Top Magic: the Gathering Stores & Marketplaces

In a similar vein as I set out to list all the top Magic content providers I wanted to do the same thing for Magic stores. Although, this is a larger and trickier task, I think that it is similarly valuable.

Stores

ABU
Bidwicket
Channel Fireball
MTG Fanatic
Star City Games
Strike Zone Online
TCG Player
Troll and Toad

A lot of stores fall under Bidwicket and TCGPlayer. If the store is a big one like Channelfireball I have listed it separately but I am not going to list out all the other smaller stores that fall under Bidwicket and TCGPlayer. Needless to say if the store is on Bidwicket or TCGPlayer that should give you some level of protection. Though if you care about the condition of cards I have found that some of the 'mom and pop' stores have some really questionable grading criteria, so keep that in mind.

Other Resources

eBay
magic traders (MOTL)
Facebook

The one that got away

magiccardmarket

Perhaps the most interesting card selection is one that is blocked for non-EU users. Magic Card Market has a huge selection of Magic cards in all sorts of languages and is a pretty great marketplace for picking up some of the more random Magic cards from.

There are stores popping up daily so I will have missed loads of random local stores (unless they are using Bidwicket or TCGPlayer) but if there are any that are truly worth adding here then please let me know.

Cheers,
Simon

Not so Mono Red Modern

I have been playing more and more MODO over the last couple of weeks. After starting off on basic mono red I have been slowly adapting my deck in order to give it a little more play and build up my collection of Modern/Legacy Staples. My deck of choice would be the UR delver list that Patrick Chapin played in the World Championships (or some variation). Unfortunately Scalding Tarn's are ~$40 a pop on Magic Online. It is hard to justify buying these when I instead bought Polluted Deltas for ~$5 each. Since it looks like I am in MODO for the long haul I am going the patient route. There are also a couple of UR commons that are quite pricey - Serum Visions ($6-7) and Gitaxian Probe ($2-3). For comparison Brainstorm is around $0.04 a pop....
 
Chapin's List
 

Creature [13]

1 Snapcaster Mage

4 Delver of Secrets

4 Monastery Swiftspear

4 Young Pyromancer

Instant [15]

1 Electrolyze

1 Izzet Charm

1 Mana Leak

1 Remand

2 Spell Snare

2 Vapor Snag

3 Thought Scour

4 Lightning Bolt

Sorcery [14]

2 Forked Bolt

4 Gitaxian Probe

4 Serum Visions

4 Treasure Cruise

Land [18]

1 Arid Mesa

1 Mountain

1 Sulfur Falls

3 Steam Vents

4 Flooded Strand

4 Island

4 Scalding Tarn

 

Sideboard [15]

2 Dispel

2 Spell Pierce

1 Negate

1 Bonfire of the Damned

1 Electrickery

1 Magma Spray

1 Harvest Pyre

1 Izzet Staticaster

1 Threads of Disloyalty

2 Blood Moon

2 Smash to Smithereens 

 
So like I said I have been buying the remainder of these cards to build up my collection but on the way I have been playing a tweaked version of this:
 

Shahar Shenhar List

 

Creature [8]

4 Goblin Guide

4 Monastery Swiftspear

Instant [16]

2 Searing Blaze

2 Skullcrack

4 Boros Charm

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Mutagenic Growth

Sorcery [12]

4 Lava Spike

4 Rift Bolt

4 Treasure Cruise

Enchantment [4]

4 Eidolon of the Great Revel

Land [20]

2 Bloodstained Mire

2 Sacred Foundry

2 Steam Vents

3 Arid Mesa

3 Wooded Foothills

4 Mountain

4 Scalding Tarn

 

Sideboard [15]

2 Searing Blaze

2 Skullcrack

4 Geist of Saint Traft

3 Smash to Smithereens

2 Wear // Tear

2 Combust 

This is a pretty sweet little list and I fell in love with the Mental Misstep's for lightning bolt that (Mutagenic Growth) that are in Shenhar's list. The only card that I didn't pick up for this is Geist of Saint Traft and some slightly different fetch lands (Scalding Tarn again). Conveniently enough it seems like a large % of other people also wanted to play Either Patrick Chapins list above or Wrapters Jeskai Ascendency combo deck. Thankfully this version of Mono Red is pretty good against both.
 
