This week's article was inspired by an Insider's post in the forums asking why people are involved in the MTG finance realm. There were quite a few different answers, though many were along the lines of, "to reduce/eliminate the cost of the hobby," or "to grow my collection." Obviously, these are perfectly fine and acceptable reasons, however, they aren't really well defined goals.

Step 1: Define Your Overall Goal

The first step to proper goal setting is to understand your overall goal or plan. This is typically where we might place "reduce the cost of my hobby." However, that's not really all that helpful. In theory you could trade for one card that goes up in value and trade it for another card that was more expensive but is now the same value and you'll have technically reached your goal.

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't keep paying for access to this site if that was the extent of it. So with that in mind let's define our overall goal a bit better.

A common mnemonic used in goal setting is SMART (which means):

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Rewarding
• Trackable

Example: Reduce the cost of playing Standard competitively by 30% within 1 year

Above is an example of a good overall goal. We've defined not only the desired outcome, but we've done so explicitly. Of course even this could run us into some problems if you're not meticulous with your MTG related expenses. The reason for this issue is because unless you know or track exactly how much money you spend on the game it's hard to track your success of the goal. However, let's compare that goal with our "SMART" mnemonic.

• Specific - We've stated that we want to reduce the cost by 30%, we want to do so within a year, we still want to be competitive, and we want to focus on Standard.
• Measurable - The goal is a reduction in total cost by 30%. This may or may not be specific enough. For example; if you want to play Standard competitively you'll also need to attend competitive level tournaments which may include travel costs, food costs, entry costs, card protection costs, and of course individual card costs themselves. For this example I'm going to assume that the 30% reduction needs to cover all those costs (which aren't difficult to track but will require additional effort to do so).
• Attainable - Do we think this goal is attainable? A 30% reduction is a decent size, but it's not so drastic that it feels impossible to reach (like say a 100% reduction, i.e. playing for free, which while potentially doable, may require a complete devotion to said goal which interferes with other aspects of one's life).
• Rewarding - If it isn't obvious, it's rewarding to have extra money for other things even if those other things just include expanding into other MTG formats or growing one's personal collection. However, we may want to partition any savings into a special fund for other things (maybe an engagement ring, or a house, or new car).
• Trackable - The goal is obviously trackable, because you'll have to track all Standard-related expenses (which you can do with any sort of spreadsheet software relatively easily) and you'll need to track the cards you buy/trade for at one price and the price you trade/sell them at later on.

Step 2: Divide Into Smaller Goals

The next step is breaking up the overall goal into smaller goals that are easily measured and tracked. We'll do this with our example above. Let's assume you spent $2000 last year playing competitive Standard (for this example you kept great records of your expenses and it's very fortuitous that when added up they were a very nice even number).

• Played in 6 major tournaments - Cost of entry $40 per tournament = $240
• Traveled to 6 big cities - Travel costs per trip were $100 (includes hotel/gas/food/incidentals) = $600
• Purchased sleeves to protect your cards for each tournament at $8 per = $48
• Played in 30 FNMS @ $5 per = $150
• Purchased 1 box of each set released @ $100 per = $400
• Bought missing cards for decks @ $562

Thanks to all that effort you did tracking last year's expenses you have a great starting place for your smaller goals, especially since your overall goal means you can only spend $1400 this year.

Now, let's figure out where our cost reductions will likely come from.

• It's highly unlikely the cost of tournament entry will go down this year (in fact it's much more likely to go up, but for sake of argument let's keep it at $40 per tournament).
• It's just as unlikely that travel costs will be greatly reduced.
• Sleeve prices have been pretty stable, so they too will likely stay the same.
• FNM costs aren't going down either.
• The box costs actually went up with DTK, but you've been a loyal customer to your store and they'll hold the price for you.

