Unless you are Tex Richman or [card gruesome encore]Jonathan Medina[/card], it is likely that you don’t have an infinite amount of money with which to feed your Magic addiction.
While smart trading and making good speculation choices can help you turn a profit, that’s only a small part of balancing your magical budget. To use a home finance analogy, reading up on stock tips might help you manage your investment portfolio, but it’s not going to help you decide whether or not to refinance your home loan or whether to buy a new or used car.
Today, we’re going to look at how to make safe, smart, long term decisions about where to allocate the cash you spend on Magic. Whether your budget is big or small, whether you’re a kitchen table warrior or a PTQ grinder, it’s important to think about your goals and make smart decisions with your money.
Before we begin, a quick disclaimer: a lot of the advice in this article is geared toward people who are newer to the game or have smaller, less cohesive collections. The sort of people who never quite have enough cards to get what they want and are often frustrated with the financial/acquisitions aspect of the game.
If you are trying to make the Pro Tour and Magic is the #1 priority in your life, obviously you shouldn’t heed any advice that would lead you to playing suboptimal decks or attending fewer events. But for FNM hobbyists, this should help you grow your collection without breaking the bank.
Why Budget?
For a finance guy, I am poor at setting budgets for myself.
Generally, I make my purchases one of two ways. For impulse buys, I only bite the bullet if something is either an absurdly good deal or will not be available to me later.
For example, the last impulse purchase I made was for a pair of vinyl records put out by one of my favorite bands. They reissued their first two albums that have been out of print for years and they limited the print run to 500 copies. If I didn’t buy them now, chances are I’d never have another opportunity.
For larger purchases, I make it a rule to wait at least a week between getting an idea and executing it. Even then, I only pull out my wallet after at least an hour of online pricing research. A few months ago, for example, I decided that I needed a new vacuum cleaner. Instead of just going to Target and buying one to replace the yard sale purchase that was in no way dealing with the amount of cat hair collecting on my floor, I spent hours online seeing if there was a way to get something as good as a Dyson without paying upwards of $400. I eventually found one, and my life has gotten much cleaner since then.
Beyond that, though, I am generally content as long as the number of dollars in my bank account trends slowly upward over time. I buy coffee every morning before work, eat out more than I should, and generally spend what I need to when I need to without much worry. Since I generally don’t make stupid purchases or overreach, it works out. For now.
Of course, if I ever want to own a house in Southern California, I’ll need to start making a big push toward having more in the bank. And that means drawing up a budget, sticking to it, and saving as much as possible. I’m saving money now, my assets are growing, but by actually establishing a budget and sticking to it I could be saving so much more.
In Magic, most people don’t have a budget drawn up. The most savvy of you probably have a certain amount that you allow yourself to spend in a given month, but beyond that it’s likely the Wild West in terms of where you allocate your funds. Scrub out of FNM? Buy a fat pack to ease your troubles. Read about a cool deck? Trade that set of Jaces for a few key pieces and then buy the rest before even testing it.
One of the major complaints people have with tournament Magic is the financial barrier of entry, and I agree – it’s brutal. One of the reasons the ‘value trading’ subculture sprung up in recent years was to counteract this. But you don’t have to be rich or even do much value trading to have the experience you want playing Magic. Just stop spending your money and tradable assets stupidly. Draw up a budget and make every penny count.
The Road Ahead
The first step in setting up a Magic budget is to identify what your goal is in terms of card ownership.
Do you need to own a mint condition playset of every card ever printed, including Black Lotus? Because if so, I can think of a couple moderate sized countries that would be happy to have your cash flow.
How about playsets of everything attainable – say, Legends or Revised onward? Is that attainable at all?
What about just the staples – enough to make every possible deck in Legacy, Modern, and Standard?
What about just a couple of Standard cards and a Commander toolbox? Or even just one really, really awesome Legacy deck?
How about one reasonable Standard deck that won’t embarrass you on Friday night?
In order to figure out what you need to acquire, take a moment and think about what your goals are in terms of playing Magic.
If you’re the kind of person who likes playing lots of different rogue decks in Standard, it’s important for you to own playsets of basically every current rare. If, however, you’re the kind of person who picks a tier-1 deck and sticks with it, all but a few dozen newer cards are worthless to you.
Someone going to PTQs every weekend who wants to audible into metagame-specific sideboard choices needs to own WAY more cards than someone who plays against the same 16 people every week at FNM and never leaves their home store.
Before we go forward, actually take a moment and think about what your collecting priorities are. What is actually important to you? What cards do you actually need? Might you be better off aggressively attempting to acquire those things instead of trading for a foil you have no use for or buying yet another Innistrad pack with a Sturmgeist inside?
