Why we use TCG Mid as a Benchmark. Why we shouldn't.
Economics forum
Posted on May 27, 2015, 8:28 p.m. by JRaynor
I just noticed someone on these forums telling a fellow player to always use the TCG player pricing, and I wanted to beg the question of "Why?"
I've been playing magic for about a year now, and when I started I would have whole heartedly agreed with the fellow. Now? Well, I have my doubts. Let me explain why.
When I started playing, I was building quite a few rogue decks. I didn't understand the meta as well as I do now, and I wasn't buying staples. TCG worked for me. It had what I needed, when I needed, for the lowest price on a consistent basis. This is when TCGplayer is at its best.
When I started playing Modern more seriously, and I was picking up my Goyfs, Liliana's, and Snapcasters I stopped using TCG player completely.
Turns out, when you're trying to build a Modern deck, TCG player just doesn't reliably have Modern staples priced well enough to justify the amount of time and risk you have to put into that sort of purchase. If you do find a good deal, most of the time the vendor will have 2 of your card at the most, which means you're going to be buying from multiple vendors and a good amount of the money you'll be "saving" is going to be eaten up by additional shipping costs. If you really work hard at it, you can still get a good deal but how do your value your time? Unless you're incapable of working, fiddling around for a few hours to save yourself a couple bucks is usually a bad gig. Furthermore, if you order from multiple vendors with an eye towards price you are only increasing your chances of getting a bad Seller. It feels to me that every time I place an order on TCG across multiple sellers, it's a roulette to decide which card/cards either miss being shipped, get lost in the mail, or take a month and a half to show up.
The problem is that Modern is a format where you regularly need 4 copies of high demand cards. I'm not saying TCG-player can't be used as a vendor for modern, but in my experience it fails as a reliable price point. The TCG-Mid price is irrelevant if you can't reliably pick up a playset of the card for that price. When I picked up my Snapcaster Mages TCGplayer was actually more expensive mid-range cost than both the ebay buy-it-now price and coostuffinc!
Anyway, that's been my experience in the matter. I hadn't even mentioned the price fluctuations and variability that happen throughout one day.
TCG-Player Mid Pricing - Great for casual play and casual price points. Not as reliable for Modern staples.
HolyFalcon says... #3
@ThisIsBullshit: we use scg bruh
lel, no, but there's a kid at my school who ALWAYS uses SCG and it gets on my nerves. A while back I was trading him some Hordeling Outbursts, and back then SCG valued them at like 0.75$ and TCG was 1.75$.
I think we just use the lowest TCG NM price. If I can buy a card for 5$ shipping included but the mid is 6$, I think I know what I'm valuing it at.
May 27, 2015 8:41 p.m.
I personally use CoolstuffInc's price point. I still check it against TCG about 50% of the time but it's rare that it's more expensive for the staples.
Both of my LGS's use mtggoldfish, when pricing cards and determining what they will buy.
May 27, 2015 8:46 p.m.
bijschjdbcd says... #6
Keep in mind, Why would he want to trade them to you for 1.75 when he can get them for less...
May 27, 2015 8:53 p.m.
bijschjdbcd says... #8
Then he should just buy them if he can get them cheaper.
May 27, 2015 8:59 p.m.
HolyFalcon says... #9
Yeah, he should've. He didn't have money though, only trade value. Then again, he could've buylisted to SCG.
May 27, 2015 9 p.m.
insertcleverid says... #10
I'm confused, is this post about using TCG as a place to shop, or a place to benchmark trades? These two different topics are conflated here. Lucky the solution is the same for both situations: Please look at a bare minimum of 2 websites before you buy or trade a Goyf. How hard is that?
But, if we're just talking about trade benchmarking, you do have options in these corner cases, but none of them are very good for everyday trades.
You can use starcity because at least they over-price their cards consistently.
You can use mtgprice.com but it's relationship to a finance blog as well as the option to include ebay and buylists into its 'fair trade' price make me suspicious.
It's really the least of all evils you're choosing from. The method most websites use to generate a card's 'value' is a top-down methodology based on their own preferences and/or needs. This is uniquely untrue of TCG, which is the real reason people use it to trade. For those that don't know, the price is automatically derived from hundreds of independent sources working in a relatively unrestrained free market. Vendors tweek prices in real time to undercut the competition when they can get away with it. TCG automatically updates the average (or is it median?) of these prices. Generally that's enough for me to prefer TCG 99% of the time. In a situation where you're trading a goyf...um maybe just slow down and think about it first. raynor is not wrong about when a card is in low supply. Those situations are open to abuse. But maybe you should just shop around before making a big magic purchase, just like you would with everything else.