My Current List:
 
Creature [8]

4 Goblin Guide

4 Monastery Swiftspear

Instant [19]

2 Searing Blaze

 

1 Searing Blood

 

4 Boros Charm

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Mutagenic Growth

3 Skullcrack

Sorcery [10]

2 Treasure Cruise

4 Lava Spike

4 Rift Bolt

 

1 Forked Bolt

Enchantment [4]

4 Eidolon of the Great Revel

Land[19]

1 Steam Vents

2 Sacred Foundry

3 Arid Mesa

4 Blood Stained Mire

 

4 Wooded Foothills

5 Mountain

Sideboard [15]

1 Magma Spray

 

1 Grim Lavamancer

2 Smash to Smithereens

1 Combust

1 Timely Reinforcements  

2 Searing Blood

 

2 Searing Blaze

 

1 Skullcrack

2 Molten Rain

2 Everlasting Torment  

 
I have been pretty happy with the deck so far and it has quite a bit of reach and a little more play than your regular mono red deck due to Treasure Cruise, Boros Charm and Mutagenic Growth. I am being a little bit of a greedy face by only playing 19 lands but so far I haven't been punished too badly (yet). I really like the idea of having 1 shard volley in the list to help pump up my treasure cruises and give a little more reach but I don't think it is possible with only 19 lands. If I go up to 20 lands I don't think I have the space to shoehorn it in the list. The only kind of odd ones are the Forked Bolt and the Searing Blood. I have gotten quite a bit of mileage from both of these and they help diversify my burn spells some. Showing the Forked bolt after fetching for a Steam Vents often makes my opponent think that I am on UR delver which lets them walk straight into mutagenic growth. Searing Blaze seems much better than Searing Blood but often times you don't have any extra lands to trigger landfall making it slightly worse as the game goes on.
 
Cheers,
Simon

Buying Magic: the Gathering from Facebook

Lately, I have been using eBay and MOTL less and less to buy and sell Magic cards. I also buy very few Magic cards from US dealers (TCG Player, Bidwicket, SCG, CFB, etc.) because their prices are generally sky high and they don't have the niche items that I generally look for (miscuts, misprints and Russian cards). So where have I been buying my cards from? The perhaps surprising answer is Facebook. Before joining multiple online Facebook Magic groups I rarely used Facebook,mostly because I don't really care what other people are doing or what other people "like."

The first group I joined was Magic: The Gathering misprints and oddities. This niche group now has over 10,312 members. This is quite an astonishing number for such a niche market as misprints.

The second groups that I joined were the Non-English Magic the Gathering trading group and the High End Magic stuff for sale! These groups have ~2000 and ~15,000 members respectively.

The above groups are the groups that I still actively use to buy and sell Magic cards.

So why use Facebook instead of selling to a store, eBay, MOTL, etc.:

Pro -
No fees!
No picture limit
You can message the buyer/seller

Con -
Scammers
Posts can get lost

Be careful out there but don't forget to have fun and buy some new sweet cards (or sell some to me!).

Cheers,
Simon

Grab Bag - Magic Online (MODO), Modern Masters 2, Jeskai Ascendancy, Legacy

Grab Bag

Part 1 - Magic Online (MODO)
 
I have been spending more time getting myself immersed in the new world of MODO (for me anyway).
 
Which I have written a little about here:
 
http://mtgbazaar-teamz.blogspot.com/2014/12/magic-online-modo-buying-edition.html
 
http://mtgbazaar-teamz.blogspot.com/2014/06/why-hearthstone-made-me-better-at-magic.html
 
What I really want to utilize MODO for is playing legacy and modern. In order to do that I need to replicate my real life collection. I saw an interesting post recently that said to buy a playset of every card on MODO (cheapest version) would cost you approximately $25,675. That presumably includes a bunch of bulk cards that you wouldn't want, or you already got from opening packs, etc. I would estimate (completely unscientifically) that to get all the cards you would want on MODO for around $20,000. If you are willing to skip on certain niche cards you can probably bring this cost down even further. I would be interested in seeing the cost for all cards on MODO for legacy since I don't need Siege Rhino's, etc.
  
The best thing about buying in to MODO right now is that Vintage Masters is still fresh(ish) off the presses and the cost of the power 9 is probably at its lowest point until they re-print in the future (~$150 for Black Lotus). Also with KTK being heavily drafted there is an influx of cheap fetchlands available (sub $10). I highly suggest to anyone thinking about buying in to start now. I think the next 6 months is going to be the best time to buy in to MODO.  
 
Part 2 - Modern Masters 2
 
Continuing on from the above there is more good news in regards to buying MODO cards and that is the announcement for Modern Masters 2.
 
