Rags to Riches: Week Nine – Fun with Foils

Posted on July 25, 2010 by Plejades

Hello fellow cardslingers,

Before we start with this week’s wheeling and dealing a few short remarks – MTGOacademy has decided to run a bot to better serve its customers. You can find it running 24/7 as “Academy_Sellbot, Academy_Sellbot2, and Academy_Budgetbot“. We have great prices on all our cards, are buying nearly all sets, and have a wide selection from which to shop. You can also purchase bot credit in our online store with verified PayPal. Check it out!

My second point is very much connected with the first; to make it possible for us to use an old bot license we had we had to move all “Rags to Riches” goodies to another account. No fear, except the name, nothing will change. I am now trading under “AcademyBot2″ and will continue to aim for my ultimate goal: a foil Force of Will.

Let’s dive right in where we left last time. After buying and selling promo foil Forks back and forth we made a healthy profit and are ready to reinvest in other goodies. I decided to go with solid cards that should be either easy to sell or have a very good profit margin. Generally speaking non-foil Standard cards are in the first category and Classic foils in the second. After some search and bot scanning I settled with the following as my first trade:

While Garruk is printed in various sets it is still a sought after card and the price seemed low to me. I bought two and hope to flip them for a bit of profit later. Shortly after the purchase, I found an old time favorite of mine at a dealer site and could not resist. A foil Smokestack will surely not be the easiest card to flip, but the card is very powerful and a Classic (perhaps soon Vintage?) player will hopefully find it appealing.

I put the Garruks up for 7 each which led to a quick sale. While I could have priced it higher I wanted to flip quick and not get stuck with them. I was able to sell both to the same person for 14 after a while.

Finally I purchased old favorites of mine – two foil promo Comet Storm. They should sell higher then purchase price.

Mostly purchases this time but I believe that we got a few very nice deals that will help to boost our ticket count soon enough. Last time I promised a short list of foils that are worth more then dealer lists indicate. I am not going to attach a specific value to them because it is highly subjective but rest assured that you will be able to sell them for more then the going list prices. In no particular order:

Wild Growth
Merchant Scroll
Impulse
Deadwood Treefolk
Squee, Goblin Naboob
Avatar of Might
Doran, the Siege Tower
Hurkyl’s Recall
Wanderwine Hub

This is by no means an exhaustive list but rather a sample of cards you can watch out for. If you can snatch them cheaply do not hesitate to do so as they should sell for a healthy profit if you take the dealer prices as baseline.

I am not going to include a collection value this time as I have mostly bought cards and don’t want to speculate to much on the values I will be able to sell them. My next update will include a list when I am able to sell some of the foils. Hopefully with a nice profit again.

Until then good luck with your treasure hunt and don’t forget to check out our bot!

Cheers,

Marin

 

  1. So you went and bought the Smokestack at a website? I thought you weren’t going to add any more money past the ROE booster. Thank you for the foil list I’ll be sure to look out for them.

  2. I think he ordered it off a website and paid with tickets ingame.

    Thanks for the foil list!

    Does the MTGOcardtraderbot have the same prices/inventory as the website’s store?

  3. Wow, the MTGOcardtraderbot sounds *very* appealing. I look forward to using it…tomorrow!

    Oh and nice trades as always, but I’m sure you don’t need a random joe to tell you that =)

  6. The Smokestack was purchased with tickets I earned with my trades of course. No outside money is flowing into the system as that would obviously defeat the purpose of this series. Thanks for the comments!

  9. i’ve been wondering, what are your thoughts on the foil phyrexian negator now? you’ve had it for 6-7 weeks without having been able to sell it. mtgotraders currently prices it at 7, which would be great, but then a human selling to a bot would maybe be able to get at most 4.5? have you perhaps found any bots buying it?

  10. As indicated in one of the early episodes the Negator will be a tough sell. The only reason I took the card was the fact that I got it dirty cheap and cannot really lose on it. I think 7 tickets is far to optimistic for the card though and would probably be happy to sell for 4 to 5 now.

  11. For cards like the Negator that are a long time sell, so you always log in and then put it straight on to classifieds ‘Negator for 5′ etc and then leave it whilst you go about your business? Or is there a specific way you try and sell hard to flip cards?

  12. I was able to buy 4 negators off a bot for 3.5 a piece and sell them for 4.04 each, to Allfoilzonly. try to sell yours there :-)

  13. What are your thoughts on picking up some foil Valakut’s as the deck has been poping up everwhere in the top 8s of the recent nationals. I can see the value going up pretty fast once the green titan hits the market online next week?

  14. how high do you think they will go up though? at one point I found them on the 10 for 1 bots, but never picked any up until they started getting popular in block and with the possibility of transferring into the new standard. I managed to get 4 for 1, but now a lot of places are selling them for close to 1, and the foils I saw are either 1 a piece or more. so it would depend on how high you think they will rise to.

  15. I’ve seen in the past 2 weeks the regulars have gone from .2 tix to anywheres from 1 to 1.5 tix. and even when they were at .2 for the regulars, the foils were still at 1. So i think in the coming weeks they should hit 2.5 to 3 at least. I could be wrong but I have a good feeling on this one. I picked up 20 foils ranging from 1 to 1.8 tickets ( I’d say 70% falling between 1-1.2) so even if im wrong i might stand to lose 3 or 4 tix at worst and hopefully make 20-30 tix if im right.

  16. Basically what I’m trying to say is they have been on the rise for 2 weeks and that is just in anticipation that it is going to make the jump from block into the standard meta. I truly believe that at least for the next few months this is a deck that is going to be around while everone tries to perfect the G\R Titan Ramp.

  17. Yeah, I too have noticed that they were on the rise, and if that works out for you, it would be sweet! Similarly lodestone golem was a cheap rare and jumped to over 2 tickets when the new zendikar bllock constructed red deck came out…hope it works out for you!

  20. The series will continue next week. Due to extensive travel and movement over continents the author (me) was not able to contribute for a few weeks. We are going to get back on regular schedule soon!

    Cheers

  21. I picked up a Deadwood Treefolk foil for about 0.25, but I’m not sure what to set the sell price for. AllFoilzOnly offered me 0.029, so that’s not good. Has this list perhaps “expired” in terms of value? Perhaps in update in Part 11 might help us be on the lookout for the right shinies. :-)

    Thanks for writing a fun series! I’m looking forward every installment.