Comparing the Community's Predictions with the Pro Tour Top Decks

A few weeks ago I asked the /magictcg and /spikes reddit communities to fill out a survey with their card predictions for Pro Tour Aether Revolt. The idea was to get a sense for just how good we are at identifying the broken cards in a standard format before any tournament results come in.

Well, the results are in. As per the contest rules, I scored each card according to how many top decks (7+ constructed wins) it appeared in, with sideboard-only appearances counting for 0.25. With over 300 entries, here's how things turned out.

The Colored Cards

I asked respondents to select 5 monocolored cards (in any distribution of colors). The chart below shows all the cards with >20 selections on the survey.

The story of Pro Tour Aether Revolt was the complete dismantling of Jeskai CopyCat decks, mostly by Mardu Vehicles, so it’s no surprise that Felidar Guardian is the biggest disappointment here, vastly underperforming its hype. On the other hand, solid answers such as Fatal Push and Shock were as good as advertised.

The biggest breakout card was Rishkar, Peema Renegade, whose value in the BG deck with +1/+1 counters synergy was underestimated by the survey respondents (keep in mind the survey was intentionally closed just prior to the first SCG opens.)

Also of note is the gap between Disallow and Metallic Rebuke. Many people picked the versatile hard counter, and while it did show up in a reasonable number of top decks, the overlooked Metallic Rebuke actually far surpassed Disallow in point value even though it appeared in 1 less maindeck. This is thanks to its frequent inclusion in the sideboard of the deck of the tournament, Mardu Vehicles.

Other notable misses on the survey’s part are Yahenni’s Expertise, Sram’s Expertise, and Herald of Anguish. All appeared to be solid constructed-worthy cards but in the end did not fit into any top decks. Also a miss, though in the other direction: Release the Gremlins. This card showed up in a few Mardu Vehicles lists as a mirror-breaker, but was completely ignored by survey respondents, and is left off the chart above as it garnered just 1 pick in the survey.

The Gold Cards

I asked respondents to select just one gold card. The chart below shows all selections.

No real surprises here. Winding Constrictor turned out to be as solid as it looked (though to be fair, it didn’t really have much competition in its category.)

The Colorless Cards

I asked respondents to select just one colorless card. The chart below shows all selections.

No real surprises here either, even though the community didn’t quite nail the relative prevalence of Walking Ballista, Heart of Kiran, and Aethersphere Harvester, significantly overvaluing the Ballista. All three are clearly solid cards and their relative performance at this Pro Tour likely says more about the particular meta at that event (Mardu Vehicles for days) than it does about the strength of the cards themselves.

So What Does it All Mean?

In my announcement for this contest, you’ll find that part of the motivation behind this particular experiment was to test my belief that “WoTC makes (almost) no obvious development mistakes.” The idea was that the community, with the benefit of hindsight bias and the crowdsourced testing resources of millions, vastly overestimates how “obvious” WoTC’s development mistakes are. With the survey I sought to discover if (1) The community picks would coalesce around some suspected broken cards, and (2) If those cards would truly turn out to be broken.

The answers to these questions appear to be (1) sort of, and (2) no. If any deck is broken in the current standard meta, it is the Mardu Vehicles deck. The predictions of the survey didn’t exactly reflect that, with respondents heavily favoring the more hyped Felidar Guardian and Walking Ballista over the Mardu Vehicles options in those respective categories.

That said… my assertion that WoTC development makes very few obvious mistakes was rather undermined by Sam Stoddard’s admission that development completely missed the Felidar Guardian/Saheeli Rai interaction. Yes, CopyCat fell flat at the Pro Tour so perhaps development dodged a bullet. Or perhaps, like the Aetherworks decks in previous standard, CopyCat will just go into hiding for a while, to burst back into a changed meta that won’t be quite so hostile to it. Either way, the power level of CopyCat is so high that Stoddard’s admission is truly very troubling for those of us, like myself, that are generally sanguine about WoTC RD’s capabilities.

