I never thought playing a card game would lead me here. My name is JR Wade, and I am a recovering PTQ grinder. Now, rather than spending hours playing at tournaments, I spend my time grinding the trade tables and supplying my friends with the cards they need to accomplish their dreams of Pro Tour glory.

I am a good friend to have.

One of the important cornerstones in value trading is doing your homework during the hours when you aren’t grinding trades at the tables. I would even argue this is the most important aspect to being a successful grinder.

Without a firm knowledge and grasp of what cards are worth, you will end up falling into a trap similar to the one that I fell into this past weekend in Indianapolis, where I valued a pack foil Damnation at $35 and ended up stubbornly trading for it at that price. I am going to use this example to illustrate where I went awry, and how we can all learn from my mistake to prevent it from happening to us in the future. I want you to think of a pack foil Damnation sitting in someone’s binder and what you would price it at, and I will walk you through how I got to $35 and why I was wrong.

• I knew a normal, mint Damnation is $15.
• I knew there was a textless foil that went for about $20.
• I knew that since it was an older foil, it would be worth at least twice what the normal version of the card was worth, if not more.
• It’s very popular among EDH players, who love to bling out their decks.
• The person from whom I was trying to acquire the card said he would not trade it unless I gave him a good price.

Of all my reasoning, only two pieces of it were sound, and that is that a normal Damnation is $15, and EDH players love to pimp out their decks.

Now here is where I screwed up: The textless foil also goes for around $15 (and that can be attributed to my ignorance and having someone offer $20 on one of mine earlier in the day). Older foils are worth twice as much as the regular in most cases, but in this case I did not also factor in that there is the textless foil.

The largest mistake I made, however, was tricking myself into thinking that I would be able to get this Damnation at value or less since he had an attachment to the card that he had verbalized. When someone tells you that he probably doesn’t want to get rid of a card, it should set alarm bells off and tell you either to pass on that card or to proceed with caution.

I decided that I would rather barrel through and shot out what I thought was a reasonable number, only for him to almost jump out of his seat and tell me he could definitely trade it for $35. I knew he was too eager about this trade, but instead of taking time to reevaluate the trade, I was anxious to capitalize on what I assumed was a knowledge gap on his part. However, he is getting the last laugh, as the gap in knowledge obviously belonged to me.

I am giving you this example so you can better learn how to approach valuing a card that you know will be sought after without accidentally losing your shirt to acquire it. How many people out there know what every card is worth 100% of the time? I would venture to say that there are very few people (if any) who qualify, so we must learn to rationally approach valuing cards with which we aren’t familiar.

So, what should I have done? I knew the value of a regular Damnation was correct, and we can use that as an anchor (you always need to have an anchor when valuing cards with which you are unfamiliar; otherwise, you are just throwing darts blindfolded), so I had a good baseline. My knowledge of the textless Damnation was flawed; it had been tainted earlier in the day by incorrect information, and if I had known that you could acquire a foil Damnation of any sort for the same price as a regular, I would have known something would be fishy with the pack foil. This caused me to throw out a second faulty anchor to this new piece of information, and that ultimately led to my downfall.

We can also use thought patterns like this to predict fluctuations in the market. Let’s look at a card that has been on a steady rise for a few months, and why it may have peaked and now be on the decline: Llawan, Cephalid Empress.

Everyone knows this card’s place in and against Merfolk in Legacy, but if we look at the deck in the context of the metagame as a whole, we would know that Merfolk can be the most popular deck in the field, encompassing up to 16% of the decks played at a large tournament; in a format as diverse as Legacy, that is a large number.

So, we have an elegant answer to what is arguably the most popular deck in the format. It should obviously creep in price until the deck either loses popularity or finds an answer to the answer. In this case, we have the latter, where savvy Merfolk players have begun to play Dismember in their sideboards as an answer to uncountered Llawans. While this will still reset Merfolk’s board, unless you have a solid clock on the ground already, it just delays the inevitable.

This new piece of technology will force people to fight Merfolk in a new way, therefore causing Llawan’s place as the catchall answer to be replaced by more unconventional or creative strategies. This is not a cry for people to begin shipping their Llawans before the price falls out on them, because that will not happen, either. People will still play her for many months; just remember, the roof on her has been hit for now. So to reiterate, pick them up if you want them, or if you can find a good price—just don’t think you will end up getting rich on them.

Let’s approach a new example that happens rarely but is coming upon us quickly. We have the Banned/Restricted announcement coming up on June 20, and a majority of people have come to the consensus that Stoneforge Mystic is the biggest reason for Standard’s single-minded metagame.

So, how do we use this knowledge? Stoneforge Mystic’s joining the ranks of banned cards combined with the fact that it is being reprinted in the duel deck would be detrimental to its value, causing it to return to the under-$5 range.

But what about the rest of the deck?

People would be forced to play more copies of any of the equipment that it wants to abuse, which would lead to more copies of the Swords being played in the main deck of decks choosing to employ them. On the other end of the spectrum, Batterskull would suddenly become worse, as a turn-five Batterskull is much less scary than one that pops out of nowhere just before the fourth turn. I would argue that we would see more people playing Baneslayer Angel before packing multiple Batterskulls in this Mystic-less world.

A large detail we also cannot overlook is when Stoneforge Mystic was added into the U/W/x Jace decks and it began to keep the Primeval Titan decks at bay. So, with the departure of Stoneforge Mystic, expect a resurgence of the Green Menace.

With the writing on the wall that Stoneforge Mystic is nearing the end of her time in the spotlight, I would be trying to pick up additional copies of the Three Swords, trying to find some cheap Primeval Titans, and reducing Batterskull stock while I can still get full value.

That’s it for my first week’s lessons in value trading, but I want to leave you with some cards for you to keep an eye on:

Phyrexian Metamorph – This card became has become harder to pick up over the last couple weeks. People are beginning to realize that this card kills any Legend for 3 mana and 2 life. Try to get them for $3, but be willing to give a little more before they spike.

Dark Confidant – This should be news to no one, but for those who do not know, this card’s price is slowly rising, currently resting at $25, and if Modern becomes a real format, seeing a $50 price tag on Bobby would not surprise me one bit.

Splinter Twin – I was able to pick these guys up for about $7 all weekend, and people are getting more creative with fitting this combo into more decks. It is still a solid $10 card with the possibility of going up to $12 to $15.

Sol Ring – This card is dipping since the announcement that it will be included in all of the Commander decks that Wizards is releasing. This is just a temporary dip, and they will return to their home at $20 once the hype dies down. For reference, the release of Demonic Tutor in the Divine vs. Demonic duel deck only caused a temporary flux in its price. Get them while they are cheap.

Happy grinding!

JR Wade

@THEJRRR on twitter

JRRRMTG at gmail dot com