This pretty much leaves us with the cards we were missing for our decks as the biggest modifiable expense. So with most of our costs remaining static we need to eliminate the one cost we can adjust. Unfortunately we need to find $600 worth of reductions and our total "bought missing cards" expense was only $562...so we still need $38 (even if we don't buy any missing cards for the whole year).

How we cover these expenses:

• Buy your cards before they go up in value - This only works if the cards actually start out cheap and then go up in value from there...it doesn't help if they pre-order for $25 and then stay around that price for most of the year.
• Sell extra cards - This is most likely your best option because MTG cards don't typically work as currency with most hotel chains, gas stations, restaurants, etc.
• Trade - you can trade for the cards you need, either directly or indirectly through intermediate trades.
• Speculate - you can trade or buy cards you think will go up in value and allow that gained value to help offset your expenses.

Now, the first bullet will only offset the price differences between the current value of the cards you want to play versus their future value. So in most instances this value is likely not that large--certainly not large enough to offset the costs of playing competitively.

The second bullet will likely generate the most actual money to offset costs, but the cost is that you lose the option to play the cards you sell in the future, and typically the cards that are worth the most money are the most powerful and likely to see the most play. This particular avenue will require that sacrifice.

It's also important to note at this time, that this goal likely forces you to stick to one or two decks. It's very difficult to change decks without losing value (unless you go from an expensive deck to a cheaper one, but this is a one way street.) It's very difficult to go from a cheap deck to an expensive deck without inputting a lot of additional money.

The third bullet obviously helps reduce the costs of deck ownership and it can help reduce the cost of some entries (often LGS's will accept trade-in to cover the cost of FNM, as they are often in need of new stock, though they may be picky and you'll likely "overpay" from an actual card value standpoint).

The last bullet is probably the reason you're a member of this site. Strong speculation can not only reduce the cost of a deck if the card you speculate on happens to show up in the deck, but buying/trading for a lot of an underpriced card can allow you to make a huge profit if it ever jumps.

The best recent example of this is Collected Company; I knew several people that loved the card and recognized it as powerful. They picked up as many copies as they could when it was at $3.50-$4. They can now sell it to buylists for $8-9, which means they can easily double up in cash or triple up in trading for other cards.

Now, this type of card jump doesn't happen all the time, but it's important to evaluate a card with an open mind; those who saw an instant-speed Birthing Pod, rather than a card that placed severe restrictions on deck construction, benefited. We see cards break out in different formats after many large events (especially when someone else thought outside the box). Recent examples include Nourishing Shoal, Heritage Druid, and Goryo's Vengeance.

Now for some examples of smaller goals.

Pick a strong Tier 1 deck and stick with it for 6 months.

We obviously need to start with this goal because as mentioned earlier, the cost of changing decks, at the very least, equals 1 / the trade-in value at your local store * the cost of the deck. Now we don't have to change decks at the six-month mark, but the reason for the time requirement is that with the typical cycle of Standard decks, the deck we pick may look weak for a few weeks as its nemesis becomes a bigger part of the metagame--but as we've seen numerous times, the nemesis deck will typically get hated out itself and thus the cycle moves forward.

Aggressively trade for cards with a low buylist spread (25% or less).

One of the best strategies for those who plan on buylisting cards is to trade specifically for ones with low spreads. Obviously, if I can trade a $10 card that buylists for $6 for two $5 cards that buylist for $4, we can make an additional $2 making this trade and both parties come out happy. You'll often see guys at major events carrying around a store's buylist and trading specifically with the intention of selling everything they trade at the end of the weekend.

Sell $100 worth of cards at the first major event you attend; only selling cards you are not playing and with a spread of less than 25%.

The reason for this goal is that we need to bring in additional cash flow to help offset the hard costs of competitive tournament entry and travel (as we can't pay these with cards directly). The reason for the spread requirement is that cards with high spreads means we lose more selling them now than other cards.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you can now see how having a single overarching goal (while important) isn't enough. Proper goal setting requires both an overarching main goal as well as a subset of smaller goals to guide you along towards achieving the main goal.