Rishadan Pawnshop #4 – Outside the Box
Posted by Jeremy Fuentes
July 26, 2009 | 
12 comments
Rishadan Pawnshop #4 – Outside the Box
by Jeremy Fuentes
New players starting up in the game often ask, “Is it better to buy a box? Or just buy singles?†Most veteran players would often reply that it is better to buy singles. That way you focus on getting what you need.
That is a very good point. When starting up, players don’t necessarily want to have a thinly spread out collection, but rather a concentrated deck. But on the lines of flat out dollars, can you get more value from buying a box than what you spend on it?
Recently, I decided to put that question to the test using M10. I know that in the past, it was possible to pull more value from the box than what you actually spent on it. When Ravnica first came out, those [card Watery Grave]duals[/card] were going for $20 a pop, easy. If you got three duals in a box and a few other money rares (Char, Dark Confidant, etc.) then you made your money back on the box. If you pulled a foil dual, then the rest was icing on top! There was also a lot of money in Time Spiral. Not so much with the individual cards, but more so with the fact that you could pull double or even triple rares in a pack if you got a foil. Lotus Bloom and [card Akroma, Angel of Wrath]Akroma[/card] in the same pack? Cha-ching! Ancestral Visions, Foil Serra Avenger AND an Avatar of Woe? Nice pack! However, M10 isn’t Ravnica. M10 isn’t Time Spiral. There aren’t money cards oozing out of the wrappers and into your wallet. One thing that I did notice though is that M10 is very well spread out across the board. Could a well-balanced set like this pull your money out of the box? Or would it end up being the big hits and huge misses that other Core Sets in the past have been? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you “the Real Financial Value of M10.â€Â
Let me start off my explaining my process. When Superstars recently cracked M10 for their store inventory, I was invited to join. This would be a good opportunity to get some raw data for this exercise. I opened a total of ten boxes. I felt that though I could have opened more to get a more extensive data set; ten boxes would not only give me a good range, but an amount of data that was small enough that I could do all the research and number crunching I needed to in the amount of time I had.
When opening the boxes, I made several notes, taking into account as much significant information of the box that I could. First, I noted all of the money rares that I opened. This included cards like Ajani Goldmane and [card Garruk Wildspeaker]Garruk[/card] (sorry I forgot you the first time around, buddy), but also cards like Coat of Arms, Siege-Gang Commander, and Twincast. Essentially, anything worth around $3 I noted individually. Next, I tallied all of the mid-level rares. This included low-end Mythics like Sphinx Ambassador and Xathrid Demon, but also Ant Queen and Cemetery Reaper. Third, I tallied all of the bulk rares. As fun as they may appear, cards like Hive Mind and Indestructibility aren’t going to be on Luis’s Top Eight videos anytime soon. Last, I took a tally of all the power uncommons and power commons. Though they’re not worth a lot individually, when combined, they do add value to the box overall.
After taking all of this into account, I added up the values of each box as follows:
- Money rares = Market value
- Mid-level rares = $1.00
- Bulk rares = $0.30
- Tier One Uncommons/ Commons = $0.50
- Tier Two Uncommons/ Commons = $0.25
As you can see, I was extremely conservative in my valuations. For the money rares, I used an average of the most current eBay auctions to determine the value (Magictraders.com didn’t have the M10 values at the time). There were several mid-level rares that may actually be worth closer to $2 than $1, but taking down and looking up every single one would be too much work for this simple exercise, so I set the value at $1, a very fair estimate. Also, though many stores sell bulk type rares for $1 or so, I didn’t want to cheat you as far as the true value was concerned, so valued them all at a very conservative $0.30. Power uncommons and commons are $0.50 and $0.25 each, though store values would likely be closer to $2.00 and $1.00. Basically, I used the real life cash value of the cards. If you opened a box and wanted to sell every single card on eBay, this is the value you would get from the box. Store credit values and different store retail prices all vary, so I figured cash on eBay (aka the free market) is the best guide. Here is how the boxes ended up breaking down, plus a few highlights from each.