Drawing it Up
If you’ve ever traded with anyone online, you are familiar with the concept of a have/want list. This is a valuable tool that going to be essential in building your budget.
Let’s invent a hypothetical Magic player – Juan. Juan plays Standard every week at FNM, and makes it to either a Prerelease, PTQ, or other large event every month. He’s got a Legacy deck he’s tinkering with, and about $500 worth of Standard rares including his U/R Delver deck complete with a playset of Snapcaster Mages.
Juan’s budget might look something like this:
Magic Budget – Calendar Year 2012
Total cash out:
Yearly allowance: $1,200.
Tournament entry costs: $10/wk (avg.)
Card acquisition costs: $15/wk (avg.)
Assets (trade-able):
{List of Rares & approx. value}
Cards Desired:
{List of highest priority wants}
Yeah, I realize this is basically just a modified have/want list. But if you’ve never used one before for real life trading, you’ll be astonished at how much your focus will change.
Having a budget will force you to make intelligent decisions. If you start to think of your cash and highest value trade-able assets as part of the same budget, you will be less likely to trade them away for cards that you don’t really need and don’t really have a place in your future. When buying those last couple of sideboard cards for means that you won’t have enough cash left to enter the Legacy event on Sunday, your priorities might change entirely. On the flip side, if you win enough store credit to pay for a month of events, you can use that money – guilt-free! – to buy singles and upgrade your decks.
If you really want to make smart decisions, keep track of all of your Magic related expense and transactions, no matter how small. It’s similar to how the act of counting calories allows you to lose weight – by tracking the information, you are able to catch your poor decisions much more easily.
With a strong budget in mind, let’s look at some ways in which you can maximize your cash and assets in order to effectively grow your collection.
Smart Drafting
So many players on a budget avoid drafting because they can’t deal with the $15 or so that it usually costs. Instead, they opt for the $5 Standard event – after all, it’s a much cheaper night out.
Or is it?
Most game stores pay out roughly similar prizes for Standard and Draft tournaments. Assuming yours is among them, that would make the true cost of packs just $10 on top of the $5 fee you are paying to enter the tournament. This is a discount of around $2 over the packs’ MSRP.
Better still, though, you’re not just opening the packs and keeping what you find – you’re drafting them, meaning that each one yields not only its own rare but the chances of someone else passing you something of value.
In my opinion, most people don’t rare draft enough at the FNM level. They often get obsessed with making the ‘pro’ pick and taking Brimstone Volley over foil Hinterland Harbor, neglecting to realize that they aren’t the ones battling it out with the world championship on the line. Practicing for a top 8 draft is one thing, but if you’re battling it out for a maximum of 3 packs’ prize support? Take the money.
It’s just as important to factor rare drafting into your pick order as everything else. People who go to stores where the support is a joke should be rare drafting as much as possible while still enjoying their deck. This is the easiest way to build a collection, and is a fast way to get your set of the Innistrad lands on the cheap – I’ve seen them go 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th pick all the time.
If your store has very good prize support with a steep drop-off, make sure you’re constantly managing expectations. If you split pods and do more than three rounds, by the end of pack 2 you likely know if your deck has a shot to take down the room. If so, rare drafting is likely a poor idea. If not, it makes sense to rare draft aggressively.
Now, I know there are a lot of you out there who will never, ever do this. Some of you are fighting for every possible planeswalker point, and a single FNM match win is more important than a $5 bill. For others, drafting is no fun if you don’t try to end up with the best possible deck and wouldn’t dream of rare drafting anything less than a Tarmogoyf. I get that.
There are also a lot of people who don’t draft because they ‘can’t afford it,’ instead throwing their $5/week at a chance to go 1-2 drop with a bad Standard deck that still probably cost at least $100 to build while keeping their collection stagnant.
If you enjoy drafting and care about the value of cards at all, you can likely make it into a better weekly investment than Standard even though the initial costs are greater.
The Siren’s Call
Ah – Legacy! Modern! The formats where nothing rotates, and every staple you acquire will be playable forever.
You know, like Survival of the Fittest/Vengevine, Vesuva/Cloudpost, Blazing Shoal, Mental Misstep…
With WOTC riding the ban hammer pretty heavily these days, any deck that performs too well could find itself on the chopping block. This is especially true with Control/Combo pieces, as no one seems to mind losing to a swarm of little dudes quite as much.
There was a strong argument to be made even as late as this time last year that Legacy was the format that made the most sense to invest in from a budget perspective. The initial investment was likely to be north of $500, sure, but the deck would be playable forever and you’d never have to worry about format rotation again.
