A while back Cauchy and I had a discussion regarding the decline in the value of our objects digital based on trends. I just wanted to paste something that I noticed in today's SoTP (One Million Words aka Pete Jahn is the author) on Puremtgo.com



Pete puts this at the bottom of each article every week and the low number 22k seemed to strike a memory chord in my head so I went and checked a year ago (or as close to a year as it gets in this case since odd # of days and days of week.)


So last year a change of -$150 was insignificant. How about a change in a year of over -$2400? Doesn't it seem like our collections as a whole must be devalued quite a bit since then? If so then what are the contributing factors?

The decline of Vintage due to it not taking off means that many of the staple vintage cards (I don't mean power) have lost some value but also modern prices are low, standard prices are low, legacy prices are low. This is across the board. What do you guys think the primary causes are?

V4?

heading to bed soon, so I will likely reply with more thought later - but also want to note that the same year time frame included a number of releases and probably a couple hundred new cards. So it isn't just -$2400 the ration of cards to total cost is lower too. Would be interested in the number of "playsets" Pete used foreach of those dollar amounts so as to calculate the average price per playset and see that ratio figure as well.

Interesting.

As I recall it the same comparison done a couple of month ago did not show the same large drop. So if it is due to V4 then it is a delayed reaction.

The drop deserves some further analysis.

I'm betting that if you looked at the overall value of vintage/legacy only cards, the overall value has likely decreased since the new client was released. There use to be a lot of people playing the Classic format, but they killed that with the release of the new client. Very few people play Legacy & even fewer play Vintage. Most play is in Modern & Standard formats, so that's where I'd expect to see more value in cards.

There are also just not so many extremely high-priced cards around. A playset of Goyf was probably 400 tickets a year ago. BFZ has Gideon, then Ulamog at half-Gideon, and all the rest is at or below five tickets. Origins has four money cards, with Jace ridicously pricy right now.

Wasn't there an article which evaluated recent tournament price changes with regard to secondary market value of cards and boosters? I don't really care about the collection value, but I did notice that the booster price went up, exactly as predicted.

Wizos are doing a good job of making constructed more available, what with Standard being very diverse, and reprints lowering the price of older cards. I guess if you want to keep the investment value, sell digital and buy paper copies.

Another factor involving pricing is that not long ago, pretty much all rares started at 0.05 tix/ea. Now they start at 0.01 tix/ea

That is true. But it happend before we compared the yearly change in total prices maybe 2 months ago. The large drop is more recent that just the intro of V4 or the lower bound on the price of rares. It would be interesting to know when the drop more precisely happend.

Well, if you're really interested, Pete has the data. Maybe you can even check yourself, if the archive of State of the program is avaliable on PureMtgO.

I am interested. But I have not yet had time to collect the Numbers from the SotP archive.

You can also check the ML bot trends. The wiki does not go back too far but it might help frame the bigger picture.

I have some issues with the MLbot wiki from back when I did more speculation. I think goldfish is more useful for tracking trends. But It seems to me that we have had this discussion before....

Goldfish have a legacy card price index which shows a roughly 10% decrease consistent with your intuition that that part of the market has trended downwards.

I'm sorry, my comment was out of line.

But I got to thinking about it a bit, and I'm not sure that the total value of all cards (Pete's big number) is relevant to this discussion, at least in the sense of giving you a handle on how much your existing collection is losing in value. Every time a new set is added, this number should go up, and there should be oscillations (spike soon after release, low point just before rotation, etc.). It would be hard to impossible to remove these effects and just look for the deprecation I think was the starting point of this thread.

In other news, a complete set of BFZ is ~100$, a complete set of DTK is ~150$, and FRF is ~50$. Origins is also at 150, with half the value in one card.

lol. I did not see your comment as being out of line. It was spot on, I should (and would) collect the data to make a proper analysis. I wish I had time to do it immediately.

I think it is easy to correct for the new additional issues that had happened over the year. It is just subtracting the value of them (unless they are re-prints). However, it is true that conditions should be taken into account. This is primarily the case if the season has somehow changed since the same time last year. Stuff like rotations happens the same time each year, so you do not need to control for that. But something like Modern Season may move from year to year.

If Pete's number has dropped significantly also after subtracting the value of new stuff then I think it is fair to say that "the value of out things" are trending down.

Ethics of their past actions aside, their data is worth looking at. Refusing to because of that understandable bias is negating whole amounts of interesting information. Where the prices spike for example. Often times the card data does not match perfectly with the mtggoldfish data because different bot renters price up/down at different speeds than MTGOtraders. Also I want to point out that MTGgoldfish is only really tracking the data of one source (supernovabot as we discussed before is barely limping along) which makes it less valuable on its own imho.

As to us going around in circles? I think I raised a valid point with the beginning of this thread. If your preconclusions don't agree and you won't look again that is not on me.

I also think you raised an excellent point with the beginning of the thread. You used my favorite data source to back up your intuition. You point seems very solid. It is on me now to present contradicting evidence (if at all possible).

The stuff about repeating ourselves was more directed at the validity of the various data sources. I don't think I added anything new regarding that topic in my former statement. Hence, I was the one going around in circles.

OK I guess I misunderstood the thrust of what you were saying, my bad.

Some interesting reading on this theme:
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/what-broke-the-magic-online-economy/
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/will-play-points-fix-the-mtgo-economy/
In the first article, the dropping value of singles is tied directly with the redemption price increase. The argument, in a nutshell, was that paper prices are as they always were, and the dealers transferred the raised redemption fees directly into lowered singles prices.

I wrote a piece on how I see price formation on MTGO. Extremely interesting reading
http://puremtgo.com/articles/other-side ... ted-prizes

It is more or less commonly accepted that the increase in redemption fee decreased the value of redeemable sets. That is also the starting point of my article. But that is a separate issue from the one that Winter.Wolf is raising. Redemption should not really affect the value non-redeemable sets. I guess non-redeemable sets are the ones that are driving the apparently huge decrease in the value of singles.

Note that, since the latest prizes overhaul, one of the points the first article makes - pack prices falling too fast - is no longer true. Origins packs have been steadily kept their price over the 3.7 tix line; BFZ packs are following the same trend for now (even with flashback week with the best Limited format ever).

In another note, we have right now the most expensive Standard format since CawBlade heyday: https://t.co/aKMyOYbn3m

Stable pack prices were desirable before they introduced Play Points. High pack prices has little value for constructed players now and is just a cost for limited players. So they may have "fixed" pack prices but not in a way that all player groups are now better off.