Hi everyone and welcome back to High Stakes MTGO!

If this past week again not much happened in the buying department, things have started to move regarding the positions on my "to sell" list. I'm still very hesitant to commit to Eternal Masters singles and my only purchase this past week was what I actually suggested: Fire-Lit Thicket. I haven't bought any EMA yet but I tell you what I consider being my best picks in the "Questions & Answers" section below.

The Legacy Leagues start this Wednesday and if there's any more room to grow for Legacy staples it's now or never. As mentioned many times before, it's also probably time to find a sweet selling price spot and move on.

Personally I'm going to be looking to sell any positions that see some play in Legacy and whose price is up these days. This includes cards such as Eye of Ugin, Dismember (sold this past week), the Zendikar fetchlands, Lord of Atlantis and Thought-Knot Seer.

The link to the live portfolio hasn't changed and is here.

Buys This Week

I mentioned this in my last week’s article and I went for a modest 31 copies last Tuesday. This filter land has gone several times over 5 tix in the past few years and now that Shadwomoor flashback drafts are behind us I hope it will soon reach 5 tix again. Because the margin in not extraordinary I didn’t want to buy Fire-Lit Thicket over 2.8 tix, hence only 31 copies.

Sales This Week

These three painlands reached reasonable selling ranges so I unloaded a few more playsets. That's my first wave of sales with Battlefield Forge. The profit is rather small but I'll take it, not knowing what happens next except that the painlands rotate out of Standard in about three months.

Although these specs were not as great as anticipated ten months ago, I'm nonetheless satisfied with them considering the large volume of tix locked with these five lands.

The price was stagnating around 13 tix for several days and was just below my target selling price. Bloodghast is not a superstar in Legacy and I’m not sure there’s much more to gain between now and the release of Eldritch Moon online. I was looking for that kind of profit when I bought in at ~8.7 tix, so when in doubt, and close enough to what I wanted, selling appeared to be the best option.

I thought I would be stranded with Snap for a while as its price didn’t seem to break over the 4 tix bar. With the big spreads we observe with Pauper prices, even at a 2.4 tix buying price it's not easy to make a profit over 30 copies.

Thanks to the reprint of Peregrine Drake as a common in EMA, Snap made in it all the way to 6.5 tix. At this point it would not have been very reasonable to wait for more. I sold my copies for 5.5 tix on average. Now I’m waiting on Sunscape Familiar to follow the same path.

I had bought a lot of these back in April when the price suddenly fell to ~2 tix. With a price back in the 4.5-5 tix range, its record high since the Modern Masters 2015 release, I decided to sell all my copies of Dismember. With about 20% I found that the spread was unusually high for a decently played Modern staple, but I managed to get out with a good 60% profit overall, pretty much what I was looking for.

When I bought Nexus back in March at ~20 tix I knew I was in for a moderate profit as I was targeting a 30 tix selling price. It took a little bit longer than I expected---and I could have probably sold them a month ago---but that's the price I finally hit. They may go a little bit higher in the two weeks to come but I'm not interested in betting for more.

On My Radar

Clearly selling my Legacy stuff is what I''l be trying to do for this coming week. Another thing everyone will be doing these days is trying to connect Eldritch Moon spoilers with anything in Standard and buy whatever could be remotely relevant. This "game" of predicting what will hit is quite exiting and can be rewarding.

While I'll be also trying to spot what could spike next in Standard, I'll be more inclined to wait for EMN release events on MTGO to maximize the price dip and get the potential spikers as low as possible. The window is small but the price drop is real during release events so don't forget to keep some tix for the very beginning of August too.

Questions & Answers

That's a good question! First, and full disclaimer, I'm not a huge fan of Legacy/Vintage specs as they can be really slow to pay off, if they do at all. Sure there's always a few exceptions and big winners here and there, but you could be stuck for months and months with any significant changes. Modern Masters sets were great for speculators because of the demand surrounding Modern. The demand for Legacy is still very small on MTGO in comparison.

We have two reprint sets to look back at for reference for Legacy. Vintage Masters was a near fiasco in terms of investment but Tempest Remastered was not too bad, almost great actually if you were patient enough.

TPR Wasteland rose from 30 tix to 80 tix in less than two months but nothing else happened next. TPR City of Traitors and Mox Diamond merely doubled in ten months but then got much better, especially after it was confirmed they could not be in EMA. Other cards such as Volrath's Stronghold, Time Warp, Grindstone, Intuition and Aluren gained some value and have nearly doubled or tripled after more than a year now---not too bad after all.

The big winners from TPR were actually the commons and uncommons. Evincar's Justice, Diabolic Edict, Lotus Petal, Mogg Conscripts, Capsize and several others went from 0 (with the exception of Petal) to 1, 2 or even 5 tix for Evincar's Justice. How about x5000? Good commons/uncommons played in Legacy, Vintage, Pauper or Modern have a great potential but it may take more than a year to explode.

So if you're looking for profits with EMA your best long-term bet may actually be among the uncommons and commons not printed in Modern sets, and not so much with Force of Will, Wasteland, Chrome Mox, Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Dack Fayden.

Good uncommons, including Daze, Cabal Therapy, Hydroblast, Pyroblast, Ancestral Mask and Price of Progress should do wonders if you are okay to wait six to twelve months. Similarly great commons such as Nimble Mongoose, Night's Whisper and Kird Ape could be awesome gainers in several months. These are great targets for small bankrolls.

Thank for reading,

Sylvain