidemic of cheating taking place in Magic are a coincidence--well, then I'd like to introduce you to my friend Elvis Presley...

Anyways, back to those people who go all "Beatlemania" over fetchlands. First of all, how are people who apparently care so much surprised by the continuation of a well documented and predictable trend? There is likely an element of online one-upmanship going on but honestly I don't think these people understand the joke to begin with.

Whatever the reason, it doesn't actually matter because these die-hards are the reason that Magic cards are worth so much money and the reason that MTG finance exists in the first place.

Adaptive Investing

There was a time when Modern staples were the absolute wild western frontier of MTG finance. Every card that was good was worth a ton and so was every card that might be good some day.

The fact that we can make an educated guess that everything will always continue to be reprinted if it is good or expensive in Modern dramatically affects how I think about investing in Magic cards.

Eternal Cards

The thing that differentiates Modern from Eternal is the existence of the Reserve List. A piece of paper that essentially says, "Does the format you like include dual lands or Power? Yes? Well, sorry we don't care about you or your format." The format basically promises to never reprint these cards ever again which means that as time goes on and the game continues to grow, these cards will continue to get more and more expensive until the vast majority of players will not be able to afford the cards necessary to play.

It also means that investing in cards that are on the Reserve List is extremely smart whenever you have the chance. Unlike Modern staples like Tarmogoyf or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn which will be reprinted as often as WotC can justify, Reserve List cards will never be printed again.

Reserve List cards are 100% the best cards to pick up and hold onto forever because there will never be more of them made. When I'm trading or spending store credit if I have the ability to get a Reserve List card I will always prefer to get that instead of anything else. It just makes sense.

Non-Eternal Cards

The question is how to approach speculating on cards that can and very likely will be reprinted in the future. If we view the equation as such, that if it is good and becomes expensive it will be reprinted, then we cannot simply buy the best cards and hold them forever.

The most successful approach I've found over the course of the past few years is to always think about prices (current and trending) as relative, and to target cards that I think have room to grow in value. I'm only ever interested in picking up cards that I think are at the low end of their price cycle.

For instance, Khans of Tarkir fetchlands likely will not be reprinted for a long time (since they just got a reprinting) which means that over the course of the next few years they will likely increase in value. On the other hand, Zendikar fetchlands have not been reprinted for a long time and are likely going to trend down in value on the heels of a likely reprint in the near future.

I see Modern finance similar to Standard finance. Whereas the prices of Standard cards ebb and flow depending upon metagame developments, Modern prices are dependent principally on reprintings. I actively want to target cards that have been recently reprinted because they will typically be at their lowest possible price and have room to grow for a couple of years before I have to worry about another reprinting injuring their value.

Ideally, I either want to sell off these cards when they mature for a higher value than I acquired them for, or trade them when they are high for dual lands, Power 9, or other Reserve List cards.

Trading into Reserve List cards has become increasingly more difficult lately because more people are clued into what is going on and also because the cards have simply gotten so expensive. A Revised Underground Sea is literally twice as expensive as the NM Unlimited Black Lotus that I bought when I got back into Vintage during Odyssey block!

Foils and Cube

I also really like foil cards as investments. Particularly cards that people tend to play with a lot, and this is not limited to Constructed or Commander. Obviously, popular Constructed staples are great investments because they are sufficiently difficult to obtain and in high demand. Based on how rare they actually are compared to regular versions of cards, I actually believe that foils get undervalued in sales and trades.

I see cube drafting as an offshoot of Magic that is largely underappreciated. A lot of the cards that are really fun to play with and really good in cubes tend to be fairly cheap. I could see this as a category of cards that could seriously make a big jump at some point in the not too distant future--cards like Mulldrifter, Tidings and Bloodbraid Elf in premium versions that tend to be auto-includes in cubes.

People also tend to spare no expense on their cubes which means they are willing to pay for things they want for their collections. If you think about it, people who manage, tune, and perfect their cubes already put so much energy into their stack, it doesn't make much of a difference paying twice as much for some foil common or uncommon that has been out of print for a couple of years.

Sealed Product

I also think that sealed product is a virtual gold mine of value. Every set becomes expensive a couple of years after rotation, no matter how badly people seem to feel about it when it's in Standard. Even terrible sets like Mirrodin Besieged and Dark Ascension sell for a premium by the booster. Sets that are actually good, like Avacyn Restored and New Phyrexia command hefty premiums.

Perhaps stocking up on cheap booster packs and boxes of Khans of Tarkir or Theros right now is a very smart place to be.

-

The point of my article isn't specifically to bash on Modern Masters but to interpret what its release means for us collectors in the long term. The first MMA didn't crash the marketplace or tank the value of singles and this set won't do that either. However, it is interesting that the size of the release is bigger than the first time around and this fact isn't trivial.

The key is that if we know that the game is rigged and that everything will always come back, we can use this information to our advantage when investing in Magic cards. We can look for cards that are trending upward and hold them until they become expensive and we can look for niches like cube cards that have the opportunity to grow as well.