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By: hamtastic, Erik Friborg
Oct 13 2007 4:58pm
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Welcome back, everyone!  This week we have a continuation of data correlation based on statistics that have been graciously provided by MTGO Traders.  If that sentence didn't put you to sleep then maybe some further down the article will knock you out.  There's a lot of data to go over so lets not waste any more time!

Table of contents:
Announcements

Outstanding Issues
Bug Complaints
MTGO Discussion Items

Server Log In Availability

MTGO Price Movers and Shakers

Editorial Section
Conclusion

MTGO Announcements:

Top 8 Drafts Removed from PE's.

This week the Top 8 Drafts were removed from PE's in the 2.5 client.  However, there appears to be a bug in them and this caused additional downtime to occur on Thursday morning.  According to Worth Wollpert the prizes for these Top 8's will include the packs from the draft that didn't happen. However, this may change with V3.

Top 8 Code Correction Outage
Worth's statement about top 8 prizes

Single Client Restrictions, still in effect.

The single client restriction is per user, not per machine.  Meaning that only one login per person is allowed.  Bots and people breaking this rule have had their accounts banned for 24 hours recently.  Again, leaving this here for reminder slash warning.

Discussion of Bots impact
How to handle those breaking the rules

Don't drop from PE's!!!

I was already advocating against dropping from Premier Events due to the likelihood of getting reimbursement from a crash.  But now things are even sillier.  According to a recent email from Customer Service you may forfeit your standings if you drop from a tournament early.  Evidently it is better for you to just walk away from your screen and let the match time out and waste your opponent and other player's time than it is to be considerate and drop.

Don't drop from events

Outstanding issues:

PayPal

I'm leaving this on the list because it's still an issue and a very big issue at that.  For those unaware, PayPal purchases from many overseas contries have been not going through correctly.  The money goes out but the product never comes through.

PayPal issues.

10ED Redemption Status

10th Edition redemption has been turned on, listed in the Server Status Announcement.  For those seeking any other type of redemption, I'm sorry, but you're in the wrong place.

10th Edition Redemption notice.

Bug complaints:

Sutured Ghoul + Tarmogoyf doesn't pump the Ghoul correctly.  And before anyone starts to yell about the Ghoul not caring about the Goyf's dynamic power, look up the Future Sight rules update information.  Or better yet, you can read about this question here and here.

MTGO Discussion items:

Bots, and the men who love them... or maybe not.

Bots and their related stress on the system were once again discussed this week.  There are some rather vehement parties on each side of the equation.  Not much is yet known about the long term stance from WotC regarding this issue, but this much is clear: they are not standing idly by anymore.

Automated nature of bots

Momir, more problems:

The price, popularity and longevity of the Momir format has become a bit of a sticky issue for our community.  Some feel that Momir should be free to all.  Some feel that Momir should be sold in the store.  Others feel that Momir tournaments should provide the avatar for the duration of the event.  And still others feel that nothing should be done.  So far there's been no official word one way or the other or other or other or other and the camps are starting to get restless.

Momir, or Lessmir?

Server Log In Availability:

I plan to graph the current and preceding month each week.  I can possibly provide a month to month overall chart once I have enough data for it to be of actual value.  Any thougts on those features?

September:

October:

Card Price Fluctuations:

Generally this would be the location to find the card fluctuation information.  However, this week I'm skipping this section to bring you some in depth data and analysis about many more card prices in much different detail.  Read below for more!

Editorial Section:

Alright!  Spinning off from where I left off last week, this editorial section will be about the price of Rares on MTGO through the ages… or, more specifically Rares from February 2006 through September 2007.  Last week I showed that we have seen a decrease in the average rare prices, but what does that really mean?  What is behind the change in prices over these months?  There has already been some speculation tossed around regarding what has caused it:  Bots, card saturation, decreased demand, etc, etc, etc.  As well as much speculation as to what these numbers really mean.  Unfortunately, there are some items we’re missing to really get into the down and dirty information.  Items like average users online, amount of rares in the system.  While I can (and do!) show how many different rares there are in the system I do not have any real way of telling how many of each rare there is in the system.  Common sense would indicate that there should be more of the newer Standard set rares in the system than there is of the older sets due to a higher amount of people purchasing them.

So I’m setting out on a quest for knowledge… and ye flask.  I started by pulling out each sets price for each month and compared the month to month pricing of each. 

Release timeframe data:

The first and probably most “common knowledge” chart shows the impact of a sets release price, in this example it is Dissension as the released set and is graphed against Ravnica for the same time period.

What I found interesting in this chart is that both sets dipped down during the Redemption Implosion of June/July/August, but both fought back to reclaim some of their initial value during this time.  For those wondering what happened to the most recent sets during the lack of redemption between April through June, this is the chart for you.  Decline followed by slow recovery appears to be the case for these sets.  I mostly just wanted a baseline chart to show a couple of things here.  First, that the data is representitive of what we'd expect during this time and secondly, that it makes sense to wait for prices to come down after the first couple of weeks of a set release.

IPA:

Next, we move on to some slightly more juicy information: IPA trending from Feb 06 through May 07 (I'm working on getting the rest formatted for the time since 5/07).  Nothing too explosive here except perhaps that Planeshift seems to have cropped up and I cannot be sure as to why, since many of the high price rares dropped between the two points of data.  Based on the largest dip in the prices happening in July, and the set's last month for redemption being July, it seems safe to say that redemption had a noticeable impact on IPA's prices (redemption cut off dates located here.)

