Vintage ≠ Rare
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ย. 2024
- Yes, the old stuff is REALLY rare. But there's still a lot of it. More than you might imagine. Let's get a little perspective so we can more carefully judge the long term prospects of the sets beyond the first few.
#MagicTheGathering #LimitedEditionAlpha #Speculating
Check out my Exorcist buyout from 2022 here:
• How the market behaves...
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I'm Mike, the Alpha Hoarder, and I'm sharing/documenting my wild collection here on YT. Join me while I ramble about old cards and MTG finance, and look at cool stuff.
hello@alphahoarder.com
Mike the AlphaHoarder @ 375 Carlls Path #73, Deer Park NY 11729
Haven’t gotten chance to watch the entire video yet but it just keeps getting better and better. Reached the air elemental, which is a card I love. I’ve always just assumed that there’s about 80-90% of each alpha rares left and called it a day. Doesn’t really matter to me how many are actually left, just that nm ones are pretty hard to come by. Can’t wait for the next video
Appreciate you watching! Yeah ended up with a long one this time 😅 NM is hard to come by, that's the truth!
Very informative video. The perspective on 100 sets of Arabian is incredible how small it is.
Right? 7800 cards out of 5m 😳 it's an oversimplification in some ways, but since market cap goes undiscussed in mtg finance so much thought it would illustrate the point
If I remember correctly I think I am only missing like 1 card from my arabian nights collection.@@AlphaHoarder
i completely missed this one, with all that’s going on here as well, but as always, i really enjoyed it!! 👊🏻🙏🏻
Hopefully everyone watched to the end for the EXORCIST 🔥 🧟♂️ 🎉❤😊much needed information indeed 🤝
indeed, an interesting case study
If I find any alpha JUMP definitely going to give it to you...sincerely love that binder 🎉❤😊 I don't have that many of 1 card...most is 20 of an uncommon silver age foils
As a player from '94 i have one thing to say about attrition. Pretty soon Alpha cards were more or less banned from play because the different corners, it was just unfair to use alpha lands and unlimited cards in your deck because you would always know what you would draw. well, if it was a land anyway.... Or let's say put 3 alpha wrath of gods in your control deck, pretty nice to know you will be drawing a board clear..... Of course this was before sleeves. and the first generations of sleeves were transparent.
So at least in my area, people pretty soon put alpha cards, if they owned any, in their collection or trade binder and played only with beta, unlimted and revised and so on. A beta power 9 card was in fact worth more for a good few years, until collectors got more serious and alpha surpassed beta.. But in my memory this was as late as '96
so this means, alpha cards might be less played and less destroyed by kitchen table play than the later sets.
Very good point!
The 800 count boxes are for vintage sports cards, at the time it was taking off Topps made sets that were 792 cards so this size was a popular size.
If you think 1,100 copies is too much, just do what I did and focus on test prints and playtest cards. I know I have a sizable market share of both and it’s actually a challenge finding extreme rarities. Jump in playtest form has The Incredible Hulk on it too.
Nice to have the BCW mystery solved at last! On the topic of play test cards, I have been dabbling in there a little bit. These things are really cool 🤩. I've been a little surprised by how many of them are showing up on the public markets recently, though… Do you have any thoughts on that? Seems to me those can only be coming from one or a few long-time collectors. I'm under the impression that individual test cards were not scattered very far. And as for the alpha print run, I'm actually not that worried about it… But I thought it was an important baseline to highlight, because it represents the rarest of the rare, for standard sets. Appreciate your insights as always 🤜🤛
Beautiful pickups and excellent discussion 👍 I slowly work on my Alpha collection along with the other goals, like my graded Antiquities set. Missing about 80 cards from the Alpha set and have around 700 alpha cards altogether.
Awesome stuff! 700 cards is epic 🤜🤛
Playable vintage + Near Mint/Mint = Rare
Yes!
Love the videos and the deep analysis. I don't collect Magic myself, but these experiments and points transfer well into so many other collectibles and antiques.
Appreciate that!