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/arcana/announcing-modern-masters-2015-edition-2014-12-08
 
The big re-print should be the Zendikar fetchlands which should hopefully reduce the price down similar to what KTK did for the Onslaught fetches. I have also seen some pictures of Emrakul so we will likely see Emrakul as well. The real question is will they reprint - Tarmogoyf, Dark Confidant and Vendilion Clique again? I would be surprised if we don't see at least some of them again and if we don't see them all I think we can expect more price jumps.
 
Interestingly Wizard's post doesn't mention that the printing will be limited (they did for Modern Masters I). Remarkably Wizards is also going to have a two tier price structure for Online ($6.99) v. Paper ($9.99). I think this is a good move and I wish they would do the same for Standard packs as well. Though I guess they will be against this due to their redemption policy. Honestly, MODO is probably successful enough that they could do away with the redemption policy but I know a lot of people pay their way through the program using that as a revenue stream.
 
Part 3 - Jeskai Ascendancy
 
Jeskai Ascendancy had a big week and perhaps an even bigger weekend. It all started with Yuuya Watanabe's Standard Jeskai Ascendancy deck from Worlds and Josh Utter Leyton's Modern Jeskai Ascendancy deck. It ended with Brad Nelson's Legacy Jeskai Ascendancy deck making top 16 of SCG Portland.
 
Standard

Land (24)

• 3x Battlefield Forge
• 3x Flooded Strand
• 1x Island
• 2x Mountain
• 4x Mystic Monastery                    
• 2x Plains                    
• 3x Shivan Reef
• 2x Temple of Epiphany
• 4x Temple of Triumph

Instant (14)

• 2x Jeskai Charm
• 4x Lightning Strike
• 4x Raise the Alarm
• 4x Stoke the Flames

Sorcery (8)

• 4x Hordeling Outburst
• 4x Treasure Cruise

Creature (8)

• 4x Goblin Rabblemaster
• 4x Seeker of the Way

Planeswalker (2)

• 2x Chandra, Pyromaster

Enchantment (4)

• 4x Jeskai Ascendancy                    

Sideboard (15)

• 1x Anger of the Gods                    
• 4x Disdainful Stroke                    
• 1x Elspeth, Sun's Champion                    
• 3x End Hostilities                    
• 2x Erase
• 2x Glare of Heresy                    
• 2x Magma Spray

 
 
Modern

Creatures (4)

• 4 Fatestitcher

Lands (22)

• 2 Island
• 1 Mountain
• 1 Plains
• 1 Arid Mesa
• 4 Faerie Conclave
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 4 Scalding Tarn
• 1 Seachrome Coast
• 2 Steam Vents

Spells (34)

• 4 Jeskai Ascendancy
• 4 Dig Through Time
• 4 Izzet Charm
• 3 Lightning Bolt
• 3 Path to Exile
• 3 Remand
• 4 Thought Scour
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Serum Visions
• 1 Treasure Cruise

Sideboard

1 Deprive

3 Gifts Ungiven

1 Pact of Negation

2 Swan Song

3 Wear // Tear

1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite

1 Iona, Shield of Emeria

2 Timely Reinforcements

1 Unburial Rites

 
Legacy

Creatures (8)

• 4 Fatestitcher
• 4 Young Pyromancer

Lands (18)

• 3 Arid Mesa
• 1 Faerie Conclave
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Scalding Tarn
• 3 Tundra
• 3 Volcanic Island

Spells (34)

• 4 Jeskai Ascendancy
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 2 Mental Note
• 3 Spell Pierce
• 4 Thought Scour
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Treasure Cruise

Sideboard

• 2 Pithing Needle
• 3 Meddling Mage
• 1 Sulfur Elemental
• 2 Hydroblast
• 1 Pyroblast
• 3 Surgical Extraction
• 2 Wear // Tear
• 1 Faerie Conclave

The Invitational coming up in Seattle should be very interesting with these decks now on peoples radar.

Note - this deck is very difficult to play on MODO because of all the triggers, this may influence the % of this deck in the metagame.

Note 2 - Jeskai Ascendancey is only about $2 a pop at the moment so it is probably worth buying or trading for a playset just in case. This is the case even if it does get banned in some number of formats.

Part 4 - Legacy

Just in case anyone wasn't sure RUG Delver (Temur Delver) is still a thing.