These days, you’d be lucky to get a competitive Legacy deck for under $1,000, and if your deck got too good it might get the axe. Modern is cheaper, sure, but there aren’t too many stores running these events at the local level right now.
Let’s face it – the fact that FNM is limited to Standard and Draft is the real problem here. If you live in a place where Legacy events fire every weekend, that’s one thing, but most of you probably don’t have that option. That means that you’re looking at Legacy as an additional expense on top of Standard or Draft.
Legacy is still a fine deal if you can get the staples in trade or for a reasonable price. I recommend picking up a set of ‘Goyfs, Forces, and Wastelands if you ever see them for trade – all three cards are essential to the format, and none of them are likely to ever get banned. Just understand that Legacy is likely going to enter your life as an addition to whatever else you play.
Chances are if you’re the type of person who is satisfied just playing Legacy every couple of weeks in lieu of FNM, you probably own at least a couple of Legacy decks already.
A Better Standard of Living
When most people build a deck they want to use to battle at FNM, they copy something that they read online – some hot new deck that took down a large tournament and looks powerful and fun.
By and large, this is a mistake.
If you’re reading this site, chances are you understand decks are entirely metagame dependant. Is Tempered Steel the best deck in Standard? Likely not. The reason Team Fireball picked it up for Worlds wasn’t because they thought it exemplified some platonic ideal of ‘the best deck,’ but because they analyzed the field decided that it was likely to be the best deck in that room on that weekend. That’s it.
The biggest acquisitions mistake I see Standard players make is in being a slave to decklists – especially going out of their way to trade for or buy narrow cards that don’t really have any application at the local level. Take the singleton [card mikaeus, the lunarch]Mikaeus[/card] in LSV’s Tempered Steel deck from Worlds. Is 1x Mikaeus correct in that deck? Should you run two copies of him? Zero copies of him? That depends entirely on what your metagame looks like. You aren’t LSV, and you aren’t playing at Worlds. Using his deck as a template is a good idea, but copying it card-for-card is likely not.
Even worse, many of the people who copy decklists like this will run their brew for 2-3 weeks, lose more than they win, and then break the deck up in a huff.
“This deck isn’t good anymore,” they’ll say. “I need something more consistent.”
And then they’ll trade away all those hard-earned rares at a loss and wonder why they never seem to have a good deck.
If you want to play an excellent Standard deck on a budget, the place to start is in identifying a proven rare or mythic that you want to build around. Good examples in the current format are Mox Opal, Liliana of the Veil, Snapcaster Mage, and Primeval Titan. All of these cards cost $10 each or more, and all of them have won their share of tournaments.
Better yet, I can pretty well guarantee that all of these cards will be at least tier-2 for their entire run in Standard. If you build a deck with 4x any of these guys, you’ll have a shot to take down any small event you play in.
Too many people see the price tag on cards like these and decide to build something cheaper instead. The problem is that budget decks are often either bad or very metagame dependent, meaning the investment you put into a whole raft of $3-$6 cards may completely disappear on you. If your budget deck becomes unplayable, you’ll likely be left disappointed and the cards you took time and money to acquire will have become hard to trade. You’ll be on the outside looking in yet again.
If you had leveled up to a set of Primeval Titans instead, you would have had months of being able to play Valakut, and then you could have made the switch to Wolf Run decks. And while the Titan has dropped in price significantly over the past year, it is still a highly desirable card that will always trade well.
I see a similar future for Snapcaster Mage. Acquiring a set will likely cost you $100 or more, but every blue deck for the next two years will likely start with four of them. And if at any point you should tire of them, they will be easy to trade or sell. Instead of having your deck be worthless once you’re done with it, then, you’ll be able to put those Snapcasters toward whatever you decide to build next.
This is part of the secret of getting and maintaining wealth in any part of life, by the way. Renters like myself give $1,000 a month to a landlord and we never see that money again. Homeowners spend more on their mortgage, after a couple of decades they’re left with a major asset. It’s the same with anything nice that you buy – expensive things often last longer and have a high retail value, while shoddy things break down and need to be replaced from scratch.
Another strong investment is lands, especially after they’ve been released for a while. The M10 lands are $3 or less each. The Scars lands are expensive now, but were $3-$4 each for months. The Innistrad lands are falling fast, and will soon be in that range as well. (hint hint.)
Lands don’t always go up in value during their second year in Standard – the Worldwake manlands never did – but they are always in demand and you will never have a problem trading them. You should at least own all of the lands corresponding to your ‘flagship’ mythic – for example, if you have a set of Snapcasters, make sure you also have a set of Sulfur Falls, Hinterland Harbors, Drowned Catacombs, and Glacial Fortresses.
