Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Magic Buyouts

A detailed look at reserve list Magic buyouts and their effect on prices. What is a buyout? It occurs when some decides to buy up all of particular Magic card currently available on sites like TCG Player, eBay and Star City Games. Usually, the target is an early card on WOTC's reserve list. The reserve list is a list of cards WOTC has indicated will never be reprinted, while early sets had surprisingly few copies of rares printed. Legends, for example, only had 19,500 copies of each rare printed and a lot of those have been lost over the years.

The author wrote the column because of the increase in buyouts over the past year and to caution players about buying into the "pump and dump" and getting a card when its price artificially peaks. Since a lot of sites use TCG Player as their pricing engine, listing a card on the site at an artificially high price forces the price high on those sites that use the site for pricing. Interesting look at Magic economics, but it can really only impact Legacy players or investors as the cards targeted are not legal for Standard or Modern play.

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