-Cheers-

Tri v. Scry by Ty Thomason

Today on Twitter, StarCityGames.com editor Cedric Phillips had this to say:

Flying across the country editing articles and working ondecklists for #SCGPORT. Step one = Get these Nomad Outposts out of Mardu ASAP.
— Cedric Phillips (@CedricAPhillips) December 1, 2014

This sparked a brief back and forth with some of his followers, including myself. I thought I would make a post to clarify my viewpoint and explain my reasoning.

Note: Cedric is not suggesting cutting Outpost from the deck to play more basics, or to play Mana Confluence. He is only comparing it to playing additional scry lands.

My official position is this: Tri-lands are awesome and you should play four of them.

To explain my reasoning, there are a few assumptions I will be making. First, we are talking about 60 card constructed decks. If you have both tri-lands and scry lands in your draft deck, you should just play all of them. Second, current standard decks are mostly homogeneous when it comes to spell power level. If there was a specific card that you HAD to draw in order to win,scry lands are a lot better. The function of scry lands in standard is mostly one of avoiding mana flood, or pushing slightly inferior / matchup dependent cards to the bottom in hopes of drawing better options. Third, you want to play somewhere between 23-26 lands. Many color source balancing issues can be fixed by simply playing more lands (a good trick to remember for limited), but at some point mana flood becomes a real issue.

So starting with the basics. How many colors can you play in a 60 card deck if you only have basic lands? The spells you want to play determine the number of required colored sources you want, and then you add lands to meet those requirements. Frank Karsten did the hard work already. This article shows that if you have double colored manarequirements in two colors and want to play these spells by turn 4, you would need 12 lands of each color. With only basics, this is 24 lands total, and pretty much limits deck construction to two colors. This is also the reason that the conventional wisdom is to draft two color decks in most formats. Without access to common mana fixing like in Khans or RTR block, playing 3 colors requires 19-21 total lands.

As you allow access to dual colored lands, it becomes much easier to meet the minimum requirements set in Franks article. With dual lands available in each color combination, the 12 dual land and 4 of each basic gives you 12 sources of each of three colors while still within 24 land slots. If you allow the tri-land of those three colors, you could end up with 15 sources in each color easily. Franks math was only done to ensure 90%certainity. With more sources you can be more certain of having the colored mana you need. Brad Nelson has shown that when you add enough tri-lands, four color decks become possible!

Unfortunately, tri-lands aren't all upside. They enter thebattlefied tapped, but so do scry lands! The issue comes down to how many ETB tapped lands we can afford to play. Another way to look at it is how many untapped sources do we need to play, since we can always play more tapped lands instead of spells. The typical standard Mardu deck plays 9-10 tapped lands.

I love scry lands. I was one of the few people in my play group not disappointed when they were spoiled. New Benalia was always a card I loved. That said, I think they are worse than tri-lands.

What advantages do scry lands have? They help mitigate flood, and the more you play the better they are. However, Most decks in standard also run fetchlands, which undo the scrying you have already achieved in the game. A deck like Blue-White Heroic shouldn't play Windswept Heath because it scrys so much that it would do more harm than good, even considering that it adds to delve to reduce the cost of Treasure Cruise. Scrying can also be used to "fix" your mana, digging you for the colored source you are missing. This isn't an advantage over tri-lands though, since tri-lands already provide the missing source. Deciphering between which land you want to keep and which land to push is another added level of complexity to the deck that might lead to more mistakes. Having to keep a land on top because its thecolor you need when you already have drawn plenty of manasources is not taking full advantage of the scrys you get.

It is completely possible to get the mana ratios right using less than 4 copies of a tri-land. With each copy you don't play, you are increasing the liklihood of not having the mana you need. In return, you get to scry. Is the likelihood of the scry helping you out higher than the likelihood of running into mana issues?

 

Maybe it is lazy deckbuilding, but it's something I've spent lots of time thinking about before. What tri-lands do is very unique and it's hard to find something to compare it to. From the Seaside Citadels of Brian Kibler's Next Level Bant, to the Savage Lands (instead of extra man lands!) of Simon Gortzen's Jund deck, they have a place in deck construction. I think 4 is the starting number, and I wonder how many more I would be willing to play.