So what does this all mean? Perhaps we need to wait and see. The single-deck-dominated Pro Tour meta is certainly troubling and created one of the worst Top 8 viewing experiences in recent memory. On the other hand, that dominant deck was not CopyCat, and it’s not impossible for a relatively stale Pro Tour metagame to eventually create a diverse standard metagame. Will Mardu Vehicles stay on top now that it’s public enemy number 1? And if it doesn’t, does that just mean that CopyCat is broken after all? I will be very interested to find out.

I hope everyone who participated had fun playing the prediction game and following the Pro Tour. Keep your eyes peeled for future events of this nature for Pro Tour Amonkhet. (Or leave your email address so I can let you know about the next one!)

But Wait, Who Won?

Oh yeah, there’s the little matter of the Japanese Elspeth vs Kiora I promised to send the winner. Congratulations to the winner of the Pro Tour Aether Revolt Metagame Prediction Game: “M” from New York. M had close to the theoretical maximum-scoring ballot. These were the picks of the winning ballot:

Pick 5 Monocolored Cards	Pick 1 Gold Card	Pick 1 Colorless Card
Felidar Guardian, Metallic Rebuke, Fatal Push, Shock, Rishkar, Peema Renegade	Winding Constrictor	Heart of Kiran

Looking at the top-scoring submissions, they all shared many of the same “probably strong” cards. There was a cluster of leaders that established an advantage by picking the undervalued Rishkar, and M opened a gap on the rest of the field by taking Metallic Rebuke over Disallow. As discussed above, the greater splashability of Metallic Rebuke led to its inclusion in many Mardu Vehicles sideboards, pushing it over the top in this Pro Tour.

The only way for M to have improved on the winning submission theoretically would have been to swap Felidar Guardian for Greenbelt Rampager, which would have marginally improved the score by just 1 point.

Here’s what M had to say about his picks:

1. Felidar Guardian. This one was pretty obvious. Give the masses a splinter twin and so shall they go forth and abuse.

2. Metallic Rebuke. Basically a mana leak in most decks, something standard has been clamoring for for quite some time. Probably just a strict upgrade to already played cards like spell shrivel or revolutionary rebuff.

3. Fatal Push. Many a nay-sayer advocated that this was made for modern and legacy, and wouldn't impact standard nearly as much. Well that was obviously wrong. The sheer power level of this card is off the charts, especially against the top tier decks of the current format. Nice spaceship you got there, its a shame if some spartan king shoved it into a pit.

4. Shock. Another obvious pick due to interaction with saheeli-cat combo, however this card overperformed further with double duty as additional fatal push copies in some matchups.

5. Rishkar, Peema Renegade. I'll be honest this is one of my favorite cards in the set. Obvious snake synergies aside, its pure value and mana ramp all in one bundled up package.

6. Winding Constrictor. What happens when you put a hardened scales effect on a 2/3 body for 2 mana? An entire deck archetype thats what. As previously mentioned, its best friends with Rishkar, and also finally gave verdurous gearhulk the spotlight it very much deserved.

7. Heart of Kiran. Ban smuggler's copter they said. Vehicles will be fair again they said. The format will be more diverse they said. I guess there's one downfall: dies to king leonidas?

Congrats to M on his win!

If you're interested in staying in touch and participating in future free games like this one, leave your email address. I'll only use email addresses collected this way to notify you when I create a Pro Tour Prediction Game.

The Community's Predictions (So Far) for Pro Tour AER

A few days ago I challenged the community to prove how good they were at identifying broken Magic cards by predicting the metagame of PT Aether Revolt, with a free duel deck up as a prize. After nearly 300 entries, let’s take a look at the results so far.

If you would like to play the prediction game before reading this summary of responses so far, go here. Entries will be open for about another day until StarCity begins broadcasting their Standard Open.