1) $117.00 (Highlights: Ajani, Silence, Birds of Paradise, 3 Dual Lands, Foil Glacial Fortress)
2) $122.00 (Highlights: Ajani, Silence, Honor of the Pure, Ball Lightning, Birds of Paradise, Darksteel Colossus, 3 Dual Lands)
3) $109.50 (Highlights: Garruk, [card Jace Beleren]Jace[/card], Silence, Birds of Paradise, Pithing Needle, 2 Dual Lands)
4) $111.00 (Highlights: 2 Silence, Pithing Needle, Birds of Paradise, Dragonskull Summit, Foil Ball Lightning)
5) $123.00 (Highlights: Baneslayer Angel, Honor of the Pure, Jace, Elvish Archdruid, Ball Lightning, 4 Dual Lands, Foil Hypnotic Specter)
6) $114.50 (Highlights: Garruk, Silence, Birds of Paradise, 2 Dual Lands, Foil [card Chandra Nalaar]Chandra[/card], Foil Overrun, Foil Doom Blade)
7) $104.50 (Highlights: Garruk, Silence, Birds of Paradise, 2 Dual Lands, Foil Duress)
$106.00 (Highlights: Elvish Archdruid, Darksteel Colossus, Ball Lightning, Birds of Paradise, Pithing Needle, 2 Dual Lands)
9) $134.50 (Highlights: Garruk, Silence, Ball Lightning, Birds of Paradise, Pithing Needle, 2 Dual Lands, Foil Birds of Paradise, Foil Time Warp, Foil Llanowar Elves)
10) $103.00 (Highlights: Elvish Archdruid, Jace, 4 Dual Lands)
Now, I was never a Mathematics major, so please bear with me if I get any of these terms or definitions tangled up. When all ten boxes are taken into account, the average value is $114.50 with a standard deviation of 9.87. However, if we pull the outliers from the data set (the highest and lowest values), we get an average of $113.44 with a standard deviation of 6.92. The smaller standard deviation says that the overall group is tighter, meaning whatever random data point you pull is likelier to be closer to the mean average. Basically speaking, when you pull out the freak box (with the Foil Birds, a card that makes up more than 25% of the retail value of the box) and you pull the wiener box (with only six solid money cards, none over $10), what you have is a higher chance of pulling $113 from your 36 packs. A few interesting things to note on the side, each box had around $11-13 worth of power commons and uncommons, and around $18-20 worth of mid-level and bulk rares. This means that generally more than 70% of the value of the box is carried by tradable rares.
One hundred-thirteen dollars might not seem like a lot. We’re not breaking the bank with $100 foil duals (when they first came out) or multiple packs with over 10x retail value here. However, first consider that most stores sell their boxes for $99. Next consider that my valuations were very safe and conservative. Also consider that the value of each box, if you were buying the cards as singles from a store as opposed to selling them for cash on the internet, is likely to be much much higher than listed out here (partly due to the fact that I did not factor in eBay shipping costs, nor discount the common retail markup). If you asked me if I could trade you my single Benjamin Franklin for a Benjamin Franklin, three George Washingtons and an Alexander Hamilton, I’d say yes, that’s definitely something I’d be interested in.
So, to answer the question, “Is it better to buy a box? Or just buy singles?†I would have to say that it very much depends on the set. For M10? If you have the money or store credit and are looking to build up your trade binder, I would definitely recommend that you buy a box or two.
Hope this week’s piece was informative and helpful. Let me know what you guys think in the forums and the comments! Do you want to see more stuff like this? Any topics in particular that you would like me to touch on? Did I miss something crucial or did you totally agree with everything I said? Let me know! Come back to the shop next week when I discuss the Nationals effect on our market this summer. (And no, I’m not talking about Nick Johnson on the trading block). Thanks for stopping by!
Peace
Jeremy Fuentes
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Jake says: July 26, 2009 @ 11:24 pm
a friend of mine who runs the singles at my local shop opened 100 boxes. He is on the MTG Salvation forums a lot in the sales threads and said he approximated 15% profit per box on average. which isn’t too bad really. that seems to be about the numbers you came up with too.
Amarsir says: July 27, 2009 @ 5:15 am
Especially when it’s new, there is *always* profit in a box. If there wasn’t, a store couldn’t afford to open it to even have singles. Unless there’s some other significant drive to opening cards (e.g. drafting on MTGO), the market will efficiently shift as boxes open and prices move.
But when we’re talking about non-dealers, market prices don’t matter. (Unless you are planning to sell everything, in which case you’ve become a mini-dealer, in which case this case this paragraph no longer applies to you.) What matters is the value of the cards _you want_. It’s one thing to say that good commons & uncommons are worth $.25 or $.50, and that adds about a dollar per pack. But only to the point that you get a playset. After that they are a burden that you have to go sell to get your money back. Otherwise that’s $36 per box that you are theoretically “saving” but that isn’t doing anything for you. And commons are only one example – it applies to rares you weren’t looking for also.
