Editorial Section:
Oddly enough, it's been almost exactly one year since I touched on this topic, and you can read my previous concerns about MTGO hoarding here.

This time around, I'm going to focus on the Speculation side of the (Hoarding |------| Speculation) rainbow as some recent discussions in my comments last week have really emphasized the hot nature of this topic.  I'll briefly restate my thoughts about hoarding before moving into speculation and the differences between the two.  The difficulty in any of these types of discussion is that people tend to have different interpretations of the same terminology.  In order to get us all on the same page in this section I'll need

Between Hoarding and Speculation:
Hoarding, (as generally defined in business terms): "Excess accumulation of commodities or currency in anticipation of scarcity and/or higher prices".
Compare that to:
Speculation: "Assumption of risk in anticipation of gain but recognizing a higher than average possibility of loss."

As stated in the linked article above, hoarding generally seems to be done with the intent of driving the price up on its own actions and capitalize once the market is effectively cornered.  I know of only one actual hoarding attempt on MTGO which backfired horribly.  (The person in question was hoarding Vampiric Tutors for 20 tix each right up until they were restricted... OOOOOOOOPPPPSSSS).  I have heard other rumors of hoarding but have not seen them first hand like I had the above example.  It's possible that there has been hoarding of the Counterbalance's in the liquid asset parts of the system (bots).  However it is really hard to fully hoard something on MTGO in today's environment.  Essentially, for every bot there are many players.  Players with cards that they might sell if the price gets high enough.  The only way to truly corner a market is on a low access card from an older set.  Anything remotely current will have plenty of copies residing in accounts.

Speculation carries risks:
Ask the guy with dozens of Vampiric Tutors in his account.  Or the bot owners who bought dozens of MED2 duals, only to see WotC subsidize the MED2 queues to the point of being 'free' and flooding the market.  The reason MED2 duals aren't through the roof is the "Farewell MED2 Events" that pumped dozens and dozens of play sets into the market right before MED2 went off sale by essentially subsidizing the players of MED2 at the time.  Looking back, it's entirely possible that those events were sweeter than normal by design, in a WotC attempt to flood the market with duals.  But that's getting us into tin foil territory, and there's only so much of that I'm willing to go into publicly.  Those are just a couple examples of attempts at mass speculation and hoarding that backfired a bit. 

Prices adjust in time:
Speculation and hoarding have a similar immediate impact on the price of the commodity in question (in our case, singles). Hoarding, true hoarding, really messes with the prices of cards by keeping them out of circulation completely until a certain price is met.  As the market is cornered there's no competition or worry of being undercut.  To this end, Hoarding can only truly be accomplished when something is going to have little to no additional supply appearing.  Speculation, on the other hand, generally has more than one person in the mix and that helps to make price much less exorbitant than it is when hoarding is involved.  The thought process is pretty simple really.  If one person has all 240 available cards then they can set the price to whatever they like.  If, however, there are three people with 80 cards each there is still some semblance of competition (assuming they're not colluding for price fixing, of course).

It's all in the intent:
If you're intending to drive the price up based on your actions, you're attempting to manipulate the market and hoard, or corner, that market.  If you're attempting to get a bunch of cards before a hopeful price jump you're speculating.  The key difference of course, is the intent of the actions.  I know that speculation carries a negative connotation with, probably overlapping from the hatred of hoarding.  People are understandably upset when someone attempts to hoard, and I think that frustration has spilled over into anyone caught 'speculating' as well. 

Let's take a couple of examples that I know of first hand; one from last week's articles involving Kabira Evangel and one non-public one; foil Forbidden Orchards.  The person who bought the foil Orchards got them quite cheap with the anticipation of Oath of Druids being a worthy archtype in Classic.  Also, we know from last week, that folks snapped up as many as 80 evangel's at .1 ticket each.  So how have those speculative purchases worked out? Foil Orchards are currently sitting at 7.00 and sold out while Kabira Evangel's are at .9, with 8 in stock.  I highly doubt that Kabira's will go much higher than that due to the massive amounts of Zendikar that still flows into the system on a daily basis.  The interesting thing about the Orchards is that their demand is directly tied to another low availability card in Oath of Druids.  The lack of availability on Oath means a lower of demand for Orchards.  Again, the fact that so much risk in speculation is tied to things outside of the control of the speculators is what balances out the risk vs reward of those who approach the speculation market.