May 27, 2015 9:14 p.m.
SpartanCEL says... #11
Not nessessarly for trading, but I use it for buying because it's safe and easy, so for arguments sake Amazon
Now just hold on a sec before you kill me. 99% of the time it's around tgc mid, legit tgc mid.
Modern staples for example
Tarmogoyf mm2015
So the prices are generally close, sometimes a dollar more but I'm willing to spend a dollar on an expensive card for saftey because I have yet to get a bad card. (tho one card came like a month or 2 late, I totally forgot about it to be honest it was a bad card haha) Just don't order across the country and it'll be within a week generally for me
May 27, 2015 9:15 p.m.
SpartanCEL says... #12
I also tend to order from stores that have lots of reviews/well known so I do get my cards
May 27, 2015 9:17 p.m.
insertcleverid Sorry if I wasn't clear. It is easy to check multiple websites for pricing before trading/selling modern staples and that's pretty much what I was getting at.
Another player was exhorting the community to "Always price cards based on TCG prices. in a different thread.
Rather than jumping off into an off topic discussion right there about why I disagreed with his statement, I posted here per forum decorum rules. My real life experience in building a modern staple collection has been that TCG-mid is not a gold standard because you can't reliably buy cards at the price listed when they're in such high demand. + all the other things I said in my original post.
May 27, 2015 10:06 p.m.
FAMOUSWATERMELON says... #14
I mean, as cards get more expensive, their prices fluctuate more. Modern staples don't really have a set prices the same as some less expensive cards, because they're valued differently by different people and their prices can fluctuate by $50 or more. So while TGC may be more expensive for card A than Amazon, Amazon will sell card B more expensive than TGC. TCG is just generally used as a reference because it shows the average more precisely than any other site. But for buying cards, you're going to have to search for the cheapest online. There's not one site that sells them all for candy.
May 27, 2015 10:16 p.m. Edited.
MSU_Iced_Z says... #15
The biggest thing to remember is that as the price of the card increases, so do fluctuations in its value between sellers. A 10% difference on a playset of a $1 rare is 40 cents. A 10% difference on a playset of a $50 modern staple (and $50 is low) is $20. TCG is great shorthand when a neutral (ie, not a site pushing its own buylist and inventory) common ground is more efficient than digging into multiple sites to save a buck. If you're trading real money around, it's worth the time to be thorough.
Tl;dr: don't drive across town to save 2 cents on a gallon of gas.
May 27, 2015 10:34 p.m.
insertcleverid says... #17
Right. 99.99% of the time TCG really is the gold standard. Because we know that when cards are in low supply, the prices might be off, check to make sure the cards are not in low supply. This would apply more to bobs and goyfs.
May 27, 2015 11:52 p.m.
insertcleverid I think my post is pretty much in direct disagreement with that statement. My experience in buying a decent sized modern collection over a period of 6 months was that TCG was primarily a bad representation for how much you could actually acquire the cards for.
I don't think there's anything wrong with using TCG as a generic guide to pricing, but it's anything but a gold standard when it comes to modern.
The value of a card is exactly equal to its lowest common denominator, in NM condition. Typically we use TCG as a benchmark because it presents the lowest price for the cards we want. When it comes to higher valued, in demand cards though, I found without fail that I could get a better price or the same price with better service than on TCG.
To give you a few examples: My LGS offers a buy a playset for the price of 3 cards deal. I bought my Snapcasters on Ebay for $35 a piece Buy-It-Now when they were going for $50 Mid on TCG. You might pick up one Tarmogoyf or any of these cards for a good price on TCG from a new seller trying to make a name but they VERY rarely have 4, or more than 4. They don't have a regular way to acquire more of those cards, not to mention the fact that you're taking a chance on a new seller if you go for one of those deals.
Again, TCG is the Benchmark for most trades because it is the lowest common denominator in terms of pricing for a lot of cards out there. All I'm saying is that in my experience, this doesn't hold true when it comes to modern staples. You can almost always find a better price somewhere. So do yourself a favor, don't blindly accept the TCG-mid pricing when it comes to high $$$ cards just because it normally works for the rest of the game and you trust it.
