Oh, hey. How’s it going girls and guys? Some of you may know who I am and what kinds of articles I write from my previous adventures, but I assume most don’t. My name is Jim and I live in Orlando, Florida. While I don’t travel nearly as much as a lot of players trying to grind out StarCity Open finishes or Grand Prix Top 8s, I do play in them fairly often. Once the year wraps up I will have attended 4 Grands Prix and 3 Opens. I am also qualified to play in my first Pro Tour in Honolulu (Pro Tour Kaladesh). I also write and talk a lot about the cost of Magic. I don’t speculate on cards per se, but rather try to figure out the cheapest way to play the game. It’s no question Magic is an expensive game to play, but with a bit of knowledge and planning you can make your dollars do a lot more work for you. In this first article I want to talk about the lifecycle of a Standard card.

The price of a Standard card can be pretty easily explained as a long plane ride. The beginning of the ride is a little unpredictable. Sometimes it has to climb a bit more than expected. These sharp increases come at pretty predictable intervals. Once it reaches the correct altitude, the plane will level off for the bulk of the flight. In the final 6 months of this 18 month journey, it starts the final descent to the destination.

Was that a little too abstract? Let’s look at some visual data from mtgstocks.com.

Sphinx's Revelation was an all-star for almost all of its lifetime in Standard. It took a little time to catch on, but it quickly spiked from a near bulk mythic to a top tier card. Quickly after that peak, it started to fall until the next Pro Tour. Pro Tour Gatecrash had 3 pretty different decks playing 3 or 4 copies of Sphinx's Revelation. With half of the Top 8 playing the card, it was quick to rebound when it again showed up at the top tables of Pro Tour Dragon’s Maze. Seeing the trend here? Pro Tour Theros again, Pro Tour Born of the Gods, and then . . .  Wait what happened during Pro Tour Journey into Nyx? Well it was a much maligned (and now defunct) block constructed Pro Tour. Obviously, Return to Ravnica cards were not going to be in decks that were Theros block constructed. But there is one other key here. Journey into Nyx was the set released approximately 6 months before Sphinx's Revelation leaves Standard. You might be a bit skeptical, but every time a card gets this close to leaving people are just not willing to pay as much money for it. This causes the slow decline until it actually leaves Standard.

CAPTION

Exactly one year later. Let’s take a look at Thoughtseize. This card is played in Modern and Legacy. Is it going to experience the same decline? Well you’ll notice the graph starts out a little backwards. Reprint cards with a known quality usually start high and decline early instead of starting low and increasing in price. Inquisition of Kozilek from Conspiracy: Take the Crown is similar in this regard. Eventually, Thoughtseize met the same fate as other cards printed since Return to Ravnica and continued their descent after rotating.

Flooded Strand was in the last set to rotate out of Standard. It rode the wave of bumps during popular periods of time but eventually reached its peak and now is on the same slow descent like Thoughtseize. I imagine we’ll see it all-time lows by December of this year. If you’ve been waiting to pick up your playset of arguably one of the best lands ever printed, you will have a good chance this year to get it as cheap as possible.

Now let’s fast forward to right now. What’s happening to the most popular card in Standard?

It’s been going down since Shadows over Innistrad? You don’t say . . .  How long until rotation was that? 6 months. Fancy that. But how do we put this information to use? We’re about to rotate, so selling Collected Company now is pretty obvious. But don’t you wish you got an extra $10 or so for your copies?

This chart shows you the life span of each block in Standard. The red line is current Standard. It rotates this fall. The lifespan of Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch are the blue line. They’re going to rotate next spring when Amonkhet is released. Since sets are released approximately every 3 months, guess what types of cards are going to start dropping soon? Your Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, and Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet are going to start dropping soon. While Kalitas and Ulamog do see some play in Modern, we can see from the far more popular Flooded Strand and Thoughtseize graphs that it doesn’t really matter much anymore. A closer analog would be Kolaghan's Command. It’s fallen a ton, since it’s not very good in Standard, and is rotating soon. You can use this graph (maybe that’s a little generous calling it a graph?) to your advantage and plan out your Magic spending. Coincidentally, if you are interested in selling your Shadows over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon staples during the release of Amonkhet it will give you plenty of money to spend on the reprints in Modern Masters 2017 a few months later.

Hopefully this can be helpful to you all. Like I mentioned at the top, I’m new here. What kind of topics would you like me to cover in the future? I’m always open to suggestions and if you have a quick question you can always send me a message on twitter @Phrost_!