I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I’ve known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.
Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don’t know how that factors in expected value return.
Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.
Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I’ll say some outrageous hypothesis:
Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen.
Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god.
There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.
Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don’t.
Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don’t come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come—there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What’s also interesting is “catastrophy mail”, that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.
There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.
I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I’m quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first “reliable” long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).
What I have taken from this is any time I travel abroad I should get in touch with my stamp investing friend and form a strategy for finding good local deals that have a likely long term value, possibly in other markets, and also I should try to make more friends expert in such collectibles investing for the same reason. I have not concluded I should expect to beat the market without a similar effort.
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There’s always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there’s an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone—logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.
I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I’ve known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.
Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don’t know how that factors in expected value return.
Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.
Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I’ll say some outrageous hypothesis: Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen. Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god. There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.
I wouldn’t know about magic cards, sorry.
Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don’t.
Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don’t come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come—there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What’s also interesting is “catastrophy mail”, that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.
There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.
I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I’m quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first “reliable” long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).
What I have taken from this is any time I travel abroad I should get in touch with my stamp investing friend and form a strategy for finding good local deals that have a likely long term value, possibly in other markets, and also I should try to make more friends expert in such collectibles investing for the same reason. I have not concluded I should expect to beat the market without a similar effort.
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There’s always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there’s an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone—logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.