Welcome back to Quiet Speculation's 'Magic Economics' on Mananation.com. For those of you who missed last week's introduction, I'm Kelly Reid, founder and editor of http://www.quietspeculation.com. We're a different kind of Magic site - we don't focus on strategy or drafting or deck-building nearly as much as we focus on the financial side of this game we all know and love. In my first series of articles I"ll be covering some of the basic concepts of buying, selling and trading Magic cards.

Last week we started with a quick refresher course on probability by discussing Expected Value and Variance. We learned that Zendikar is an extremely variant set due to the high number of cheap rares and the big gaps between the lowest lows and the highest highs. Hopefully last week's article gave you a good idea of how effective it is, financially speaking, to open sealed Zendikar product.

This week we're going to get into how to evaluate cards. This is one of the most important concepts to learn and it is one of the most difficult to teach. It's more of an art than a science, so it will take practice. For those of you who are used to simply applying an algorithm or formula to a problem it may take a small leap of faith, but you'll get there.

The most important thing to understand is the following mantra: "There are no such thing as good or bad cards!"

Magic players tend to speak and think in black-and-white absolutes. Statements like "That card is terrible" or "That deck just can't win games" are crippling to speculators because they close off mental lines of play. Here's a good example: before Grand Prix: Seattle, Sygg River Cutthroat was a "crap rare". He could be bought for less than a taco at your favorite Mexican chain, but the Monday after GP Seattle coverage broke, he was suddenly a 4 dollar card. Now, making three bucks isn't enough to cover lunch or get anyone excited, but when you ordered 50 of 'em that Sunday night at 71 cents a piece, well, you probably just paid for your next 5 or 6 PTQs. Not bad money for a "crap rare", huh? That's why it's so important to keep an open mind and never think in absolutes.

So, how DO you think if not in absolutes? Think in terms of conditions. Just like you'd evaluate a play by considering what the opponent could be holding, consider what circumstances would be required for a card to be played. Let's take a dead simple one: Day of Judgment. What conditions are required for Day of Judgment to be a useful card?

1. Opponent must have a larger creature investment on the board than you.
2. Opponent cannot control regenerators with open mana.
3. You must have a plan to handle the creatures that will follow your Day of Judgment.
4. You must be able to generate 2WW

Those are the basics. It's pretty easy to see why the new Wrath is good. All of those conditions are what we call "organic" conditions - they are met during the course of an average game. Simply do not match your opponent on creature parity, make land drops, and make sure they don't have a River Boa! Easy. Compare this to a card like Luminarch Ascension, which has a ridiculously powerful effect but is about as inorganic as it gets. The odds that you take damage on your opponent's turn are very high - you need to organize your entire deck around the card. That doesn't mean it's not "good", it means that it isn't a no-brainer like DOJ is.

Once you ascertain what it takes to make a card useful and how likely it is that such a circumstance will occur, you have a basic idea of what a card will be worth. Cards like this are usually "Spike" cards - favorites of tournament players, ruthlessly efficient or amazingly powerful. Consistency is a big part of card quality, so a smaller effect with high consistency is worth more than a bigger effect with lower consistency (even if the sum of each individual effect is the same). Consider Bitterblossom, a former staple of Standard and 25 dollar rare. It was cheap at 2 mana, and did the exact same thing every single turn of the game. The effect was small when repeated once, but when repeated for multiple turns, it was game-ending.

The next factor to consider is the card's range of use. Bitterblossom was the engine behind the format's most dominant deck for over a year, but it was also useful in other kinds of decks. Looking into the way-back machine, Masticore was a tournament staple big-money rare because it was color-nonspecific, had two abilities that dominated the board, and had a drawback that was easily built around. A card that is used in two tournament decks will be worth more a card used only in one.

The final factor when evaluating a tournament card's price is its competition and its supporting cast. That's why you cannot evaluate a card in a vacuum. The best example of this right now is Ranger of Eos. Ruel's card was dominant in Extended, but somewhat lacking in LRW-ALA Standard. Now in Zendikar Standard, we've got a whole host of amusing one-drops to fetch with the good Ranger and his value should adjust accordingly. He's got cross-format appeal, generates card advantage and in Standard, fetches out an unprecedentedly fast creature and a game-ending pump spell. Were it not for the early pressure created by Goblin Guide and the reach generated by Goblin Bushwhacker, the game state simply would not be conducive to Ranger of Eos, nor would it have any good targets to fetch. This is why it is so important to evaluate a card in a context, not in a vacuum. In a vacuum, Ranger of Eos is really quite good. In reality, he is only good when the supporting cast allows him to be.

There's another factor to a card's price beyond tournament play - the Timmy Factor. Planeswalkers are the best example of Timmy Factor. Even if they never see tournament play, they almost always weigh in above 10 dollars. Why? Because casual players will always trade for a Planeswalker. This is the same reason that Glimpse the Unthinkable was popular, as well as Doubling Season. These cards are so popular with the casual crowd that they'll hold their value for a long time. Timmy doesn't care what's in Standard - he just knows that Doubling Season makes a LOT of Saprolings in his deck, Planeswalkers, things that say "Win The Game", "Mill" cards, and things that make a lot of tokens all have Timmy Appeal. These cards are great to trade because tournament players will get tournament cards, and casual players will be glad to get rid of "boring fetch lands".

People are learning to ask about Sleepers when discussing Magic finance. Just like in Fantasy Sports, a sleeper is an underpriced asset that carries with it some risk. In Magic, sleepers are some of the best ways to make money. There's no alchemy or sorcery involved - when you evaluate a card and think it's really quite good, but the pre-order prices disagree, you have a sleeper. Sometimes sleepers don't wake up, so be prepared to change your mind with sufficient evidence that you're wrong. For example, when I said "Lullmage Mentor will be good if Blue gets some decent countermagic", I was serious. I'm also serious when I say that Blue's countermagic is currently in the worst state it's ever been in.

Overall, history is the best teacher. Magic is an evolving game, and Wizards does a fantastic job of keeping things fresh, but the basics never change. As you endeavor to become a stronger player and gain more experience, you'll quickly see trends emerge. Cards that break major rules, cards that give many options, and cards that have few peers in their format are all good contenders. Reading as many evaluations as possible will also help you form your own opinion. Don't take any one writer's evaluations as Gospel though - even the top dogs are wrong some of the time. Nothing's better than practice, so write down your evaluations and share them with your friends and peers. When you get it wrong, discuss why you were wrong and soon you're on your way to evaluating cards for yourselves.