Nothing wrong with using it as part of your research or as a rough guide, but it is not 99% correct as you stated; at least when it comes to modern.
May 28, 2015 1:10 a.m.
JakeHarlow says... #19
I use ABUGAMES even though they're often inflated for staples by up to $5. But it's usually not so bad and their pricing is consistent.
May 28, 2015 2:34 a.m.
Somewhere between mid to low is what a local shop accepts for most trade and sell value. On few occasions, if I remember correctly, they'll go for full mid value.
I don't like TCG due to such low value on bulk rares, because of this I tend to not trade 'dollar rares'. Let's see them take a card from a rare slot worth $0.07 on TCG. Or a card is outrageously high valued but the mid to low is very cheap. blah, blah...
As for Modern staples; I just to know where to get 'em. So, my decks tend to be cheap.
May 28, 2015 2:54 a.m.
APPLE01DOJ says... #21
I use Amazon also.
Bidding on eBay is typically the cheapest.
May 28, 2015 2:56 a.m.
Back to using Amazon for me then. That's what I used when I restarted up Magic
May 28, 2015 3 a.m.
I use TCG because the cards I buy on it are usually cheaper. Personally, i've never had a bad experience.
Also I don't mind waiting a month for cards since shipping is free for most of it because otherwise i'll have to pay whatever the local shops demand.
Lately some of my favorite local shops are falling out of my favor. For instance, one of them started refusing to buy Courser of Kruphix a few weeks ago. I get that it's the stores right but saying "We don't want to buy that, rotation" is just a bad excuse. Especially when standard players are notorious for buying a good card even if it's only got a week left in rotation at the full price! Other times they don't want to buy cards simply because they don't want to do the work of entering the card into their online accounts and/or sorting it for their in store accounts.
Also stores have a serious problem of selling/not selling promo cards. For instance, I had gotten 3 promo Thunderbreak Regent and went to Store "B" to sell them after Store "A" said that they didn't want to buy mine. I ended up selling all but 1 of my promos to store B. Then a few weeks later I needed cash due to an unexpected ear infection so I go back to store A and now they're willing to buy the promo. The price was still like 95% of what it was the first time I tried to sell to them.
Lastly a lot of the staff at the local shops are just assholes. I've seen several of them gripe about their job while their working, gripe about a customer "A" to customer "B" when customer A is and isn't there, and though I didn't realize it at the time, some of them have taken stock from the store in order to get me the card I wanted for the trade because they wanted one of my cards badly. Oh and sometimes the staff tries to intimidate me into buying things or making trades for cards that I don't want to trade. So yeah getting sick of game shops.
Anyways long story short is if I didn't go by TCG prices i'd have to use outdated information for reference, or worse, whatever the prices are at the shop i'm in as I arrange a trade either with another customer or the store.
Oh yeah that brings me to my last pet peeve. Store employees often get a discount which is a good thing. What's not a good thing is when they try to base the prices for cards off of what they "could get it for". This isn't a big issue with standard but for commander or modern it can really change the pricing of things.
May 28, 2015 3:16 a.m.
I will say JRaynor that E-bay is the way to go. If I were to put my favorite way to price cards in order it would be E-bay>TCG>Card Kingdom>Local Shops.
I got a sweet deal on my Ajani Steadfast when they were newer and have since traded them to other players using TCG mid and made approx 9 dollars profit off the deal. Super happy I let my friend talk me into using E-bay.
May 28, 2015 3:21 a.m.
Didgeridooda says... #25
I just use TCG, but if someone wants to use something else, I will use that. I am pretty easy to deal with, but I also do not deal in high value cards. I only trade for the cards that I need for decks, and have only tried speculating on a couple small things.
May 28, 2015 3:43 p.m.
GeminiSpartanX says... #26
If you're looking solely to buy certain Modern staples, then Ebay is the best place to get them. However, TCG is a great and easy tool to determine approximate trade values of cards when no real cash is involved. You need something to judge relative card value by, so use it along with other sites to determine what that value will be for you. In the end, the trade will either happen with both parties feeling good about it, or likely won't happen at all.
ThisIsBullshit says... #2
However, that begs the question: What do we use instead? There's, in my experience, no other vendor that represents prices that follow the supply and demand curve as well as TCGplayer does.
May 27, 2015 8:35 p.m.