Core Sets:

Next is a trend of the core sets during this same period:

Here we see that all of the dip to their lowest point from August to September and then climb back up.  Once again likely due to the biggest item effecting prices around that time: the Redemption Change.  Since 9th Edition was the most recent core set at the time its variance seemed to be the greatest of the core sets.  In this instance I believe that the price per rare for 9th is being held up by the pain lands (Brushland, Underground River, et al).

Totals and Totals:

Lastly for this week, we have the overall rares in the system vs. overall rare prices:

Far more noticeable on this level is the fact that not only did the average price per rare drop, but so too did the worth of 1x all rares drop.  One can tell the price per rare is dropping by observing that the amount of rares has increased while the sum of all rare prices has decreased.  This also means that the amount of money willing to be distributed across the rares is likely less now than it once was.  And by a fairly large margin, at that. 

This is where one of my statements in the opening paragraph comes back to haunt our numbers…  If there really are more rares in the system from the new sets it’s nearly impossible to accurately determine if the gestalt value of the rares in the system.  Imagine the following (obviously fabricated for simplicity's sake) table.   The numbers break down like this:

Set Name (obvious)

Individual cards.  This represents the number of cards in the set.  Again, this is simplified greatly to illustrate the point.

Number of each.  The number of each of individual card that actually exist in the system.  Like how many of these were opened, etc.

Amount to spend.  The amount that players have to spend on the card that they want.

Price per individual card.  This is the culmination of each field.  Simply showing the more cards that are opened in a market that has a capped amount to spend will result in less value per card.

Set Individual Cards Number of each Amount to spend   Price per  individual card
Invasion  10 10 $1,000.00 = $10.00
Mirrodin 10 100 $1,000.00 = $1.00
TSP 10 1000 $1,000.00 = $0.10

There we have $3,000 dollars being allocated for purchases, with a wildly different price per rare despite having an equal amount of net worth.  Now, what happens when we add another set but leave the amount to spend total as the same amount? 

Invasion  10 10 $600.00 = $6.00
Mirrodin 10 100 $700.00 = $0.70
TSP 10 1000 $800.00 = $0.08
Hammy 10 1000 $900.00 = $0.09

Here we have the same gestalt value ($3,000) of cards, but having more cards in the market means that the prices of the previous cards had to give up value in order for the new cards to have relative worth to the previous set.

As more sets get added without increasing the amount that's able to be spent on them (i.e. more users to buy them or more cash from each user) individual card prices will naturally continue to slip.  The only thing that will actually increase the price of overall rares is more players (or more money) to buy them.  This is made more pronounced by bots due to liquidity in the market but is a natural progression of the game in its current state.  In order for prices not to fall there needs to be an increase in demand that meets or exceeds the new amount of cards that are released every couple of months, or a decrease in supply for the new sets.  As I don't see either of these happening I have to imagine that we must all be prepared for prices to continue to decrease as each set releases.  Especially since we (MTGO) will get about 2 extra sets a year more than our paper counterparts to further drive the price of each rare down.

Many (including myself) have thought that resuming redemption would help with this problem.  And it's true that prices of recent rares would increase if they were easier to remove from the system (such as via redemption) but that solution wouldn't change the amount that is able to be spent in the system as a whole, especially on older sets.  And this would not make all rares increase, just increase the price of the rares that were actually leaving the system.

Conclusion:

Hopefully I didn't slaughter any mathematical or statistical rules too badly this week.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm not an economics major, minor or Skull on a Stick.  I'm just a player with some questions and some stats that can provide some insight into our game.  Hopefully in the upcomming weeks I can get a bit more data out of MTGO Traders and provide something else for us all to chew on.  I'm just a layman when it comes to all this economics stuff, so if I completely mistook something then I preemptively do the dance of shame.

~Erik

7 Comments

IPA dip by hamtastic at Sun, 10/14/2007 - 15:00
hamtastic's picture

I'd be surprised if too many people actually redeemed IPA around August 06, actually.  I think that what happened there was that the perceived value of the cards dropped and that likely should have been one of the many indicators that those cards were artificially over valued at the time. 

momir by Anonymous (Unregistered) 67.82.43.241 (not verified) at Mon, 10/15/2007 - 02:36
Anonymous (Unregistered) 67.82.43.241's picture

On the topic of momir I love the format and agree that the fact that there is a limited supply of the avatar frusterating. it is for the most part the cheapest format to play $13 for the avatar is not that much but still as we get further and further aways from the time it was distributed it can be expected that the price of entry into this format to increase. the solution i would like to see would be in the place of the top 8 draft that momir doesn't run (or i guess any torney at this point) tat the bonus prize for getting to the top 8 would be an avatar. wizards could even have some fun with it as an alternative art avatar or make it an avatar that could only be used in the format (only in momir not in vanguard) and one that doesnn't change the aperance or avatar in the game that way the origanals prices will some what be maintained.

IPA Prices by iceage4life at Sun, 10/14/2007 - 02:40
iceage4life's picture

I'm surprised that IPA prices when down when repetition was turned off.  By that point it was clear that redeeming IPA was quite a foolhardy endeavor as it was worth much more online then in paper.

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