This was a great video!!! I love what you thought on how many cards and prices etc. Very informative and gives you something to think about. More like this imo. And I just realized I missed this vid whe nit came out lol.
Glad you liked it -- thanks for tuning in!
Great topic and research! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for watching!
as always great video, great info (thank you for the work behind it) .. I do wonder about the stats of complete sets and in particular complete NM sets ... wonder if there is a way to work out a (very) rough number or more likely a probability that X exist given the 8% NM per rare approximation .. Anyway very interesting .. and equally interesting the card arrivals ...I have lost a couple bids on alpha cards lately .. Somehow I think I am going to see them on your videos in the near future : )
I've missed on a lot of auctions myself recently lol. There's a bit more interest brewing than a few months ago.
Love the perspective, thank you. Also, I kinda miss your outros, but understand maybe they made more sense in times when you are able to put out videos more frequently
I did have fun with those, but I didn't want to overplay the joke 😅 I felt they were getting less clever as time went on. It is kind of cool to see the people who actually watched the end though, because they're the only ones that noticed anything changed. You rock.
I look forward to each video and here we are a month later. Don't leave us hanging Alpha Hoarder!
Lol yeah my bad!! I have three sitting on my desk that need recording... soon!
Love the content!! Watch all ur videos even though I don’t collect Magic cards.. just very interested!!
That's awesome you rock lol
Another grouping of cards to note, are the original play test cards and 1-off special event cards. They have their own ecosystem. We've lost track of the 1996 World Champion card to an anonymous private collection, the other specific single prints aren't likely to find their way out to a general auction. The Garfield life event prints are very scarce. I've only seen 3 individual cards available ever, and not at once. But, like I said, they're their own ecosystem.
Then there's the whole Artist proof part. I don't delve into those. I do know that's partly why Post's grade 10 Lotus was so high priced. Artist proof + grade 10 + case signed + economy + whoever was "in the room" bidding all of that mattered, but Artist proofs, themselves, are rarer than commercial print runs.. I just don't know any numbers regarding them to take a stab at that.
Yes, good insights. Those sorts of things have very high scarcity, but they don't appeal generally to the entire hobby, so you have a much smaller demand pool which happens to be concentrated among high value collectors.
Good to have you back!!!
🤜🤛
Its always a pleasure watching your video : great job !
Appreciate that!
The lesson I get from this is: collect what you love, and invest in Alpha only if you got the risk appetite! Other sets are just TOO risky and suitable just for someone like the hoarder!
Another video, nice. Keep 'em coming.
You gonna show of all of your collection at some point?
Probably not, just because I have so many different cards in so many different places. Cards in boxes don't share great on a video, either. But over the life of the channel, I think people will see much of it, here and there. Something in particular you'd like to see that I haven't shown before?
No, just wanted to see them all stacked or laid out on table(s). Would be an amazing view. But guess that could take a really really long time 😅@@AlphaHoarder
Great video mate. Love the analysis as usual. I think your % of cards for Alpha still floating around is a little bit low. There was a great question in the Alpha 40 MTG group back in 2021 asking what the highest amount of a single rare one person own. One person at the time had 110 Volcanic Eruptions. Another used to own 266 Island Sanctuaries but sold them all on ebay in lots of 11. One person had 156 Savannah Lions. Someone had 110+ Raging Rivers. Another owned 50-60 Farmsteads. These are all well known names in the MTG community posting this so the numbers tend to seem credible. My guess would be between 600-850 copies per rare left in the world. Might be safe to assume 3% annual attrition rate too like the insurance world does too. Whatever it is - it is scarce though.
Interesting information, thanks for sharing those numbers!
Missed a closing challenge this time. But glad you posted.
Yeah I skipped that the last couple, got to get it back in there lol appreciate that you watch to the end to notice
@@AlphaHoarder yea of course. Also, your analysis seems pretty good. Its a nearly impossible task to assess. One thing I ask is, what about if someome cracked a graded card and got it regraded? Wouldnt that artificially inflate graded pop?
