Ambition's Cost Pt. 3: Cheapest Available Printing

In the first two installments of Ambition's Cost, I explored the tool I am using to compare format prices and then analyzed the same price data for patterns. I uncovereed the relative price of lands in each of these format's best decks and discovered that in Standard, Modern, and Legacy, the price of non-basic lands are 35 to 55 percent of the average competitive deck's total cost. In Vintage, where lands make up 10-15 percent of a deck's cost, lands still account for nearly $2,000 of the average competitive deck's total price.

Cheapest Available Printing (CAP)

The Cheapest Available Printing or CAP is simply the least expensive version of a card that is available. A format staple is a card that can be found in multiple deck archetypes. Often these are lands, but they can also be other cards like Tarmogoyf. Format staples tend to be expensive, because they are in high demand due to their inclusion in multiple competitive decks. Many of the format staples have been printed a few different times either through a standard set or in a supplemental product like Modern Masters, duel decks, or a special promo.

Elspeth, Knight Errant has been printed six times. Its CAP is from the Duel Deck: Elspeth vs. Tezzeret, at $14.05. The most expensive printing is the Modern Masters promo foil at $49.99, more than three times the price of the CAP. Budget-conscious deck builders would prefer to use the CAP, and having affordable CAP prices lowers the price barrier to entry into any given format. It is also important to point out that having an affordable CAP does not mean that all copies of a card are affordable. Some printings become more valuable due to the art, foil, or rarity. These are things that are important to collectors, but are not necessarily that important to a player looking to get into a format with a competitive deck.

Affordable CAPs Mean Healthier Format

Having affordable CAP prices for staples is very important for the health of a format. I am in agreement with Wizards on promoting Standard to be the most played format. It is ever-changing, with cards entering at a fast clip, while other cards rotate out. Pro tours featuring Standard are exciting, because there are always new decks that appear resulting from professionally-tested, new interactions. Modern, Legacy, and Vintage suffer from too much stability in their card pools. Cards from new sets rarely make significant dents in them. However, these formats all play differently and each is fun in its own right. Unfortunately, for many Magic players, all formats outside of Standard are well out of range for their budgets,

In order to keep the player base of non-rotating formats healthy, format staples must stay affordable. $200 for a CAP Tarmogoyf, one of the most widely played creatures in Modern, is unacceptable. $100 or more for a CAP dual land, which are ubiquitous in Legacy and Vintage, is also unacceptable. Price adjustments are needed to improve the health of these formats, otherwise they will likely die out. Vintage and Legacy are already most of the way dead. They are rarely played at stores with actual cards. There are few events for these formats and those few events are orders of magnitude smaller than Modern and Standard events. These are signs that these formats are dying. I don't want them to go away, and to save them drastic measures must be taken.

Reprinting Does Not Necessarily Mean Instant Price Reduction

Reprinting old cards is contentious because of their current prices. There are a lot of unknowns, and collectors expect the Reserve List to protect their investments in old expensive cards. When expensive cards are reprinted, we expect their prices to drop because economics tells us that increasing supply drives prices down, but that is not always the case. Format staples used in multiple deck archetypes have price benefits from modest reprintings. We can look at Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant before and after Modern Masters was printed just before M14.

Tarmogoyf - Future Sight (7/2013, $141 vs. $143 - MMA)

Dark Confidant - Ravnica: City of Guilds (7/2013, $77 vs. $74 - MMA)

Looking at the price lines between Modern Masters and M14, you can clearly see fast movement upward. This should be somewhat surprising considering more copies of each card were entering the market. What we sometimes fail to notice is that opportunities like this often get new players interested in a format, increasing demand. In these cases, we can think about a Standard player who jumps into a modern Masters draft, opens a Tarmogoyf, enjoys playing with the other cards in the format and decides to make a Modern deck. Now that player needs to buy three more Tarmogoyfs to complete their new deck. The price of Tarmogoyf ends up climbing because more decks are being built with a need for Tarmogoyf than new Goyfs are being opened. In the case of Goyf, that price continued to climb and rests at approximately $200 today. Dark Confidant, after the initial climb after Modern Masters was printed, has seen a drop in price over time because new cards made him less desirable in the decks he was being played. Either way, both staples presented collectors and financiers a window to make some cash off the staples they had collected because new players entered the format.

The same thing would happen for Legacy and Vintage staples were they to be reprinted in similar fashion. In the final installment of Ambition's Cost, I will explore the actions I think Wizards should take to revive Vintage and Legacy while at the same time giving collectors a chance to make money off their staples should they choose to do so.