Top 8 Predictions

Let’s start by looking at the tiebreaker questions. These are questions I added to the survey to break any ties that could occur if there was a tie in the scoring on the card-by-card predictions. Unlike the main ballot, which asked about the best constructed decks (7+ wins), the tiebreaker section sought predictions about the Top 8 decks only. Also, these questions were optional, so some respondents left these questions blank.

The community predicts a mean of 4.48 unique archetypes in the top 8, with a mode of 5. This would make for a reasonably diverse top 8, but I think the community actually isn’t optimistic enough here. In the past, we’ve seen that even PTs which inaugurated relatively stale Standard seasons (such as PT SOI) had diverse top 8s, due to the early state of the metagame, the inclusion of limited rounds confounding the constructed results, and the sheer skill of certain top players. (Seriously, how many people built that middling Seasons Past deck because Jon Finkel is a beast?) My personal over/under on number of Top 8 archetypes would have been set at 5.5.

Here things get pretty interesting. White and Blue together combine for nearly 2/3rds of the responses here. This makes sense as those colors represent a number of archetypes (Various combos, Tempo/Flash, Control) that can be expected to put players into the Top 8.

I still remember how last year, everyone was all talking about how Magic was all about creatures now and Green with all the high value creatures was just too good and Blue is always going to suck. Or how the year before that people were wondering if maybe RDW was always just going to be the right deck to bring to Pro Tours because it seemed to always feast on the inchoate PT metagames. The lesson here is to remember that WoTC likes to constantly mix things up in Standard and that the pendulum swings around by design.

Mean here is 2.67, which seems reasonable to me just based on my gut impression of past Pro Tours. More and more, we are seeing “stacked PT T8s” reminding us that Magic is at the end of the day a game of skill. Yes, you always need a bit of luck to Top 8, but over and over again we’ve seen how the consistently good players are more likely to put themselves in a position to benefit from that luck.

I made a small mistake on this question and failed to include an option for 0 first time top 8s, which likely skews the results a little. If this question is needed to break a tie, I will be giving the win to the respondent with the answer closest to the true number.

Ok, now it’s time to look at some cards. On the survey I segregated the colorless cards, the monocolored cards, and the gold cards. This was so that cards that could go into any colored deck wouldn't be compared against cards that could only go into decks of specific colors.

Colorless Cards

Walking Ballista is the favorite here, but Heart of Kiran and Aethersphere Harvester aren’t far behind.

Metallic Mimic and Inspiring Statuary come in as dark horse picks among the colorless cards.

These picks are all fairly conventional. In fact, as of this writing, the ranking of the top 4 colorless rares in the survey perfectly correspond with their ranking by market price! (As a Mythic, Heart of Kiran’s greater scarcity of course throws off this pattern.)

Gold Cards

Winding constrictor’s combo potential made it by far the community pick. Oath of Ajani is a distant second.

Monocolored Cards

And finally, we have the biggest chunk of the survey, the monocolored cards. Each submission picked 5 cards, distributed as the respondent desired among the different colors (ie, it’s a valid strategy to stack up on a single color’s cards if you anticipate that color to truly be that strong in PT AER.) There are too many cards here to list, so the table below is all the cards with >20 selections.

The Copycat hype is real. Felidar Guardian was a clear top pick here and frankly, the only top pick that is potentially truly “broken.”

The next top 3 selections were strong answers that have a very good chance of being staples in the format, but aren’t going to be format-destroying cards anytime soon. Sure, we know that Shock is a good card that will probably see quite a bit of play. But we also know it’s probably not a development mistake.

Rounding out the top 5 is another card with some brokenness potential. As both a Cryptolith Rites and a Travel Preparations on a stick, the community thinks Rishkar is a card with some upside.

There’s a natural tension to prediction games like this - to some extent, you can use the conventional wisdom as a guide to your picks. But if you hew too closely to conventional wisdom, then your submission won’t stick out from the crowd in any way and your chance of winning is lower. There is a long tail of dark horse picks among the submissions so far: many cards with 5-20 picks that I haven’t included in the chart above.