Yes definitely, but then there are companies I didn't count, so who knows how closely those cancel out
@@AlphaHoarder got it. Just a thought. Hard to incorporate that data into analysis like this. But this is the best ive seen on the topic.
From what I have seen on Facebook market groups, there are people with collections like yours and Rudy's in multiple European countries and in the US. Wherever you have the big Vintage dealers are big whales. Funny thing is that when I started playing MTG with Unlimited and AN, Alpha cards were trash as they were not tourney legal because of the corners. Most MTG players at that point were players as it more a card game than a collectible at that point and Wizards was heavily promoting tournaments. They were not taken care of well during that time as unplayable cards were worth significantly less than Beta. I still regret trading a mint Alpha Pearl for $100 worth of cards.
Yeah that's a crazy flip history took on Alpha v Beta lol! You are right, there are several other collectors with massive collections, some that make mine look quite puny! I can only speculate just how large some of their positions are 🤔
@@AlphaHoarder don't forget the Japanese, I once was one of the europeans with early collections, and we bought from americans (because it was cheaper, they had almost all the cards) and we sold to Japanese, because they would pay even more...
At some point in time I bought 1 Arabian nights set a week from the States, for $750 a set, because we could flip it so easy here for a really good profit. easily double our money with little risk of not selling them, because even the worst commons were novelty cards for european players (hardly any was sold here in stores) We also bought out any random collection of americans, because it was always worth it, for the random '93 & '94 stuff it would contain. So I bet a lot of Alpha ended up overseas (from your point of view) because foreigners were paying more than americans.
(sadly we sold everything waaaay too soon, around the year 2000) I could repay some student debts, which was nice, but I could not buy a house...
With the exorcist buyout I wish you tracked a card that wasn’t bought out that was a similar card to see if the growth in the supply post buyout was different.
You're right, I definitely should've had a control or two to compare 😫🤦♂️🤦♂️
Wife: “just wait for me in the car for 30 mins until my facial is done “
Me: 😡
Me 30 seconds later after seeing that Mike posted a new video: 😃 🎉 🧙🏻♂️
There's one thing I can pride myself in, it's providing nerdy entertainment to people stuck in cars or on toilets
Always appreciate your analysis Mike! 😊
I was curious what are your thoughts on Alpha cards as a holding in a family trust or a collection as a asset holding in one of those companies that buy works of art that you can then invest in. Do you think this will ever happen?
I've been watching these sort of companies with some interest, waiting for somebody to do it right. The most recent one to cross my radar is masterworks. So far they all suffer from the same mortal wound: there's a gigantic liquidity problem none of them can solve, and they're all arranged so that the so-called investors are not actually owners of the original piece, allowing the management company to have all kinds of expenses and maintenance fees between the sale of any assets and you. I don't know if it'll ever happen, but I haven't seen one yet that I like.
U didnt mention the overlap of grading with resubmissions which is pretty high
I mentioned it only quickly in passing… I think the graded pop numbers for each company are pretty inflated for the reason you stated, but on the other side of that equation is the fact that there are more grading companies than just the three I counted, though with much smaller pop reports. I have no way to know, but I sort of treated those two as canceling factors. Out of to curiosity, by what percentage do you think the population report is inflated because of resubmission?
The BCW card boxes are sized for vintage sports cards -- those are thicker than playing cards. I find the multiplier is about 1.25 to get the capacity for Magic cards.
As to graded population, the annoying thing is one of the original "big 4" grading companies, GAI, that did grade magic, has all their pop report data unavailable (assuming it still exists).
One thing is that back when set collecting was a thing lots of the early cards got locked into sets, and my guess is they are still there, and that inordinately skews the ratio of rares available down.
I actually disagree that Alpha is the upper limit of attrition -- Beta and in some cases Unlimited will be higher. Alpha was quickly removed from the play pool (essentially tournament illegal from 1995 to 1999), and so for several years the attrition was minimal compared to Beta and Unlimited, especially for power, especially near mint.
