9/26/2023 0 Comments Mtg spike definitionLet's say there were 10 copies of Greed listed for sale on TCGplayer at between $40 and $60 (made up numbers, but having 10 or fewer near mint copies for sale isn't uncommon for very old cards). Unfortunately, things can get a bit weird when it comes to cards with low supply and buyouts. Normally, this system works pretty well because if you look at random Standard or Modern cards, there are generally hundreds of listings on TCGplayer, giving us a large and meaningful sample size and a pretty stable representation of a card's price. Just like it sounds, TCG-Mid is the median price of all the copies of a specific card listed for sale on the site. If you somehow aren't familiar with TCGplayer, it is the biggest card market in North America, and rather than selling cards itself, it allows players and stores to sell cards through its marketplace in exchange for a small percentage of their profits (similar to eBay but focused on CCGs / TCGs and without auctions). The price charts you see here on Goldfish use TCG-Mid pricing. So, how does a random old card (with a bunch of reprintings that are worth $1 or so) end up spiking to $300? To understand this, we need to to talk about how the price charts on Goldfish (and most other finance sites) actually work. Here, we have the Legends printing of the aptly named Greed, which more than doubled in price a couple of days ago (and, compared to a couple of months ago when Greed was around $30, increased about 1,000%). Let's start with an ironic price chart I posted on Twitter a couple of days ago: This being said, for our purposes today, it doesn't really matter too much how a card was bought out or why it spiked in price because whether it's players or speculators, finance-driven or play-driven, the underlying mechanics of a buyout and price spike are more or less the same. Second, there are cases (especially with Reserved List cards) where one person or a small group of people intentionally buy as many copies of a card as possible with the express goal of increasing its price to be able to make a profit. As people start to relist new copies of the card for sale, they do so at a higher price representative of this new demand. First, a card suddenly becomes more popular, and lots and lots of players start picking up a copy or playset (perhaps combined with some number of "speculators" who buy cards in the hopes of making a profit), and (especially if it's an older card without a lot of supply to begin with) the end result is that all or most of the copies of the card are purchased from various Internet vendors and sites. The reason why cards spike isn't all that important to today's article, since our focus is on understanding how price spikes actually work and what they really mean, but typically there are two primary reasons why cards get bought out and spike in price. While Reserved List cards are especially likely to be bought out (which is the most common cause of a price spike) thanks to their low supply and the Reserved List itself-which offers a wall of protection around speculators, who don't have to worry about a surprise reprint ruining their investment-older, low-supply Modern, and Commander cards deal with the same issue, just on a smaller scale. Magic cards are changing in price all the time, and at least a handful of cards "spike" in price (see a very large and fast price increase) just about every week.
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