What it All Means

As a reminder, one of the objectives of this whole game is to resolve the question of whether or not the community is actually able to identify development mistakes better than the people who design the game, or if complaints about RnD’s incompetence are just hindsight bias. Here’s what I had to say in my post announcing the contest:

If I’m wrong, and there is an obvious development mistake, the community’s picks should concentrate into a few (<3) cards, and those cards should turn out to be OP. If the community’s picks are spread out among a lot of cards, and some of them do turn out to be OP - then I’m right, and there were no obvious development mistakes. If the community’s picks are concentrated into a few cards, and those cards do not turn out to be OP, then I’m still right, and there were still no obvious development mistakes, because the ones we thought were “obviously too good” turned out not to be.

I’m pretty sure I’m right, but hey—maybe you guys will prove me wrong.

Looking at the results so far, I would say the only cards the community has pegged as potential development mistakes are Felidar Guardian and Winding Constrictor. If CopyCat turns out to be a truly degenerate combo, or Winding Constrictor turns out to be oppressive, I think it would be fair to conclude the RnD missed some pretty “obvious” mistakes in this set.

It’s not too late to prove me wrong and win a Japanese Elspeth vs Kiora Duel Deck! The FREE prediction game is open until Starcity begins streaming its first Standard content, which will likely occur sometime on Saturday morning!

There are (Almost) No Obvious Development Mistakes and Complaints are (Almost) Always Hindsight Bias: Issuing the PT AER Metagame Prediction Challenge

(Click here if you just want to go straight where you can win a Japanese Elspeth vs Kiora for predicting the PT AER metagame. Keep reading if you want to know why I think you - the collective you - aren't any good at identifying broken MtG cards.)

Complaints about WoTC RD’s card balancing/metagame prediction abilities basically all fall into something like this pattern:

Step 1) New cards are spoiled. Something like 10-20 strong standout cards with high competitive potential are identified by the community as cards to watch.

Step 2) Competitive metagame forms over the course of many weeks of high-level competitive play and deck refinement from a playerbase of millions. Eventually a handful of the true standout cards are discovered from among the group identified in Step 1. In some cases these cards might even be broken.

Step 3) “RD is terrible at their jobs, how did they miss this obviously broken card, I saw that this card was broken the second it was spoiled. Clearly the FFL is no better than a bunch of drunk monkeys.”

The key bias that allows people to falsely believe step 3 is that they did identify the development mistakes when they were spoiled. It’s just that they identified them as one of a bunch of possibly good cards. Some of these good cards didn’t quite make it, some of them were actually good, and some of them were broken. Then, we forget our misses and zero in with hindsight bias on the hits, and wonder why RD isn’t as good as we are at identifying the broken cards.

I’m not exaggerating about the level of contempt that is sometimes expressed for RD, by the way:

I hope we all can see the hindsight bias at play here. Particularly telling is how this poster’s ability to identify development “mistakes” seems to take a nosedive as we approach recent sets. Grim Flayer’s deck just got knocked out of the meta. And Mardu Vehicles is certainly a top contender, but Depala is hardly a card people point to as an OP development mistake. It’s not impossible that Yehenni’s Expertise will turn out to be a development mistake, but at this point it’s just one of many cards that could possibly be OP. Even Sylvan Advocate no longer seems like such a big mistake now that it’s completely fallen out of the metagame.

It’s instructive to go back and read some of the set reviews of sets that contained obvious development mistakes. Yes, we thought Dromoka’s Command and Collected Company might be good. We also thought Sidisi, Undead Vizer and Narset and Thunderbreak Regent and Secure the Wastes might be good. Some of those cards were good, some weren’t, and some were perhaps too good.