Fair point about beta and unlimited. I think there's also other edge cases like vintage foil cards that. I wish it was a better way to figure out these numbers without a lot of guessing, but I don't think there is.
@@AlphaHoarder On the early foils I have no idea. I got out of Magic before those hit. The early sets of original frame foils are really hard to find (i.e. Urza's Legacy through Scourge, plus 7th edition), and they degraded seriously with age if not properly preserved. At least almost no one played with them, and those that did kept them sleeved for the most part. Another set that's relatively rare and that I've seen absolutely no numbers on is Portal Three Kingdoms. But again, sleeves were fairly widespread by 1999 (I started using them in 1993, as did many others), so my guess is the attrition rate is far lower.
Loved the video, btw.
Cracking the now ungradable PSA Crusade. 😲
Rudy will grade it, if it comes to it 🤣 #FreeTheCardboard
Your data does not matter. Even superrare cards have a ceiling that doesnot fit the rarity but rather the desirebility. For instance a lot of old border foils are extremly rare. Yet this does not explain why a bop foil 7th is thousands of dollars while one of the planeshift elder dragons foil is a mere 100something 😅 Its hard to predict future desirebility but certain cards just always had something extra, altough these things slowely shift with time. Bop is on a 30 year all star roll and always had great art so that might help.
I can agree to that. Desirability as you note is impossible to anticipate in the future, so that falls into the realm of speculation. I think rarity is a good proxy for the fundamental, and then there'll be headwinds or tailwinds for unpredictable variables like that.
@@AlphaHoarder u know why my BOP 7TH foil is 4k? Because I bought so much 7th in NM-Mint during Corona I forced the market to shift. Yes. Literally me personally. I have receipts.
I'll do my 7th foil set video soon as promised. I do have just about 1000 foils of English 7th foils & 20-30 foreign total 🥳🤯😻❤️🔥
I wonder if Fallen Empires might have a higher attrition rate, given how awful it was recognized to be, even early on.
Haha yeah maybe, though the original population was so high, probably doesn't even matter
I wish more people had a fundamental understanding about print run sizes, the impact on scarcity, reflective value, etc.. The last few years have really warped people's perspective about MTG card value. Everyone wants A/B prices from their special treatment chase card out of Modern and scream about reprint equity... but one single print run has so many more copies than the old school sets... I'm amazed there are so many modern cards in the higher double-digit range. Then so many people "investing" in sealed modern product? Like What? No...
Well said
The dangerous assumption is that because sealed Urza, Alpha, beta, Tempest etc command multiple x prices today that Moderb Horizons, Streets of New Capenna will command those prices 4, 5 or 10 years down the line. Mike's video shows that is unlikely to happen.
@@thewealthofnations4827 Exactly.
Which means 70 new Alpha investement YT channels?
Your buyout likely did make a difference in the current market.
Surely prices would be lower if you weren't holding all that supply.
Could be, that's true. I was actually wondering if the reverse might be the case though. Because I did the buyout, that might've inspired people to dig through their bulk boxes and post a bunch more supply that would have otherwise remained out of circulation. The supply surge might have actually driven the prices even lower as time has passed and organic demand returned to pre-buyout levels 🤔
That makes sense too.
I feel we need a new Video 😁
I have 4 sitting in my desk to record 😅 finally getting over 6 weeks of sickness, so hoping to do this soon!
what would you do if someone sent your the wrong stuff after waiting so long to open the package?
I'd be screwed. It happens once with ink. Most of these are through authentication services, and the rest with rares are from sellers I have a good relationship with. But some... I'm exposed with no recourse 😬😅
Do you the the main grading companies caught most of the early day clips or do you think a lot of clipped Beta cards slipped through Alpha grading?
I don't know, it's a good question, and I wasn't involved in the hobby when grading started. But I do know some of the people who kicked it off and I'm sure that they were consulted. I would hope these sort of things were squared away very quickly… But yeah, I don't know
@@AlphaHoarder interesting, yeah makes you wonder. Thanks for all you do! I know the market has changed, but I hope you stick with the videos!