Ambition's Cost Pt. 2: The Price of Land

During my last article I organized the prices of decks in popular formats. You should go back and take a look. I’ll be referencing those tables in this article. Quick recap: I found the average price of four formats using the prices of the most played decks and calculating the weighted average by the percent of the meta-game that each of the top 12 decks occupied.

The average cost of entry of the formats from Standard to Vintage is vastly different. The fact that there is a difference should not be news, but the magnitude of each difference might be. If we display the average deck price for each format into an area model, we can visualize the differences. This area model compares formats by displaying each’s price of entry as a circle with an area proportional to the average deck price of each format.

Analysis

The price differences are shocking. Just who exactly is playing Vintage -- with actual cards? Judging by the price of entry for Vintage, almost no one. The average American adult can probably afford to play a competitive Standard deck. At about $340 per average deck, this compares well to other hobbies like video game playing (console + games).  Still, $340 for a deck of 75 cards is laughable in most social circles! Choose your friends wisely, my magically inclined friends.

The jump from Standard to Modern is steep, and most American adults would spend at least a year accumulating the cards they would need to play competitively in a sanctioned Modern tournament. This dramatically reduces the number of people playing Modern. I believe that Modern would be healthier with more players, and increasing the number of players requires a lower price point for competitive decks.

Moving from Modern to Legacy, prices start to get ridiculous. The average price of entry for Legacy is $2,600. With that price point, there just isn’t going to be much new blood in this format. It’s too expensive for the average person to buy into no matter how much time is allotted. Some of the cards are so expensive, that it makes me nervous to shuffle them. Spending over one thousand dollars on a deck of cards for tournament or social play is just too much for almost everyone.

If you can’t afford Legacy, then Vintage is laughable. The area model really puts Vintage in perspective. It is often spoken in the same sentences as Legacy, but competitive Vintage decks are no where near Legacy’s price point. Legacy decks are over four times as expensive as the format that I just described as ridiculous.

Most Played Equals Most Expensive

Another pattern evident in the price data is that the most-played decks legal in Standard and Modern are also the most expensive in their respective format. This pattern does not hold exactly true for Legacy and Vintage, however, their most popular decks are above the average price of each format at $2,900 and $13,000 respectively. Additionally, the highest priced decks in Legacy and Vintage rank in the top three most popular decks. The correlation of popularity and price is not really surprising to a Magic financier as we all know that popularity drives up demand and then prices. This is one of the most important drivers of high prices of entry to all the formats.

The Price of Land

The lowest-priced yet still popular decks present an interesting anomaly in the data. The lowest-priced decks in Modern and Legacy are nearly identical in price while the average deck price between the formats is dramatically different. Merfolk in Modern is mono-blue and comes in under $400, and Burn in Legacy is mono-red and shares the same price point as Merfolk in Modern. The lowest-priced deck in Standard, Red Deck Wins, is mono-red and hovers at just above $100, which is very affordable. All three of these uncharacteristically low-priced decks are just one color.

The best lands for these decks are often basic mountains and islands with a set of man-lands thrown in for good measure. As you may have seen from the final table in the previous article, the cost of the land base in most decks is significant. In Standard, Modern, and Legacy the lands often make up 30 to 50 percent of the total cost of the deck. Building a mono-color deck dramatically reduces its cost. In Vintage, all of the cards are so expensive that the land cost is only about 13 percent of the total deck cost, but that still amounts to over $1,000 per deck. Lands are expensive. Lands are also boring, and these two facts put together are problematic for the price of non-rotating competitive formats.

The price of land is the most significant problem with the prices of Modern and Legacy decks. Lands make up 37 to 50 percent of the deck cost for these two formats. The first time a new player discovers that good non-basic lands are expensive, they get this funny confused look on their face like, “huh? Wait a second, you are telling me this card, whose only role it to tap for two colors of mana, is 40 dollars? And that sweet angel/demon/dragon/etc is just $1? That makes no sense.” A competitive deck needs 8-24 of these expensive non-basics, most of them are rare, and many of them are very old and cannot be reprinted.

The question I am left with after looking at the price data is: are Legacy and Vintage actual formats played by actual people with actual cards? Are Legacy and Vintage formats we sometimes talk about but can only access with proxies? If we want them to become or return as actual formats, something drastic needs to happen, because very few people, even in the most affluent countries in the world, can play these formats with actual cards. I am looking right at you, Reserve List. Have your little dual-land ears been burning? I will explore the Reserve List in more detail in the fourth and final article in this series.

In the next installment, I am going to expand on the concept of the Cheapest Available Printing (CAP) and how it can be used to reduce the entry price to all formats.

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.