Pimpin’ is Greedy
One of the pieces of advice that financial writers give out a lot is to de-foil your decks, cash out, and buy regular versions of cards. After all, unless you’re trying to intimidate your opponent, the only thing that foils add to the actual game is to open you up to possible marked cards accusations.
I agree with this sentiment, but only to an extent. I absolutely adore foils, and I actively trade for them whenever I can. Of I see a foil I’ve never seen before, I generally have to have it.
If foils are a source of joy to you, keep them. You should especially hold on to the ones that mean the most to you – ones you had in your casual decks from years ago, or cards you find especially beautiful. So many people regret trading really rare foils and never finding them again.
Just keep them out of your trade binders – I don’t want to get all excited and then be told I can’t have them!
What you shouldn’t do, even if you’re a major foil lover, is to trade staples for random durdle foils that you don’t have a home for.
It’s easy to think of cash as money – it’s green, and we’re used to understanding it as legal tender. What’s harder is thinking of staple Magic cards – I’m talking Force of Will, Jace, Wasteland…the cards that never seem to go down in value – as currency as well.
No matter where you are, certain cards will always trade well. These are the ones you should always be trying to hold on to.
Foils, on the other hand, are like little black holes of value. Occasionally you someone who will flip out over one that you have for trade, but most of your foils will either end up in a casual deck forever or sitting in your binder for years being admired by people who have no interest in paying full value for it.
I also don’t recommend ever ponying up for foils of mid-value Standard cards – things like Stromkirk Noble. These will cost you ~$20 in trade and will often go down to $5 or less after rotation.
By all means go big into foils if you love them or if you get a really good deal, but make sure you work that into your budget. Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there at the end of the year with a weak trade stock and a mediocre Standard deck wondering where all your money went.
Don’t Sweat Pennies
I have a section similar to this one in nearly every article I write. That’s because it’s one of the most important things I talk about.
I see way too many trades fall through because someone balks over a couple of dollars in a trade between volatile Standard cards that go up and down by ~20% in any given week.
One of the big complaints people have about Magic trading these days is how hard it is to acquire expensive mythic staples in trade. It is – but pulling out your smartphone and refusing to give more than a penny over market price is one way to insure that you’ll have as difficult a time as possible.
Small, low value rares are always easy to acquire – it’s the high ticket mythics that are hard. If you want to get a set of one, be prepared (and willing!) to give up value in order to do so. These are the cards that will allow you freedom in deck building, and they’re also the cards that will make your binder attractive later if you decide to switch decks.
Here’s an example of two trades (all values from Channel Fireball, per usual) that most people wouldn’t make but I certainly would under the right circumstances:
Trade #1
My:
Geist of Saint Traft – $15
Past in Flames (Foil) – $12
Ratchet Bomb x3 – $9
His:
Snapcaster Mage – $30
Trade #2
My:
Elspeth Tirel – $25
Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon x2 – $16
Stromkirk Noble – $6
Bloodline Keeper – $5
Slagstorm – $4
Glissa, the Traitor x2 – $4
Dismember x3 – $9
Lashwrithe – $3
His:
Snapcaster Mage x2 – $60
Assuming you’ve been drafting and have been lucky enough to open a single Snapcaster Mage, you’ve gotten yourself playset of the elusive blue card by just giving up a little bit of value. In both trades, you’re effectively paying a small tax (in middling cards) to consolidate your value into something you can actually get some use out of. Even if Snapcaster goes down to $20 retail, you’ll get tons of use out of the guy and he’ll still be just as desirable later on.
Discipline
This is what it all comes down to, really. The more disciplined you are, the better your collection will end up.
Spend your money where it can do the most work: staples that trade well and entry fees for tournaments you think you can win. Purchase sealed product only when absolutely necessary, and only splurge on sideboard cards/role players when a ‘must win’ event comes around. And even then, try to figure out your own local metagame, not the metagame from some national tournament three weeks ago.
Treat your trade binder as the asset that it is, and make strong trades for cards that will either be in high demand or you have a strong need for. Use a ‘want’ list, and build toward something slowly over time. Test often, use proxies, and don’t abandon strategies at the first sign of difficulty.
And never, ever buy into hype unless absolutely necessary. Wait for a card to prove itself before making a move – it’s better to have missed on Olivia Voldaren than to have traded for a playset of [card liliana of the veil]Lilianas[/card] at $70/card.
Until next time –
- Chas Andres
