Standard Showdown
So, first things first, I was reminded of a good lesson yesterday when I went to Standard Showdown at the local store: Sometimes it pays just to show up. We only had 3 people, which wasn't enough to run SS, so the store employee just handed out the 4 prize packs and didn't even make us pay to enter (we rolled dice to see who would get 2 packs -- not me!). So this was actually free:
The Fiery Temper is a foil, although it's not obvious from the photo. Not super exciting, but a free planeswalker is never bad. The best card someone opened was a foil Tireless Tracker.
I hung out and played a few games with one of the other guys who showed up. My black Standard deck went 1-2 in a match against his homemade Jeskai Control.
Then I played my Modern Soulflayer deck against his mono-white aggressive Standard deck just for fun and testing, and went 1-2 again, losing when I didn't put good Soulflayers together and crushing in the one game that I did.
But I also wanted to post some pointers on buying cards for some friends who are trying to build their own decks. So here's the as-brief-as-I-can guide to buying Magic cards for your own deck.
How to Find and Buy Magic Cards
Two important resources:- Gatherer is the official Magic search engine. Like many search engines, you want to be in the Advanced and not Simple if you want to narrow anything down in a useful way.
- TCGPlayer is an online store where a bunch of smaller/local sellers are aggregated.
Before we talk about singles, note that preconstructed decks are the easiest way you can get a functional Magic deck. They're not (usually) a good investment for card value, but they are a great investment for getting started playing the game. But with few exceptions (which tend to self-correct quickly), sealed products are never a better dollar value than buying individual cards if you know what cards you want.
Also, if you don't know a lot of cards, you might not even know what to search for. Playing Magic with people, looking at other people's deck lists (people love sharing their deck lists, and you can find a lot just by searching the Internet), reading articles about the kinds of formats you like to play, and looking in the glass display case at your local store or in people's "trade binders" are all good ways to become familiar with what is out there that you might want.
Anyway, back to Gatherer. If you're making any kind of theme deck, like for example a white-based Girl-Power deck, a good place to start is searching for general categories of cards that might fit. A search for color includes white, subtype (creature type) includes angel brings up 129 results. A search for color includes white, type includes legendary brings up a whopping 239 results (although unlike the angels, you can immediately exclude a lot of the hits). Using additional filters like excluding unwanted colors or specifying CMC (combined mana cost -- the total numerical cost, not accounting for mana color) can improve your searches further. Look at some of the cards you like or know, then use them as inspiration for additional searches.
One more note on Gatherer -- it always shows the most recent printing of a particular card by default (clicking on "printings" on the card page or the set symbols that appear in the search results can find other versions). Generally, cards that have been printed with the "modern" frame will have cleaner, easier to understand, and more uniform text than cards that have only been printed with the old frame. In all cases, the "official" text is the text that appears on the page next to the card (this is called the "Oracle text" and it is the actual text that Gatherer searches for, rather than what is written on the card, if you put in a text search). The point being, playing with newer cards may result in less confusion.
Now that you've found some cards, you can cross reference them on TCGPlayer. TCGPlayer does have its own advanced search that works like Gatherer, with the very big upside of being able to filter by price, but I've had difficulty getting the expected search results sometimes.
I have to give Mike credit for turning me on to TCGPlayer. I used to use Troll and Toad for online singles purchases, but TCGPlayer is far better if you're buying cheap singles. There are lots of other online sources, and of course local stores (although stores have so many cards buried in binders and boxes that many stores require you to make your purchase online for in-store pickup unless you're buying out of their glass display).
When you just start typing a card name in the TCGPlayer main search bar, it autofills and you can go directly to the card you want. If it is a card that has been printed a lot, you get a results list that includes all the printings. When you add a card to your cart, you can try to pick the cheapest one in the condition you want, but you can also optimize your cart later and have TCGPlayer do that work for you. If you optimize into a "TCGPlayer Direct" package, the cards usually arrive almost as fast as Amazon Prime. If you don't buy Direct, the order might take a week or two, or it might not. There are advanced options you can choose when optimizing to make sure you get what you want (like if you prefer the sword-and-muscle Llanowar Elves over the albino wicker-head version, or vice versa).
A bit on prices:
There are a few different reasons that a card is expensive, but they all boil down to the same thing -- demand is greater than supply. Some cards (especially certain older sets) just weren't printed in very high quantity, but usually newer cards are only expensive because they're popular for a certain format, including both competitive and casual formats. Both Gatherer and TCGPlayer show rarity in their search filters and results, and you can also tell from looking at the set symbol on any card in the modern frame and some cards in the old frame -- black is common, silver is uncommon, gold is rare, and orange is mythic rare.
Prices range very roughly as follows:
Common:
- Unpopular or printed in huge quantity: under 10 cents
- Somewhat popular or printed in an older set only (in which case there are few good-condition copies because people played without sleeves, or their mom threw their cards in the trash after they moved out): 10 cents - $1
- Extremely popular - over $1
(Note that Llanowar Elves has been printed a billion times at common and is still 10 - 20 cents in its cheapest printings. For a common, that shows that it's a good card and people use it.)
Uncommon:
- Unpopular: under 20 cents
- Somewhat popular or printed in an older set only: 20 cents - $2
- Extremely popular - over $2
Rare:
- Unpopular: under 50 cents
- Sometimes played or printed in an older set only: 50 cents - $1
- Played regularly: $1 to $5
- Extremely popular new cards and somewhat popular old cards - over $5
Mythic Rare:
- Unpopular: under $1
- Interesting to some players (either as a collector item, or for niche uses) but not competitive: $1 - $5
- Popular: $5 - $20
- Highly sought after - over $20
I have one last resource that's worth mentioning -- sites that let you track/build your own decks or collections. I use MTGVault, as with the decks I linked at the beginning of this post, and Tappedout is another popular site. I feel like MTGVault works better on a mobile phone. You can make your own decks, share decks, and look at other people's decks on these sites. MTGVault is also linked into data from some of the major online stores, so you can get a snapshot of the card prices. You can even "draw" sample hands and mentally play out your first few turns to see how your deck feels.
Anyway, I hope that this is helpful. Please feel free to comment!
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