This week, I want to do a little throwback to a series I started a few months ago, wherein I interview people within the financial community. This week, I interviewed a website dedicated to price guides and trends, MTGPrice.com. I have used this site since its infancy and am very pleased by how far progress has come. If you are looking for a site that accurately and quickly shows you not only the current price of a card, but also the price history, look no further!

What exactly do you do in the world of Magic?

At MTGPrice.com, we provide a free, independent price guide and research tools for Magic players. We don’t sell cards, so we have no interest in whether you buy from one vendor or another. In addition to the price guide, we track prices over time so people can see if the card they are about to trade away just has a big price swing, and we have a whole bunch of tools for more serious traders.

Number one, most important thing: Let new players be certain their trades are fair. I’ve been playing since The Dark and have seen literally hundreds of new players be ripped off in their first trades. Just because a card is at one price on a single site doesn’t mean it’s close to that at another. In the middle of a trade, however, who has time to check three to four sites for every card in the pile?

Second, we’d like to make the Magic market more efficient. We know from talking to lots and lots of store owners and players alike that people are more likely to buy MTG singles when they are certain they are getting a fair price. The truth is most stores track each other, and there is little difference in the prices for most cards—by making people certain of that fact, store owners can sell more inventory and keep the game thriving.

What event caused you to create MTGPrice.com?

I’d just finished my graduate degree at business school and had taken a bunch of finance and economics classes with a guy who was a big seller of MTG cards on eBay. I used to play a lot of tournaments but hadn’t played in several years, and his business intrigued me. I sat down with some spreadsheets and tried to work out how much money could be make cracking packs of various sets and selling them individually. To get some good data, I wrote some code to gather historical eBay prices for each card and pull information from a few of the big vendors.

I realized that simply having really easy-to-use historical price graphs would be an awesome tool for the community, so I contacted Josh (my business partner), and we hashed out what we wanted to build, and that’s how it all started.

What did you do in the world of Magic before you started this website?

I was really into tournaments. I made over fifteen PTQ Top 8s and at least 6 UK nationals, although I only ever attended one Pro Tour—I was more interested in the cash in the finals than the slot, and the rules at the time allowed a prize split so long as it affects no other person other than the two splitting.

I had stopped playing until very recently—I played in one of the online Modern PTQs and went 7–2 with Red Deck Wins. It was a lot of fun, and I plan on playing at least a few each season.

How can MTGPrice be useful for a trader? How about a player or collector?

For occasional traders, just look up a card on MTGPrice.com, and you’ll see the prices various stores (including eBay) are selling at right now. You can also see a price history graph for each individual store. We’ve just added a new feature that gives you the price various stores are offering to pay cash for a card at. We also have a tool that shows the biggest price movements over the last day or the last week at the MTG price tracker (you can see a shorter version on the homepage).

For collectors, we have a collection tracker that will track your collection value today and graph it over time. We have a beta version of a new feature that tells you the total amount of cash your collection is worth if you were to sell it to a store right now, and it tells you at which store to sell each of your cards to in order to maximize your profit. In testing right now are custom price alerts and wish/trade lists for collectors.

All of the above features are completely free. We also offer a $10-per-month paid service for professional traders and store owners. It’s called ProTrader, and it has more powerful data analysis tools. For example, you can see an entire set at once on a single screen along with the lowest price and (importantly) current in-stock inventory information for each vendor. We also send out a daily e-mail showing the biggest price and inventory swings. It’s extremely common for a large price spike to be preceded the day before by a large decrease in available inventory, and this tool gives early warning of such changes. You can learn more and try it out for free here.

Do you play Magic as well? If so, what formats?

I’ve been playing a lot of Modern recently, and I’m loving it—I’m playing on MTGO mostly. I love playing control decks, but I simply can’t play fast enough to always beat the time limit (I have the same problem in live games), so I mostly play RDW right now. It’s a much more skillful deck than people give it credit for being, since to play it correctly takes a lot of real-time math and statistics calculations.

What are your goals and aspirations moving forward?

I want to make it to the Pro Tour again, and I’d like to see MTGPrice.com hit a million page views a month by May of this year.

Still playing. I love tournaments—so long as Wizards doesn’t screw it up, I plan on playing Magic until I die.

Do you have a family, wife, and kids? If so, how do you adjust to being tied up with Magic? Do you have any words of advice for those looking to put more into Magic who have families?

I have a wife, two step-daughters, a son, and another son on the way. I just found out he’s a boy a few hours ago, so I’m really happy right now!

With very limited time, you have to make your time count. I’ll plan a tournament day a few weeks in advance and take steps to ensure everyone is happy so I can disappear to play. I restrict my practice sessions to MTGO for the most part, and I play a fast deck so I can get at least a few games in once the kids are in bed.

I’m probably had to timeout over a hundred games due to family stuff, however.

Do you think what you do is a positive for the community? What do you have to say to all the naysayers who feel financial Magic hurts the community?

Absolutely positive. MTGPrice.com helps people trust that they are getting a fair trade and prevents people getting ripped off because it’s so cumbersome to find prices. It helps store sell more product, too, since people don’t buy things if they think they might be getting overcharged. Stores selling more product means more money for play areas and tournaments, and that means a better game for everyone.

What is your favorite part about Magic and the community that comes with it?

I really loved playing on a competitive team and all that went with it. When a member of our team qualified, it felt like we all won.

If you had to pass on your wealth of knowledge in three sentences, what would they be?

Learn the basics of finance and economics—look up the wikipedia entry on opportunity cost, supply, and demand and the efficient market hypothesis, and think about them—you will see the world in a completely new way. Learn about risk and beta and why an investment that may make you $1,000 may be worse than one that makes you $500. Learn to code, at least a little—coding is the twenty-first century equivalent of literacy. Most rules are just guidelines—if some guy tells you that you can only write three sentences, write four.

Anything you would like to say to the community in regards to your business, plugs, shout outs, or just general comments?

We love feedback—let us know if you hate or love anything on the site. Users can vote for new features, and we're pretty good at adding the highest-voted ones. Finally, we'll be adding non-U.S. sources as soon as Amazon and TrollAndToad are up, starting with mtgcardmarket.eu.

Buy list prices should go fully live within a week. Amazon prices will be up soon after. We’re then going to add much better collection tools (import/export, filters, and so on) and wish lists, and then some things for the ProTraders. We also have a secret project that should go live in around three months.

Do you have any other projects waiting in the wings you would like to comment on?

I have a fun AI system that I built that plays millions of different Red Deck Wins decks against various simulated opponents and then uses a genetic algorithm to tweak the deck to maximize the win rate against an expected field. I’m sure that computers will be used more and more in deck-building in the future, and I plan on releasing the code once it’s at a point that it’s useable by others.

I want to thank the gentlemen at MTGPrice for their time this week, and if you have not already visited the site, please do—I have found it to save me both time and money.

One last note before I depart for the week: Since I once again did not write an article last week due to some sudden problems in the logistics department, I want to remind everyone about the Modern Masters competition. Submissions will be taken through Sunday, February 10. Submit your fourteen picks for what you feel the mythics in the set will be besides Tarmogoyf, and have a chance to win an awesome prize! I will announce the prize options next week, and I will be paying out as soon as the full spoiler officially goes live later this year.

modernmasterscompetition at gmail dot com

That’s all for this week. Join me next week as we delve further into the world of Magic financial and see what we can dredge up. With a Pro Tour on the horizon, I expect a lot of price changes over the next few weeks, so stay tuned, and see what my pickups will be.

Ryan Bushard

@CryppleCommand