I appreciate that. They do seem to come in bursts, hoping to make a few more soon
Any opinions on how much is too much to pay for most Alpha Commons that are grade 10? I know it all depends, but just curious if you had any general guidelines. I’m considering a deal to get 8 CGC grade 10 cards (Terror, Twiddle, Shatter, Disintegrate, Merfolk of Trident, Drain Life, & Unholy Strength, plus an CGC grade 10 Pristine Shatter and an Uncommon grade 8 all for $3700 and part of me has a hard time justifying that much on a bunch of commons even if the grade pops are decent. I just don’t know… my gut tells me from your old vids general rule of thumb to buy decent commons for under $100 a card. I just am having a hard time coming to grips with Grade 10’s commanding 3-4x that premium.
But I’m new to all this and this is only my second big deal. First one dealing with commons. Wondering if you had any thoughts.
@AY-hq4qz BGS 10s easily demand massive multipliers, in excess of 3-4x. CGC is another story, especially since they adjusted their grading scale in a way that gives out more 10s that canonically should be 9.5s. I'd definitely be more cautious if this is a long term hold, since you're speculating not only on the cards but also on the eventual collector demand for CGC. Not saying that's a bad speculation, since they're doing a lot of things right atm, but for sure they haven't yet built the demand BGS or PSA cards get, and the longer your horizon the more uncertainty there is here. But as always, buy the card not the grade. If they are really true pristine cards that's something.
Finale more videos :)
If there are so many cards even of old sets aside from Alpha, why do cards still command so high of price?
Circulation. It's also one of the downsides of @AlphaHoarder's collection. It'd be near impossible to liquidate without supersaturating the market and driving the price to oblivion. It would need to be slowly liquidated over months if not years &/or broken to sell some as complete sets, some as singles, some as "bulk" to a like-minded collector.
The amount of cards relative to the size of the hobby is important, circulation being a force multiplier on that. And that's definitely true about liquidating. The low supply at any particular time enables these higher prices… Look how much prices fell when a handful of each rare came to market over the last year. It didn't take that much.
what about the calculation with the gradings... okay let us say PSA has graded 10.000 Berserk Cards of PSA 8 How many People have cracked those and sent them back to get a PSA 9...so what i say is..they are count multiple times so even more rare, no? Same with crossover gradings. I dont think beckett calls PSA and tells them "hey we have a PSA 10 here, the dude is going for a black lable so please make a minus 1 on PSA 10s :D
Obviously its an even tougher estimation to think about all the cards the got lost/destroyed/forgotten in a basement or perfectly faked
I absolutely agree. I just worry that makes it easy to lose perspective when numbers aren't involved. Take a legends C2. There were 425k copies of each one. Go wild with attrition and re-grading estimates, let's say 75% are gone forever. That still means 100k copies of every single one of those cards still exists. That requires a large collector base to drive value. And if we start talking about revised and silver age and later... requires a giant collector base.
@@AlphaHoarder thanks for your respond, i am already a big fan of yours and your collection! i love alpha cards and i was always searching for something regarding printruns that can come close. What do you think about P3K? could be an interesting set in about 5-10 years. But i am an alpha lover. love your videos about the red, blue....commons. Its a pleasure for the eyes. Love to see more videos of you. greetings from germany Mike
I like p3k, but it's definitely a niche and I don't see it breaking out to the wider player base anytime soon. Make from that what you will! But for me, I love me some horsemanship 😆
@@AlphaHoarder thanks man. Cant wait to see more videos of yours. i hope you keep up the work. i love that youre sharing your collection with us. Much Love!
This is shedding insight perhaps into wizards' vision for the game. They know the days or rare cards worth value are long long gone. Those days appear to be over from your analysis basically at Alpha. If that is the case, if they know that rarity, condition rarity is all gone then should we be surprised by the approach they are taking, which is every card a "G@me Pie$e" to use Rudy's saying?