There’s a saying I really like by Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Only buy a box if you actually want what you’re going to end up with. So yeah if your goal is to get 4x each of the lands, Silence, Djinn of Wishes, Pithing Needle, Elf lords, BoPs, and a couple baneslayers, then at that level of volume maybe it is worth a couple boxes. But when adding up your value, don’t count that 17th Elite Vanguard if it’s just going to sit in your card box.
BLu says: July 27, 2009 @ 5:21 am
I find it interesting that you opened only one Baneslayer Angel (bought my playset for 50 € [about 65 $]) in ten boxes.
And it is very important to note that you have to buy at least five boxes, probably more, to get to your average.
I opened only three and made close to no profit.
That is, of course, in part due to the display and box prices in Europe, especially Germany.
You also have to sell many of the cards very quickly, as there are quite some that are likely to drop when Lorwyn rotates out (Great Sable Stag, for example) and others might rise significantly (who knows what the duals will cost if Zendikar doesn´t provide us with land-based mana-fixing?).
llarack says: July 27, 2009 @ 6:32 am
Pulling the highest and lowest datapoint of a sample size of 10 seems somewhat questionable. Granted, the highest datapoint can be mostly explained by a foil birds, so pulling it out alone might be reasonable, but I see no real reason to pull the lowest.
If you did more data collection, you could approximately fit a normal distribution to the value of a box with some mean (approximated by the sample mean) and some standard deviation (approximately by the sample standard deviation).
Dstroud says: July 27, 2009 @ 9:16 am
An Elite Vanguard in hand is not the same as a quarter. In fact, it takes quite a concentrated effort on my part to make that conversion.
fcolos says: July 27, 2009 @ 12:56 pm
First of all: great to see an analysis like this, and I hope to see more in the future! I have not come across much of this thusfar and it is really insightful. The fact that the average value of the 10 boxes described here (potentially questionable statistics aside
) matches an average found independently by someone else, adds weight too.
Something, imho, to keep in mind as well, is that if you are a regular player looking for specific rares for your deck, you have to either open up a lot of boxes to be significantly certain of a full playset (with likely financial difficulties involved), or have to invest a good amount of time swapping your trade fodder for the cards you actually wanted.
Since time equals money, to me this lowers the relative value of a box of closed product vs buying the exact singles you need, as the time I can spend on magic (unfortunately) is limited, and I rather spend it on deckbuilding, reading, writing long comments, and playing tournaments…
What are other people’s thoughts on this?
Deneir says: July 27, 2009 @ 1:57 pm
I’ve heard the Lightning Bolt seemed to be “rarer” than the other commons. It took me two full boxes to get my playset of Bolts. I got my forth in my last pack of my second box.
What was your perception?
Jim says: July 27, 2009 @ 3:28 pm
Are the values you obtained after opening these based on the selling price of the cards? This is the only relevant price, as pretty much no one will buy cards buying price from a non-dealer. If they were based on the “store” market value, you could essentially divide these values by 2 and and up with hardly getting a profit…
merl says: July 27, 2009 @ 4:27 pm
Doesn’t this analysis mean that M10 as a set is overpriced and all the prices will come down in the near future?
Mike Destroyer says: July 27, 2009 @ 5:05 pm
good article, strong info, and i love the fact that your 8 ) turned into sunglasses smileyface.
jeremy says: July 27, 2009 @ 8:59 pm
overall, lots of singles prices do go down as a set grows older. however, many also go up… Bitterblossom, Cryptic, Figure of Destiny all went up after the release. not sure how much it affected the overall set price in the end. i think that is enough research for another article though. we can probably use M10 and the same rares and see how the set appreciated or depreciated over time. Lorwyn leaving will change a lot, but Zendikar coming in could help many cards as well.
@ Jim: prices used are ebay final auction prices.
@ merl: it doesn’t necessarily mean the set is overpriced and the prices will drop. the retail value of a box is constant. the value inside changes with every set though…
Casey fatguy_poolshark says: July 28, 2009 @ 6:45 pm
Actually Jeremy the overall value of sets has to go down due to market forces(FS being the only exception to this rule). Basically if we all switch to buying boxes then singles prices drop because stores need to keep stuff moving etc.