Ambition's Cost Pt. 1: The Price of a Format

Introduction

Hello. My name is Dave, and I am a Magiholic. At almost 40 years old, I still collect and play with Magic cards. My relationship with Magic began over 20 years ago in high school but kicked it for four years dumping all my Alpha and Beta cards in a garage sale. In college, I earned the wrong crowd’s favor and reentered a state of Magiholism, only this time I lived with a mountain stronghold of guilt for letting my early and now extremely valuable collection go. I vowed never to feel that chained to the rocks again. Here I am freeing my heart warden to intentionally spread my exotic disease. Don’t listen to me. Save yourselves.

By the way, if you are getting rid of your collection, toss me a tweet; I know a guy.

For my first Magic articles, I will complete a series comparing prices of competitive decks in different formats and suggesting ways for Wizards to make all Magic formats accessible to all types of players. The first article will focus on a strategy to compare the pricing of the four competitive formats: Standard, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage. The second will dive into the patterns that emerge when we compare format prices. The third article will focus on a new concept I would like to introduce to the Magic hive mind to describe the accessibility of a format. For the final piece, I will explore what I believe Wizards is currently doing and can do in the future to improve accessibility to all formats. The series will be called [card]Ambition’s Cost[/card] after the Portal: Three Kingdoms card (reprinted in 8th Edition) that nets you three cards in exchange for four mana and three life.

Ambition’s Cost pt. 1: The Price of a Format

The most recent Brainstorm Brewery cast #136 got me thinking. Are Magic cards too expensive? I agree with Marcel in that many cards are too expensive, especially if the “Eternal” formats are to be played with actual cards. He made some good points about not playing Legacy and Vintage because of the high price of entry. Are these formats just for the wealthy, lucky, or homeless?

We know that some formats are cheaper than others, but by how much? What can one expect to pay to “get into Modern?” How out of reach are Legacy and Vintage for the vast majority of us? What could be done to bring the eternal formats within financial reach of the rest of us? The first step to answering these questions is to find a way to nail down and compare the average prices of different formats. This series will focus on Standard, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage.

The Tool

We need a tool to measure the difference between the prices of Standard, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage. The variability between deck prices inside each format is wide and it is often hard to figure out which decks are the best decks.

I used MTGGoldfish to identify the most commonly played decks in each format and their prices in paper. MTGGoldfish is the best choice for the availability of price information, but it tracks popularity of decks in Magic Online events. I made the assumption that decks being played in MTGO and paper events are very similar, and, to check that assumption, I looked at the most-played decks listed in MTGGoldfish and Star City Games. I found that the prices of the top twelve decks reported on MTGGoldfish were less than a percentage point different from the prices of the top twelve decks that top-eighted all of Star City Games’ February paper tournaments. I am very confident that MTGGoldfish can be used to compare deck pricing.

The problem of finding the price of a format is a little more complicated than just adding up deck prices. Some decks are far more expensive than others in the same format, and some are played much more often than others. I accounted for the variability in deck price and the popularity of decks by utilizing each deck’s meta percent.

The meta percent measures a deck’s current popularity in a format’s field. It is calculated by counting the decks that have mostly similar cards and dividing them by the total number of decks participating in tournaments in a format. The resulting percent tells us how many of the decks in the overall tournament scene resemble what most of us think of as a uniquely named deck like Junk, Dredge, or Abzan Aggro.

I used the meta percent as a measure of a deck’s popularity in the current format to weight the prices of each deck into the price of the format. If a deck was a large percentage of the meta, its price weighed more heavily into the calculation than decks with low meta percentages. The table below shows the highest and lowest priced decks in the top twelve decks for four formats. I included addition information like the highest and lowest priced decks’ rankings in the field and their meta percents. Lastly, the table shows the meta percent weighted average deck price, or the “Price of the Format.”

The Price of a Format

Each cell contains the deck name, current price, meta percent ranking, and meta percent.

	Standard	Modern	Legacy	Vintage
High	Junk $444 (1st, 12.48)	Junk $1891 (1st, 9.76)	BUG Delver $3,792 (3rd, 7.25)	Grixis Control $19,100 (3rd, 14.68)
Average*	$340	$930	$2,650	$13,760
Low	MonoR $106 (6th, 5.79)	Merfolk $342 (10th, 1.81)	Burn $382 (10th, 3.93)	Dredge $1,773 (4th, 6.42)

MTGGoldfish. March 4, 2015.

*The Average was calculated by multiplying each of the top 12 (by Meta percent) deck prices by their recent and relative percent of each format to the other 11 decks in the Top 12 and adding the results together, then rounding to the tens place.

The Cost of Land

I would like to also leave you with the following chart showing the cost of land in the top five decks in each format and the percent of each deck’s total cost. I think it helps to highlight the problems with the price of certain types of cards in Magic.

	Standard	Modern	Legacy	Vintage
Land Cost	$109	$294	$1,438	$1921
Land CostPercent of Deck Total	29.26	37.38	50.10	13.40

MTGGoldfish. March 8, 2015.

In the next post, I will explore the patterns in these two tables.

If you would like to join in the conversation, tweet me @dbeedy. I’d love to hear your feedback about the article and any patterns you see in the data.