Going Deep and the SCG Effect

A TID-BIT ABOUT PRIME SPEAKER ZEGANA

In my previous article I talked a little bit about Prime Speaker Zegana and how I thought she was good but situational, and that situational is often bad. Seems like I’ve been put in my place as her upside overshadows the occasional time when she’s a “1/1 draw 1 for 6”, as there are results to back her up!

I think a lot of people were skeptics like me and thought that her variance made her undesirable and that kept her price deflated… until now.

Although I wasn’t yet appreciating the broken things she could do, my friend Eric informed me that a deck called “Prime Speaker Bant” (piloted by Andrew Shrout) took first place at a Star City Classic on 3/3/2013 and was running her as a 3x main. I still thought to myself “Meh, I guess she’s OK then, I mean it IS the ONLY blue spell (main) in his deck so there has to be SOME merit behind it.”

Here’s a link to his deck so you can see for yourself:

http://sales.starcitygames.com/deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=53580

Now I like to speculate on cards almost as much as I enjoy playing, and when a Mythic rare starts showing up as 3x main in big tournament winning decks, I take notice from a financial standpoint if not a playing one. She seemed reasonably priced at $5 on eBay, so I picked up 2x playsets for $43 shipped. Worst case scenario she’d already been showing up on some buylists for $4 so I’d be down $11 overall. Not a huge risk, and I’m in profit city should they explode.

I think it’s important to remember that rares have a hard time holding significant value due to the quantity that are opened. You are far more likely to open a Boros Reckoner than a Prime Speaker Zegana. The odds of getting a Mythic Rare in a pack are 1:8 so in a big set like Gatecrash with 15 mythics and 53 rares, that means that the odds of getting any particular Mythic Rare in a pack of gatecrash are 1:120.

That’s right. You open 1 Prime Speaker Zegana every 120 packs… or about every 3.33 boxes. That means that to get those 3x Prime Seakers you need to open 3.33 x 3 = 10 boxes. That’s a lot of boosters that need to be opened for just 1 person to play a Prime Speaker Bant! And now that the deck is “a real thing” I’ll bet a lot MORE people are going to want to play it which means either crack 10 boxes or pay the piper based on its rarity / demand.

A JONATHAN MEDINA STORY (AKA WHY HE’S THE MAN!)

Big props to Jonathan Medina and his site www.legitmtg.com. Since I’m Canadian it’s hard for me to use TCG player so I often hit up Jon’s site when I need to make a bulk order. He had a nice stack of PSZ (<- that’s right, she’s getting the BBE / FOW abbreviation treatment lol) listed @ $7, which was about what eBay was closing at so I bookmarked the deal and did a little more snooping before coming back to him.

I hit refresh… and his price was up to $14.99.

What the?!? Seemed like what I was guessing the price would RISE to, but at the time it was more than double what I could pay elsewhere. I closed the browser window and chuckled to myself.

“Well played Mr. Medina… well played.”

This morning I had a little discussion with him on Facebook about Prime Speaker Zegana and he said that he’d raised the price to where he thought it would fall after the weekend. Lo and behold, SCG raised their price to 14.99 this morning as well.

I jokingly mentioned that I was a hair trigger away from buying him out of his stock @ $7 and he replied:

“I would have shipped them all too! :P”

Jonathan Medina = a class act.

BACK IN SCG LA-LA LAND

Over the weekend at the most recent Star City Games (Indianapolis: 774 players… a new SCG Open attendance record!) 3 of the top 8 decks were running Prime Speaker, so at this point she HAD to be good.

From a speculator standpoint, I didn’t wait to see if one of them won the entire event or not (it didn’t) before buying more. Just the fact that there were 9x main deck Zegana in the T8 was enough for me to go deep. I bought 2x more playsets @ $26 each… the price was already increasing since Friday.

I then hit up my LGS’s and picked up those I could find at their then current value of $7. If I’m willing to buy online for $6.5, I can support my locals for $7. I find getting the QUANTIITY I need locally is often the problem, not the pricing. They didn’t exactly have the 30+ I was looking for just sitting in their cabinets waiting for me to come buy them all lol.

SPIKES AND RIPPLES

Another friend of mine (Sigmund Ausfresser @sigfig8 on Twitter, a QS writer) is not so sure on buying in. He just posted to my FB a valid point:

Sigmund: “There are over 100 under $10 [on TCGplayer]. You think they’ll be bought up so quickly? Not so sure… highest buy price still hasn’t moved. Still $4…”

I told him I was writing an article on it so he’ll just have to wait for me to post this before getting my long winded reply. My hands are getting tired and my glasses are starting to hurt the bridge of my nose, so let’s get to the meat of the matter: Why I think she’s going up.

HAVE YOU MET MY PET ROBOT?

I remember in 1996 or so when I started playing magic that the only way to really gage prices was to buy a magazine called Scrye or later on, Inquest. Kids these days are all about newfangled technology like smart phones and websites that do all the work for them (Examples include www.mtgstocks.com, www.legitmtg.com & www.quietpspeculation.com). Almost every single LGS in my area uses SCG for pricing singles. This leads to a few interesting things that start happening:

From a LGS / Trade perspective:

1. LGS’s increase the prices of their cards to match SCG and start taking trade based on SCG. That means that as of today, I can expect to get trade in value for my PSZ = $15 – whatever % the store takes off. If that’s 33%, I’m still getting $10 each. If it’s 50%, I’m just above breaking even at $7.5.
2. Regular humans will now value PSZ @ $15 in trade. This means in trade when we both use SCG prices, I’ve already doubled up.

Now let’s see what this does from a buyer / speculator angle:

1. All of the sites that use JavaScript to crawl through SCG’s prices and compare yesterday’s value to today’s will show PSZ with a 100%+ price increase between Saturday Mar 09 and Today. This of course leads to a speculator feeding frenzy because no one likes to miss out on the “next big card” when it can still be had for “cheap” in some places. Which results in:
2. Speculators buying up all of the PSZ’s that were “underpriced” ($10 is only 66% what SCG is asking… what a deal amiright?). This inevitably leads to:
3. People who need the card not being able to find it for cheap because they’ve all been bought up so need to pay the new $15ish price which means that:

I call this second set of points “The SCG effect”.

From a player perspective:

1. The new price is $15ish… at least for a while until everyone gets their fill.

A BOMB IN A NUTSHELL

PSZ is a powerful card. Here’s the perfect storm that I believe will keep it high:

• The SCG effect
• It’s a big set mythic
• It’s a great commander Card
• It draws you cards
• It has results to back up its price

So that’s why I think Prime Speaker Zegana is going to get its bump and maintain it. Maybe not to $15 cash (I’m thinking $10-12 in real money), but doubtful it will ever sink back to $5-6.

So this article was about PSZ, but just as much an example of the thought process I use when I’m looking into going deep on card investing.

Remember that there are NO guarantees when you speculate!!! I can’t stress this enough. I’ve won big (Thundermaw Hellkite / Hellrider) and I’ve lost big (I’m looking at you 50+ copies of Hellion Crucible), but at all times I was prepared to accept a loss.

Heck, I could even still lose on the 30+ PSZs I’m holding! lol

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

I do NOT advocate speculating on cards If you can’t handle losing ALL of your $, because there is no guaranteed method to succeed. Watch trends and go with your guts. Because there will be tears… of joy, and sometimes sadness.

Cheers, and may all your PSZs enter play with a Thragtusk on board and a Restoration Angel in hand!

Carl Szalich