Sorin pre-orders start at $60 on SCG

[Philip Dickinson]

welp

thanks ben bleiweiss for exploiting your market position

[Daniel Royde]

Yes, damn him selling cards!

[Dan Barrett]

Well they wouldn't be that price if no one was willing to pay it!

[Philip Dickinson]

that seems like an absurd thing to say considering we have precisely no idea exactly how many copies of the card have been pre-ordered. how can you make assertions about peoples' willingness to pay it?

Dan Barrett said:

Well they wouldn't be that price if no one was willing to pay it!

[Dan Barrett]

Well actually, it sold out multiple times at lower price points, and has been restocked at least once at 59.99

[Philip Dickinson]

don't you think there might be flaws in attempting to evaluate the sales of a product that does not exist yet in terms of "selling out" or "restocking"? the numbers on the page don't correspond to actual availability - they are arbitrary numbers that SCG is prepared to sell at a given price point before another increase.

i'm not even really calling the relative demand for any specific product into question. i'm just consistently confused by how influential starcitygames is in determining the value of cards and how no-one seems to have a problem with it. i think that anyone would have a hard time arguing that starcity do not directly shape the global market value of cards (objectively for their own gain)

[Daniel Royde]

How influential are they? How are you measuring that?
"directly shape the global market value of cards (objectively for their own gain)"- What do you mean?
What proportion of the global singles market do you think they have?

[Louis Mackie]

I think what Phil is trying to say is that people view Star City's prices as the baseline price, such as when checking values on trades (people in London normally go by Mike's prices, but the US is the majority of the market), and stores checking whether or not their prices are consistent with others. CFB is pre-ordering Sorin at $55, which seems like they are directly trying to steal revenue from SCG. SCG is the biggest and most well known MtG dealer and they get a lot of exposure through their other products.

Their pre-order prices go up first, others follow suit.

For example, most of the hype for Time Reversal came from Evan Erwin and Ben Bleiweiss, which resulted in a rediculous price for a pretty crappy card.

Daniel Royde said:

How influential are they? How are you measuring that?
"directly shape the global market value of cards (objectively for their own gain)"- What do you mean?
What proportion of the global singles market do you think they have?

[James Mills]

He does looking fucking amazing though.

[Thomas David Baker]

From first hand experience of seeing CFB in action at their store I think that the big stockists really do price according to demand and rarely try to make a market in any way.

The way they make their money is buying very, very low (by the standards of any market) compared to their sell price.  But I do think that the sell price is a semi-efficient market price.  (I may be wrong - I don't buy or sell cards as a rule this is just a casual observation from standing in line watching people buy and sell cards.)

I do think the whole Magic economy (on MTGO at least) is ripe for a giant shakeup, but it's hard to see how given the difficulty of trust and of moving items around (even on MTGO, which is ridiculous).

[Rich Hughes]

He does look bloody good.

While $60 for a bit of card is ridiculous, given that all the other recent planeswalkers(even ones in large sets) have been $40-$50 to pre-order, and clearly have sold in decent numbers at those prices, i think $60 is going to be the natural go to pre-order price for a planeswalker whos looking like filling lots of the 'next jace' criteria.

hopefully, the fact that innistrad has been more interesting to draft than zendikar was will mean more packs get opened and thus push his price down.

we shall see.