I don't believe that either individual in my stories have attempted to impact the availability of a card, a deck, or an archetype.  And they all put their own money on the line on speculation.  Luckily both have made a decent profit from their speculation, but both were reduced by items outside of their control.  This is a typical risk/reward structure of an open market like we have on MTGO.  In fact, in the above stories one ran up a bunch of the current set cards and one picked up the 'special' version of an ample supply rare.  This type of speculation doesn't hurt the players as the cards' prices' in question would have gone upwards with or without their involvement.

Ways to benefit from Hoarding/Speculation:
The best way for most players to capitalize on the actions of others is to use them to subsidize your limited spending.  In the case of Kabira Evangel going up and up, there's not a lot of change in the way people play.  Meaning that most people already are playing Zendikar, and this merely helps recoup those costs a little bit more.  However, knowing that some older cards, like Coldsnap rares and uncommons, have gone up tremendously and as such we should be on the lookout for CSP nix tix drafts when they are added (although sadly, none are on the nix tix schedule through March).  However, there are MVW nix tix(and pax) events coming up in early to mid February which should prove to have a solid EV for the costs.  As that event gets closer I'll run the numbers for per pack prices again.  As always, keeping an eye on the nix tix schedule is a good idea for planning out limited spending, and it can be found here.  MVW is a good time to hit the queues, as there are quite a few high priced cards in the set, even though they are slanted more towards the rare cards.
 

Discussion Items/News:
Shard of Alara Block Events extended! -
Evidently these have been pretty popular and as such they're being extended a bit and expanded.  Details in the link above.

Thoughts on being auto-dropped -
A thread about the impacts and implications of the MTGO "Auto Drop" rules.  I haven't seen a discussion about this in a good long while and I'm interested in seeing where this goes.  I don't expect any changes to the set up of tournaments but there's a lot of interesting ways to look at this one.

Card Price Discussion:
Extended, how do I love thee... let me count the ways!  Lots of improvements in Extended card prices and some positive movements in Standard and Extended to boot!  Namely on the upcoming changes for each of these formats.  Urza's is on the horizon for Classic as is the Classic/Legacy split.  Standard is about to go all Bella Swan and fall in love with a bad mate deck because it's a vampire.  Not to get all blappy or anything.  Dark Depths continues its meteoric rise based on the constant Pro Love of the deck.  Time for a haterade deck, I ever saw one! 

As for negative movers, M10 Mythics and out of flavor rares started to slide a bit, for no reason I can ascertain.  They're going to be legal for a good long while, folks!  Remember, these things will not rotate until SHARDS rotates out, not when M11 rotates in... crazy double Core Set overlap and all that. 

Card price tables:

Card price Graphs:


dark depths chart
vampire nocturnus chart
sorin markov chart
summoner's pact chart
null rod chart
city of traitors chart
cloudstone curio chart
umezawa's jitte chart
fulminator mage chart
glimpse of nature chart
cloudstone curio chart
pristine angel chart
malfegor chart
summoner's pact chart
dark depths chart
the tabernacle at pendrell vale chart
fulminator mage chart
seal of cleansing chart
rugged prairie chart
seismic assault chart
ajani vengeant chart
sphinx of the steel wind chart
stomping ground chart
baneslayer angel chart
avatar _ commander greven il_vec chart
maelstrom pulse chart
steam vents chart
grindstone chart
arcbound ravager chart
time warp chart
extractor demon chart
avatar _ commander greven il_vec chart
mycoid shepherd chart
font of mythos chart
broodmate dragon chart
earthquake chart
sphinx of the steel wind chart
hell's thunder chart
great sable stag chart
ball lightning chart

Tournament Stuff:
Below is the handy-dandy Google Tournament Calendar for MTGO! 

Sadly I don't have any videos this week as my life away from MTGO has taken a bit more focus for the past week.  I can't guarantee any major videos next week either as I intend to be working on my Card Shop as hard as I can!

Conclusion:
That wraps up this week's State of the Program. By this time next week I hope to have a Card Shop opened up in my home town of Bemidji, Minnesota.  Once that opens I will start each SotP with a full disclosure statement about said involvement just so everyone knows everything they need to about where my biases may lie!  Until then, have a great week!