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Kevin
5434
Outreach
Jul 22, 2016
I watched the Craig Berry facebook video about his buyout of Lion's Eye Diamond... he bought around 150 copies of the card for $127 each? I can't imagine that's nearly enough to 'corner the market' for the card... Sure, some desperate people will pay the inflated $200 prices for a very short period of time, but the high price will attract sellers and the price will come back down. Craig unloading his copies at some point will also push prices down. If the MTG market can be heavily swayed by a $20k investment, it's a lot smaller (and dumber) than I thought it was...
It will be interesting to see how it plays out over time. It also seems like a terrible idea to try to corner a market when you have no control of the supply (i.e. WOTC can reprint similar versions, just as you mentioned, and effectively destroy the strategy).
I also think WOTC is more organized than you give it credit for, and if cards markets are regularly getting 'cornered' to artificially increase prices, I think they'll react. Keep in mind, that's completely separate from price spikes due to genuinely high demand.
Henry_L
659
Jul 22, 2016
KevinIt's not just Craig, it's the fact he has the ability to mobilize thousands of players with deep pockets on youtube and reddit. I'm sure the actual quantity that was purchased outside of Craig and his friends was what really moved the needle at all. The aftermath is already starting to take shape. It seems like LED did stabilize, I feel that sellers came out in droves when they saw the buylist prices, and as it's in so many legacy decks the supply seems to be there. Moat and City of Traitors are another story, the trend is down but they seem to be more inelastic.
I'm excited to see the results as well, I just believe that the reception of messing with the reserved list would be really negative among the LGS network who makes the majority of their money through selling singles. It's why people continue to believe that the supply is fixed and WOTC has no desire to make any drastic changes.
Hopefully they respond or even acknowledge this issue. As of writing this, there has been no official response from WOTC about the buyouts.
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