It’s Impossible to Evaluate Individual Cards without knowing the Metagame Context (And the Metagame is Impossible for the FFL to Accurately Predict)

As the fate of “obviously broken” cards fading in and out of the meta shows us, the difference between OP, good, fringe, and not-quite-good-enough cards isn’t the cards themselves. Their actual strength is always an emergent property of the metagame in which they exist. Take one of development’s biggest mistakes of recent memory:

There’s no denying that Collected Company was a pretty big miss on RD’s part, and the eventual Dragons/Origins-BFZ-Shadows standard it dominated was truly quite stale. But even this card’s strength in standard was highly context-dependent! On release CoCo was seen mainly as a great addition to modern, spawning a new but not broken archetype. Meanwhile in standard it was middling, forming part of a good-not-great Green/White aggro deck. It wasn’t until two sets later that enough solid 3-drops were released to create an environment for CoCo to become the oppressively format-warping card that we grew to hate.

CoCo started out fine and became strong, so in hindsight we consider it broken. It’s also instructive to consider a card that had something of the reverse dynamic:

Half a year ago Duskwatch Recruiter was labelled a “development mistake” just as often as Collected Company was. Green getting a recurring card draw effect that’s also an extremely efficient beater that’s also a ramp spell? How ridiculous is that? Of course this is broken, what are the morons in RD doing? But wait, the meta changed, and these days even when there is a green deck in the format, Recruiter doesn’t make the cut.

There’s been a lot of whining about FNM promos lately, so let’s look at one of the FNM whiffs of last year:

Flaying Tendrils has always been a bulk card. Which intern in RD do they have picking these Promos anyway?

But wait, what happened the last time they printed a similar effect?

You may not remember, but while in standard this was a $2+ uncommon. Sounds like something that would have been a solid FNM card!

Of course the difference is that Flaying Tendrils is in a standard environment where a mass -2/-2 is pretty useless, and Drown in Sorrow was in a standard environment where a mass -2/-2 was amazing.

So: individual cards are impossible to evaluate absent foreknowledge about how the entire metagame will shape out, and the metagame is the emergent result of the crowdsourced efforts of a horde of highly motivated and intelligent players (and even then it takes us a few months to really shake it out). Given this, I feel confident asserting that there are almost no obvious development mistakes, and if you think you identified some, you’re likely operating under hindsight bias.

You Totally Predicted the CoCo was OP, Though, and can Prove it

Any such assertions made after-the-fact (and any arguments that rely on such post-hoc assertions) are indistinguishable from hindsight bias and should be discounted. The only way to rigorously test whether you are as good at identifying OP cards as you say you are is to pre-commit, before the tournament results come in. Since we’ve just finished the Aether Revolt prerelease, that means… now. In the vein of the PT EMN Fantasy Draft, I am happy to unveil...

The Pro Tour Aether Revolt Metagame Prediction Challenge - Win a Japanese Elspeth vs Kiora!

Contest is here.

All entries will be individually scored. You receive 1 point every time one of your cards appears in a top-performing standard deck (7 wins/21 points or better). For each sideboard-only appearance, you will receive 0.25 points. To capture the impact of cards that may be format-defining despite not being 4-offs in their decks (such as Emrakul), you will receive the full point value even when your selected card is a 1-off, 2-off-, 3-off in its decks. The top individual entry will win a new Japanese Elspeth vs Kiora.

The challenge here is to prove me wrong. If I’m wrong, and there is an obvious development mistake, the community’s picks should concentrate into a few (<3) cards, and those cards should turn out to be OP. If the community’s picks are spread out among a lot of cards, and some of them do turn out to be OP - then I’m right, and there were no obvious development mistakes. If the community’s picks are concentrated into a few cards, and those cards do not turn out to be OP, then I’m still right, and there were still no obvious development mistakes, because the ones we thought were “obviously too good” turned out not to be.

I’m pretty sure I’m right, but hey—maybe you guys will prove me wrong.

