As many of you know may already know, this article is not my only medium to provide financial information. I am also a cohost of GatheringMagic.com’s podcast Brainstorm Brewery, where we bring you up-to-the-moment financial information with a few laughs thrown in. Since our recent move to GatheringMagic, the number of reader, or in this case listener, e-mails has skyrocketed, and we have been unable to talk on the cast about even a fraction of our audience’s weekly questions. In order to make up some of this lost ground, I have decided to take a handful of these questions that I feel I can answer individually and create another grab bag article of sorts. If the listener responses keep up at this pace, I will probably be making this a regular article in order to keep up. This week seems to be an ideal time to start since the spoilers have just begun to trickle in, and this will probably be my last week of free writing before this series, like many, is consumed by Dragon’s Maze.

This is a fairly common question, and although I have answered it in part before, I feel it deserves some more attention given the number of listeners who have been asking.

Truthfully, the answer to this question is very dependent on what you are looking to get out of the sale and how much you have to sell. Between the listing and closing fees, the cost of eBay can be steep, and since the cards are already typically under retail, you may be losing between 30% and 40% at times. If you only have a few items to sell, I tend to advise people to avoid eBay. If you have the ability and stock to list a hundred or more items a month, a digital eBay store suddenly becomes an option along with the benefit of lower listing fees and the potential for a the top-rated-seller tag. For most people, this is not feasible given either time or stock constraints, and for those people, I suggest using buy lists. Typically, a good buy price can be found for 60% or higher of a card’s value, meaning you may be making about the same or even more than eBay on certain items without the hassle of listing and shipping. Buy-listing also means you don’t have to worry about items not selling or the price fluctuating while you have it listed, thus taking a lot of the headache away from the process.

For those with enough stock and time, eBay can be a great tool to maximize profits if you are not in a rush to be paid. I personally use eBay but am ever-rotating my stock online, regularly pulling items down if they do not sell, and then shipping those items to a buy list if the number is right. Even for those who do use eBay as a primary outlet, I encourage you not to ignore buy prices—sometimes, as I stated above, they can be higher than what you would receive after fees.

If this is the case, and it is jumping right away, why do you recommend on getting into Modern "now?" What makes Modern prices move just because the season is over? Just because you aren't playing in the season, doesn't mean you won't be when the season is back . . . or does it?

I wish I had a better answer for this question, but unfortunately, the honest truth is players are so blinded by what is in front of them that they refuse to look toward the future. While a particular format is within the Pro Tour Qualifier season, the cards will typically spike based on coverage and demand, but while a format, excluding Standard, is on the backburner, you will typically see prices wane since people are looking to turn them into cards that are helpful now—not in six months. Currently, Modern has just concluded the season, meaning a number of competitive players will not need these cards again for a number of months, and since a format typically grows stagnant while out of season, you will see a number of cards’ prices drop as stores now have a larger supply then demand for them.

As a trader, it makes sense to pick these cards up when this supply reaches a critical mass, typically a few weeks after the format changes, and to hold said cards until the format picks up again next year. The other reason we see a spike in cards after rotation is that at that point, they are no longer in print. This means, as of now, we no longer have as readily available access to cards that were printed last year and are coming up on rotation. For this reason, we see cards such as Snapcaster Mage and Liliana of the Veil increase in price. Directly after a rotation, you will find a number of Standard only players looking to dump these cards, and since again the demand has dwindled, the price has probably dropped as well, making it an ideal time to pick them up. Waiting a year—or even a few months—to then resell these cards when the season is new again and people still need these staples means you will probably see the prices rise again—possibly even higher than during their lives in Standard.

I remember when I first started trading and realizing how big of a boon it was to have commons and uncommons in your binder since no one else seemed to bring them. This is not to say you want to fill your binder with fluff, but it doesn’t hurt to have some of the more desirable ones in a section just in case.

To answer your question, I believe uncommons are a great place to start since the buy in is very minimal and you can sometimes flip cards to a buy list for a dollar or more if the cards begin to see enough play. Beyond that, if someone is looking for them, it is very easy to grind a small amount of value on them since you are probably one of the few people in the room who has them. I have seen people do crazy things in order to grab those last cards they needed for their decks but that the vendors didn’t bring.

As for undervalued uncommons currently in Standard, I would look toward the new set and see what archetypes we will probably see holding over, and then grab the uncommons for those. Cards such as Invisible Stalker have crept up in price due to how hard they are to find anymore partially since the product is no longer in print I don’t see them becoming any more common. If you are looking for the next wave of Invisible Stalker–priced cards, I would look at the Charms, which outside of a select few, can be grabbed for dirt cheap or found in Draft chaff. With so many effects, it is likely a number of these will see play moving into the next year, and as Return to Ravnica goes out of print, I see these fetching a few dollars each and possibly seeing a few spike as high as $3 to $4 if enough decks are running them.

I hope I may have answered not only the listeners’ questions but some of your own as well this week. As always, if you have any questions of your own, please leave them in the comment section below, and I will do my best to answer as many of them as I can. I will be taking another dive into the mailbag soon, but for the next few weeks, expect some Dragon’s Maze coverage as the end of the month quickly approaches. As always, thank you for reading, and check out our podcast Brainstorm Brewery here on GatheringMagic every Friday.

Ryan Bushard

@CryppleCommand