Not all that Glitters is Gold

Hello everybody! I'm going to talk about my favorite part of magic today... Trading! As has been mentioned occasionally in various posts, I am a card pimp. I won't spend money on cards just because they are foil or foreign, but if I am trading and I could trade for one or the other, then I will always go for the pimp one.

Trading for pimp cards is always interesting, starting with what do you value the cards at? For example let's use the foil incinerate from the 2001 Deckmasters box set I traded for recently:

What would you value this card at in NM condition?

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I had no idea, and would have guessed 5 as it is a safe number that you can't lose too much value from, but can potentially gain value with too. After doing some research, I found a site selling them at 8, so I offered 7 for it, which was obliged. But what if I didn't have a computer? We would have probably gone for 5, and never thought of it again.

But now I have to stop and think of all the other times I have traded for pimp cards and wonder if I gained value, lost value, or was right on target? In my Storm deck I have 4 Dark Rituals in the form of 2 Black Bordered 4th Edition Japanese ones, a Black Bordered 4th Edition French one, and a German Urza's Saga one. I decided to look up the price of the Japanese ones because I can't remember what I got the others at (or even when!). I got them at 5, and it turns out SCG has them at 7 a piece, and ebay has 2 listings at 7 and 8.86. I also got a pair of counterspells from him (Japanese BB) but I couldn't find any listings anywhere online, but I got them at 5 as well.

Now those are old cards, what about new cards? Usually the rule of thumb is that a foil is worth twice a non-foil. But is that always true?

No

This is especially the case with cards that normally don't hold any value, but they are very played. Here's some examples from Innistrad:

Dissipate                        0.76         5.00
Forbidden Alchemy       0.38        10.00
Stoney Silence               1.37         8.00
Brimstone Volley          0.18          2.50
Delver of Secrets           0.15         5.50
Snapcaster Mage          27.20        70.00
Past in Flames               5.51         18.00
Unburial Rites               0.81          6.50

All of these cards have foils that are disproportionate to their non-foil cost. The closest is Snapcaster Mage, which I posted up simply for data reasons. But all the other cards are 4-30x more valuable in foil! Recently I have traded for a couple foil Stoney Silences for my Enchantress Deck at 2, without any knowledge it's actually worth far more than that! Now that I know, I now have another card I can pull out tons of from everyone's binder as trade filler.

Card pimpin' aint easy, but always be ready because you never know when a sweet value deal may be headed your way! That's all I have for today! Until next time, Stay Classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie@gmail.com
@ThingsILack