Appendix - In Which I Concede a Situation Where I Look Pretty Wrong, but Not Really because Reasons

Funny thing about the terms of the metagame prediction challenge - had I run this challenge for Pro Tour Kaladesh, I would probably have lost. Why? Well, you may recall that this card was recently banned:

And honestly, had I run the prediction challenge pre PT-KLD, I expect a lot of people would have picked Copter. Now, I could submit the small quibble that the Smuggler’s Copter is colorless. For a prediction game that’s scored simply on the number of decks in which your picked cards appear, the strategic choice is to load up on powerful colorless cards that can go in many archetypes, rather than powerful archetype-specific cards. Even if you thought, say, Chandra, Torch of Defiance would end up being stronger than Smuggler’s Copter, your incentive would still to pick Copter. My point is not that Chandra is stronger than Copter, as we’ve learned that she’s not, just that someone *believing* at that time that Chandra is stronger would still have picked Copter, thus misrepresenting the wisdom of the playerbase versus development. It’s for this reason that I’ve segregated the colorless cards from the pick pool in the PT AER prediction challenge.

But that’s just a quibble, and  to be completely honest - a lot of people pegged Copter as the defining card of the set shortly after release, head and shoulders above the rest of the set. I don’t believe many people predicted a banworthy-level of brokenness from Copter, but it was definitely a case where FFL missed something that was reasonably obvious.

That said, a single exception does not disprove a general rule, and there is an “almost” in my assertion for a reason: “complaints are (almost) always hindsight bias.” So even granting that complaints about FFL missing on Smugglers Copter are more reasonable than most MtG balance whining, I still believe overall that obvious development mistakes are extremely rare.

Magic “Finance” is Categorically a Bad Idea. Don’t Invest in Magic Cards. (Magic the Game is Probably Going to be Fine, Though)

Historically, expensive Magic cards were actually a very good investment. This is no longer true, because:

1. WoTC now prioritizes playerbase growth to an even greater extent than before, and thus is becoming more aggressive in its reprint policy
2. The fundamentals of the Magic economy are now inherently hostile to Magic investing.

Categorically* speaking, investing in Magic cards is a really bad idea, and you shouldn’t do it. This is not because Magic is dying. Magic as a game will continue to grow and thrive. But Magic “finance”, ie Magic as an investment is for suckers. On average, the expected long-term performance of expensive Magic cards - format staples - is somewhere between no growth and slight decline. When you consider the high transaction costs inherent in an “investment vehicle” as illiquid as Magic cards, this makes Magic “Finance” a categorically bad idea.

*Don’t worry, I will explain what I mean by “categorically” before this article is done.

A. What is “investing in Magic cards”?

The general consumer buys Magic cards for three reasons: to play with them, to collect them, and to “invest” in them.

1. Playing with cards: the owner of the Magic cards derives value from from using them in games.
2. Collecting cards: the owner of the Magic cards derives value from the sheer pleasure and satisfaction of ownership.
3. Investing in cards: the owner of the Magic cards derives value from being able to sell those cards in the future (hopefully for a profit).

Now most of the time, people buy cards for a combination of all three of the motivations above. When someone shells out some cash to finish a deck, going through their minds is some combination of “well, I’ll be able to play this deck for at least a year before standard rotates, it is satisfying to own and flip through cards, and later I will be able to sell this stuff, maybe even for more money!”

What I am suggesting is that when buying cards, you should discount motivation (3) to zero. Don’t expect to make a profit on your Magic cards. Certainly don’t buy Magic cards if your only objective is reason (3). So you should buy cards if and only if you expect them to be worth it on the basis of motivations (1) and (2) alone.

In this post I will talk about “investors” as if they are individuals distinct from players, but let’s submit that this is simplification. When I say “investors” I am actually specifically talking about investment-motivation from Magic players and the degree to which that motivation causes different behavior on the margins - ie, buying/holding cards you otherwise wouldn’t have, only because you expect the value to grow.

B(1). Why is investing in cards a bad idea?

Magic “investors” hurt the game, and are the consequence of a common action problem. We all would be better off (as players) if we all bought cards only when we expect to use them and the game were cheaper to play, but individual players have a strong incentive to defect from this arrangement and “invest” in cards. This takes cards out of circulation and drives up the cost of playing the game by increasing aggregate demand for the cards. Every card not in circulation and not in use represents a card that is not fulfilling its play utility. Thus, a common action problem.

