How Do I Make Money During Spoiler Season?

Now that we're nearing the end of spoilers and Dragons of Tarkir is finally starting to take shape, I'd like to explain how I personally make money during this time.

There's many ways to do this obviously, but I have my own feelings about the best ways to do it and when is the best time.

First, it's important to keep up to date as closely as you can as new cards could be spoiled or leaked at any time. The best resource for these I believe is Mythic Spoiler (mythicspoiler.com) as they keep it very recent throughout the day and it's easy to find it all in one place. There are several individual sites that may get it to you faster, but most people use Mythic Spoiler and therefore, you won't really have any sort of head start on the market if you find it a few minutes earlier.

Second, is the idea of following the hype around new cards. Is the card good? Who cares. The real question is what someone is willing to pay for it. What matters is whether someone out there thinks it's a good card. If someone out there is willing to pay big money for certain cards, then it would almost be a crime to not let them overpay for something you can make a profit from.

Third, is whether the cards resemble anything previous to it and whether that means people will pay more attention and ultimately pay more money. Same thing as before; it doesn't matter whether it's good/bad, better/worse, awesome/stupid. What matters is whether you can make a profit on someone else's misevaluation. Cards that do things that resemble previously good cards tend to have high price tags and hype after they're spoiled (i.e. Ojutai's Command).

Which brings us to my fourth point: how do we make money on this? There are two ways of doing this. Buy-Sell and Sell-Buy.

Buy-Sell - Probably the most common form of speculation during pre-order and spoiler season. This is the very simple idea of seeing, what you believe to be, an undervalued card from the set. As such, you then buy copies at the current price in order to hold until the player base sees the real value of the card.

Overall, I personally believe this is the slowest, least profitable, and riskiest forms of investing in a new set.

1. Speed - It’s no secret that shipping can sometimes take more time than expected. Especially when it comes to new cards that are being opened from boosters. If, for example, a shop that you pre-ordered from has delays, it can lead to very big problems with the timetable you have in mind for your investments (i.e. Pro Tour).
2. Profitability - Here’s the issue with this model’s profitability: the market dictates your margins. In almost every case, as soon as product starts to be opened, cards lose value. Everyone in the mother is going to start trying to sell things they opened at pre-release on eBay because they know that in another 2 weeks, it could be worth half as much. This then leads to issues with your margins because demand takes a huge hit during this time outside of chase mythics. I tend to call it the “Hype Cycle”: demand increases slowly for pre-orders, then decreases rapidly upon release.
3. Risk - Going off of the same ideas as profitability, cause they really do go hand in hand, risk is without a doubt the major reason I don’t use the Buy-Sell method. After a new set is released, and we enter the downward portion of the Hype Cycle, the majority of card prices immediately start to fall and there’s very little likelihood of the card ever rising to its pre-order price again outside of strong tournament results (i.e. Pro Tour, first Grand Prix) and even less likelihood of it surpassing it. This means that if you intend to invest long term, it will almost certainly lead to losses.

Sell-Buy - Now this model, however, is my personal preference. The basic idea is to minimise your contact with cards and only focus on buying trends. You do this by selling cards before you buy them. Now, on it’d face, yes it seems to be more risky, but the Hype Cycle dictates that prices rise very quickly during spoiler season and then fall very quickly upon release.

The best way to go about this is by staying updated on spoilers and evaluating them as quickly as you can by reading comments and ideas from other players. This will allow you to properly gauge the consensus from the players about the card’s value. After doing this, check prices online and set up your own listings on your preferred site. I personally prefer eBay because it’s usually the first place people go to look. After you’ve created your listing and they have all sold, it’s your job to keep an eye on prices and decide when to buy. You should be able to find good prices within the next week or two before release day and, hopefully, profit. As a little extra hint, when you buy them, simply address the order to your buyer and save yourself the extra few cents on shipping.

The reason I really like this model is because it really allows you to play the market and follow the Hype Cycle and determine your own profits, so to speak. In my opinion, there really isn’t any other way to do it: fastest, most profitable, and least risky.

1. Speed - The reason that this is definitely the fastest way on making money is because you’ve essentially taken yourself out of the equation. What’s happening is that your actually matching up your buyer to your selling and collecting the difference between the two prices. If you follow my advice and just address the package to your buyer when your make the purchase, you actually never touch the cards which means fast service.
2. Profitability - One reason that this very profitable is because you get to determine your own profits/losses and this lets you focus entirely on the money instead of the cards.
3. Risk - While we can’t completely eliminate risk, I believe that this style of selling is much less risky because we know how the Hype Cycle works and how to follow the trends. This means that if you’re fairly certain that a card is being overvalued, then it would definitely be in your best interests to follow this model.

My apologies for the incredibly long article and the lack of pictures. This was much more meant to be an information piece and I hope it helps.

I'm anxious to hear what you have to say. Are there any problems with my thinking? How do you make money during this time?

Thanks for the support and happy hunting.

 - Jay (@mtg_investments)