Another way to think about tri-lands and their importance is to look at fetch lands in formats where dual lands are fetchable. In a typical Legacy deck, you run many more fetches than duals, many times not even running the full 4 copies of any one dual. This is because fecth lands that can get any of the 3 dual lands you use function as tri-lands until you fetch them. A fetch land in your hand with and single other colored land gives you access to all three colors of mana for your deck. Waiting to crackfetchlands is very important not just for brainstorming, but also so you don't restrict the colors of mana you have access to. Similarly, it is also important to not fetch the last copy of a dual land in your deck unless you have a good reason to. Not having a Tundra to get with Scalding Tarn the turn you need to cast Swords to Plowshares will cost you.

Bonus Top Ten - Top Ten Dual Land Cycles

1.Tundra
2. Hallowed Fountain
3. Adarkar Wastes
4. Mystic Gate
5. Seachrome Coast
6. Celestial Colonade
7. Temple of Enlightenment
8. Glacial Fortress
9. Flooded Strand (number 1 if Tundra / hallowed fountain are legal)
10. Skyclould Expanse

Reminder that fetchlands aren't as good without dual lands!

Thanks,
Ty

Magic Online (MODO): The Buying Edition

Despite purchasing a laptop specifically to play MODO I have been dragging my feet on making the jump into the online universe of Magic. Paying for digital versions of cards is just nowhere near as exciting and I have preferred to spend a lot less money playing Hearthstone (i.e. almost none) and buying fun foreign and miscut cards off eBay instead. I talked about this briefly before.

This weekend while sleep deprived and up way too late with the little one, I decided to mess around on MODO some. After expending some  more time and energy winning 5 card booster packs in the new MODO player draft events I was getting a little bored...Aside - Wizards is that really the best you can do for new players? Winning a 5 card booster and getting 4 commons and an uncommon is a really miserable experience. With my new found interest in MODO piqued (and my distaste for 5 card boosters), I started exploring Magic singles and was sent into a nonsensical spiraling world of bots, websites, credits, PayPal and tix. Oh my, is this a whole different language and style than the regular process of point and click purchasing. That is before you even look at pricing trends (Ex - Real life Daze $3, Online Daze $30). This is going to take some work...

First, I searched for reviews of bots and sites, etc. There are a lot of them out there and using MODO alone will not help whatsoever, so you will need to search the internet for more info. Aside - the online market place is a total shit show and is completely nonsensical to new players... I found a few helpful articles but in all honesty nobody broke it down enough to make it 100% useful.

Second, what did I want to play? I am fine playing any Magic format (minus EDH) because I just love Magic but my preference is to play Legacy for the sole reason that it is easier to keep up with if I have to take a break or I am unable to get a hold of new cards, etc. I also just like playing with the old cards that I am familiar with. I would have liked to build UR delver or something similar, as I have been playing a lot of UR delver in the real world and it seems like it would be a fine deck online as well.

I was prepared to pay for the Volcanic Islands and Force of Wills (around $30 each) but I was not prepared for the price of some of the commons (Daze $30 and Pyroblast $7). Consequently I stepped back a second and decided to go with Stage 1 of UR delver which is simply Burn. After I filled my cart with the cards for Burn I noticed that I also had most of the cards for modern burn minus a few of the Modern only cards (i.e. Skullcrack, Flames of the Bloodhand, etc.). Thus, I filled out my cart with these cards too. I still had some new player event tickets and I noticed that there were some New Player Standard Queues in which I could play (I really want more 5 card packs!). From my initial card collection and the 5 card boosters I had already won I had a good start on Boss Sligh, so I decided to pick up the remainder of that deck minus the Stoke the Flames (already had 1) and Goblin Rabblemasters (which only some versions use).

All in all, I got x3 playable if not Tier 1 Magic decks for ~$140. In this purchase I also bought some of the cheap blue cards to give me a head start on UR Delver (Brainstorm, Ponder, Delver, Young Pyromancer, etc.) I probably bought from one of the more expensive stores (MTGOTraders) but their search engine was the best and they let you pay through PayPal easily. Oh yeah and I found a coupon for 8% off my entire order which leveled the playing field a little.

Lastly, I later found that these exist for ~$30...

http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/tcg/productarticle.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/mtgodeckseries/themedeck#deck1

I could have saved quite a bit of money and time if I had purchased this instead and I definitely need to keep and eye out for future ones (the $7 Pyroblasts I bought are particularly galling). Also, I will definitely be buying the white one to get the x3 Stoneforge Mystic, x1 Jitte and x4 Swords to Plowshares.   

On the plus side, I did win my first New player Standard 1v1 (oh yeah 5 card pack) as well as my first 1v1 2 tix event (oh yeah 15 card card pack).

Cheers,
Simon