B(2). Ok, that’s why investing is bad for the game as a whole, but why should I care?

You’re right, it’s unreasonable to expect people to act against their own interests, but in this case understanding the nature of the common action problem helps you understand this next point: if you are an “investor” in Magic, WoTC hates you. And they are beginning to act on that hate, by aggressively reprinting cards.

To WoTC, every card that is being held by an “investor” is a card that could be used by someone playing the game, or alternatively, appreciated by a collector. Remember, the player and the collector are both deriving value from the cards as they own them. Just by existing, the card is generating value for players or collectors. But a card sitting in a binder as an “investment” generates no value for anyone until it is sold. This is why WoTC hates you - because “investors” contribute towards raising the barrier of entry for the game, while not contributing towards product satisfaction.

Now in the past, this was less of an issue, because the game was growing very fast anyway, and by raising aggregate demand the investor is contributing just as much to WoTC’s bottom line as a player (perhaps indirectly through singles purchases, but aggregate demand is aggregate demand and at the end of the day WoTC is the original source for all Magic cards). In the past, even if the high price of the game were inhibiting the size of the customer base, it pretty much evened out in terms of revenue because each individual customer was worth so much money.

That was then. What’s happening now is that WoTC is finding itself in a situation where size of the playerbase matters more and more, and in which their premium pricing model is poorly positioned in a changing marketplace. What is changing?

1. After years of explosive growth, WoTC has already maxed out its traditional and natural market. What we see now is WoTC trying to continue to drive growth by expanding into previously untapped markets - including emerging markets such as China and the global south, where the consumers have growing levels of disposable income, but still nothing like what WoTCs traditional customers were spending to play the game.
2. Streaming and esports are the revenue streams of the future. Both of these have large multiplier effects from a large playerbase. Now, Magic has certain inherent disadvantages in both streaming and esports, but WoTC still clearly wants to get in on these revenue streams. To do that, they need a bigger playerbase.
3. In part because of streaming/esports, Magic is being disrupted by Hearthstone and other cheaper competitors. Disruption is a tech buzzword, but in business refers to an observed pattern wherein a premium product (Magic) is supplanted by a cheaper, more agile competitor (Hearthstone). Note that “premium” is used here in a business sense and refers to that product’s positioning in the marketplace. By being more expensive, more full-featured, less convenient, and more complex, Magic is “premium” compared to Hearthstone, which is cheaper, less-featured, more convenient, and less complicated. In the same way, the Mainframe was “premium” compared to the Desktop, the Desktop was “premium” to the Laptop, the Laptop was “premium” to Mobile. But the desktop killed the mainframe, the laptop killed the desktop, and mobile killed the laptop. Why? Because the cheaper competitor is the one that creates new markets/new customers, leaving the premium competitor in the dust with its traditional high-revenue but increasingly irrelevant share of the market.*

*I want to point out that I’m personally skeptical of whether the “disruption” model is a useful as a prescriptive tool for business. But what matters here is what WoTC believes, and given the ubiquity of the concept of “disruption” in business schools and tech boardrooms, I think that the uncanny resemblance of Magic-Hearthstone to disruption case studies is undoubtedly influencing WoTC decisionmaking. WoTC's reaction to Hearthstone is actually a fascinating topic that is worthy of a future post of its own.

All of the above explains WoTC’s behavior and drive to grow Magic as a game that will appeal to a larger audience, and indifference to the equity of Magic investors. As we’ve seen this year they will reprint aggressively, across a multitude of supplemental products. They won’t do it in a way that crashes the market, but are happy trickling out supplemental printings to devalue your investments gradually. (See: EMA “supplemental” print runs). WoTC is doing this because it’s in their interest to drive down the cost of playing the game and grow the playerbase to a degree that wasn’t true before.