Your video really seems to put the nail in the coffin on hoarding sealed boxes of modern cards. It will never be rare and I don't think the case being sealed will be incentive enough to ever drive the price up to make it worthwhile paying for holding them. Alpha of course seems to be a different story and if your analysis is true the cards are underpriced at present. The king under the mountain of Magic at this stage of the game seems to be he who can hoard the most Alpha.
I also want to ask you about the "lost Legends" boxes. Have you considered how many other loose boxes of "rare" cards are laying around at present? How much do you think that is a factor in terms of supply for old and new cards?
Reserve List really means very little post Alpha it seems. Exorcist isn't shielded by the reserve list if it was printed to oblivion in the initial run.
I'm beginning to think the price of vintage cards is who is willing to sell and when and accessibility to cards. The rarity is not necessarily the number of cards in existence, it's the number of cards of that rare slot people are willing to part with.
Last question for your listeners and for you Mike, should we embrace the new era of "game pieces" and if we want to have something special look to Alpha?
Yeah I mean, I'm not sure I'd say it's Alpha or nothing, but what's very relevant is the size of the hobby. If the magic player base grew from 40M to 100M over the next couple years, then you would see more of the old sets properly supported by demand, despite larger print runs. And obviously the reverse would have the reverse effect. But runs ramped so quickly that you need quite aggressive growth in the hobby to see some of the later sets appreciate in the way the very early ones have. I think that's a great insight about circulation. You're right, the market price is more about the number of cards available right now, than the number in existence, although it's the second number that might be more relevant over a long time horizon. I haven't done the math on the lost legends myself, but I remember when they came out talking to a few people, and most people seem to think it was a negligible increase in the total number of cards. I'll look into that 🤔
As Alpha cards change hands at these significantly higher prices relatively to when those who got them when the game was new, wouldn’t new price memory help set a new higher floor for these rare magic cards even at their new depressed prices compared to 2021 highs?There is Alpha cards out there to be had, but they are exchanging hands. With patience and luck even those with little capital can participate, but I don’t think it will be for long. Rudy had mentioned in a video in the last year that he thought this could be the last opportunity to buy Alpha at low prices, and I’m starting to think he’s right. I wonder how much Alpha he has purchased over the last year 🤔
Another thought … what happens when a collectible card game that once held value no longer does. The collector is forced to choose. Sell off that that which isn’t personally valuable, useable or has very little chance of retaining value. That is where we are now.
Last recession I stopped buying this time I won’t. As long as I have a roof over my head and food on the table 😊
How many alpha rares do you own?
I actually don't know offhand. Too many 😅
I must say, I’m sad you cut the jokes at the very end.
It's warming to know you listened to the end to notice! A few people said that, so perhaps I'll bring them back. I didn't want to overdo the joke, but if people still appreciated it, I'll carry on 🤜🤛
Thousands of anything is not RARE.
I don’t think he has thousands of the same thing?
@@keithshaffer5975 My point is that if there were 5,000 copies of the Mona Lisa, would it still be rare?
My 🧠 mind is going...can you feel it? It's twisted 🥨 🎉❤😊
I think you are dang close that remaining alpha % run 🏃
Don't use empty boxes, ya don't feel the weight of the guilt of carrying it all around 😮🤯
I don't own any alpha rares unfortunately. Just 1 uncommon, a jade statue & 4 commons😢❤😊 please help if possible 🤝 😂j/k seriously. I do ❤alpha as much as you possibly, I just don't have the $ to keep investing in it. I went deep with 7th Edition foils when I should have went with alpha during the beginning of Corona lockdowns.
Haha the weight of guilt 😂 love that. 7th foils are a god place to be also. I'm sure the condition rarity on those is even steeper than Alpha.
@@AlphaHoarder my super long video of My set is coming...every card is in a top loader so this will be fun. I may end up splitting it into colors.
I can't wait!
Make another video already
Appreciate the shove 😅 I now have four videos sitting on my desk that need recording! I've been pretty sick the last couple weeks so that's been an added slowdown, but I hope to get through it soon.