B(2). Is that all?

If that weren’t enough, the macro fundamentals of the Magic economy are now very hostile to Magic investing. Much of the conventional wisdom of Magic “finance” comes from a period of explosive growth, during which the player base was growing at a tremendous rate. In such an environment, demand for cards was reliably increasing and an “index” of Magic cards - such as sealed booster boxes or format staples - would reliably grow in value very quickly.

This historical performance is what informs a lot of the conventional wisdom in MtGFinance about holding format staples, or holding popular kitchen table/commander Mythics, or holding sealed boxes. I'm talking about strategies like SaffronOlive’s Three Year Plan to buy and hold an “index” of mythics from each set. In the past demand grew at a high enough rate that any of these strategies were very profitable.

However, explosive growth is not sustainable. For the past few years, the game has still been growing, but no longer at an explosive rate. And what implications does this have for MtG Finance? Well, you can throw all the conventional wisdom out the window.

Sealed product? All post-RTR sealed product has remained flat and available at or below MSRP.

Format staples? Shocklands have been flat since rotation.

Thoughtseize, the biggest Modern staple out of Theros, has only declined.

Same with  fetchlands.

All graphs above from www.mtggoldfish.com

If there were an “index fund” that bought MtG staples,  it would have been climbing up until around RTR, and then it would have declined gradually since then. Why? The ratio of current player base to historical product available used to be very high, and this supply-demand gradient was a recipe for climbing prices. Today, thanks to a more modest rate of growth and more aggressive print runs, that ratio is much more even.

Which means that as a whole, MtG Finance is not a winner. The value of the most cards will stay flat or decline gradually, so once you factor in the transaction costs of buying/selling illiquid cards it is very hard to come out ahead. This is what I mean when I say MtG finance is “categorically” unwise. Yes, there will still be some specs that pay off. However, I am suggesting that specs are a bad idea as a whole because on net there will be more losers than winners.

C. What should I do?

My expectation for the future is that expensive Magic cards - format staples - will see returns somewhere between staying flat or gradual declines. I’m not suggesting you stop buying Magic cards. I’m simply suggesting you stop buying or holding Magic cards as a long-term investment. It is still a good idea to buy or hold Magic cards if:

1. You will get value from playing them.
2. You will get value from collecting them.

But don’t hold any cards as an investment, outside of strong seasonal/rotation-based logic - for example, it’s reasonable to hold standard cards you don’t expect to use until after Pro Tours in which they might see play.

In addition, there are still lots of ways to make money in the economy by providing value and services to the Magic community - in which case you can buy low (buylist) and sell high (retail). If you are flipping collections, you are trading your time for money and providing a service by increasing liquidity of Magic cards. Similarly, if you are acting as a store and are moving many cards. In addition, individual spikes will still occur, and so do rotation patterns, so if you do believe that you truly can outrace WoTC's reprint treadmill, you're welcome to put your money down on the proposition. That said, keep in mind that with the transaction costs of moving Magic cards you need a very high rate of very successful specs for this to be worth your time.

D. So you're saying Magic is dying! Sell sell sell!

Nope.

Yes, player growth is slowing, but the past rate of growth wasn’t reasonably sustainable anyway. Magic is probably now growing at a healthy single-digit annual rate, which is a perfectly sound business that Hasbro will continue to invest in.

Yes, WoTC is trying to drive down the cost of entry, which by definition means cards will be worth less. But the game will probably be fine. Just treat it as a game, where you only spend money because you want to play with what you get, and don’t expect it to be a good long-term investment. Instead, expect card values to break even or gradually decline. Remember the three motivations for buying cards? If you got value from playing and owning the cards that was sufficient to cover the cost of buying them, then even if that card’s value drops, you come out ahead!

TL;DR: WoTC is reprinting aggressively to expand their player base, and the playerbase is no longer growing at an explosive rate. Magic cards are terrible investments, so treat Magic as a game you spend money on because you enjoy it, not because you expect a return.