I do not (and will not) maintain an e-mail distribution list for these price lists, so please don't ask.
I will attempt to generate and post these lists once per week, probably on Wednsdays (historical accident; I created the first of these lists on a Wednsday).
This list will also appear monthly in _Shadis_ magazine and in _Shadis Presents_ issues. Look for "The Card Street Journal". This will in no way affect the free availability of this list on Usenet, by FTP, or on the World Wide Web.
Where this list comes from:
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This list is generated by a program I wrote which collects all articles from the above-mentioned newsgroups for the past seven days, and attempts to intelligently generate prices for all the cards cited within those articles. The program is reasonably clever about matching card names as written with the card names as properly spelled, even taking into account misspellings and inconsistant capitalization, punctuation, etc.
I would appreciate if you would send me e-mail about any oddities you find in this list. In particular, please look for:
* missing cards
* common or uncommon cards that you think have too high a value.
* rare cards that you think have too low a value.
Problems like that can point out errors in my card name database, or strange patterns of input that confuse the card name recognizer and cause bad data to be entered for certain cards. A typical week's worth of posts generates anywhere from 60000 to 200000 lines of useful data. Clearly, I don't have time to check every one of those lines, so I appreciate being notified of any oddities you see in my lists as that helps me avoid them systematically in future lists. You can e-mail such reports to me at:
cloister(at)hhhh(dot)org
How to make your sale or auction work with this list:
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If you want your sale or auction to be included with the data that this list is generated from, please follow these guidelines:
* Put only one card name on a line.
* Make sure there is whitespace (spaces or tabs) around the card name on both
sides of the name.
* Do not abbreviate card names. There is still plenty of room on an 80 column
line even with the full card names.
* Report prices in U.S. dollars, formatted with a decimal point
followed by two digits. Dollar signs ($) are optional. All of the
following are acceptable prices:
$.50 1.50 12.37 $100.00
The requirement of a decimal point plus two digits is important; that's the only way the program can reliably find the prices on auctions that are formatted with index numbers, like this:
225. Card of Doom 4.00 12.00 20.00 someone@somewhere.com
* Use one of the following three types of auction progress reporting:
card name current_bid
card name minimum_bid current_bid
card name minimum_bid current_bid buyout_bid
So long as you stick to one card name per line, you can have those pieces of information in any order. Any other text on the line is ignored.
* Spell card names correctly. While the program is pretty good at matching misspelled cards with the proper names, having correct names does result in better data. It doesn't matter how you capitalize the names, however.
* If you have to differentiate between artwork variations, repeat the actual card name before the differentiating string. Like this:
Urza's Tower (in the forest) price
Urza's Tower (in the mountains) price
Urza's Tower (by the ocean) price
Not (repeat, *not*) like this:
Urza's Tower
(in the forest) price
(in the mountains) price
(by the ocean) price
Don't try to claim that this is too much effort, either, because any text editor makes doing it right easy enough with cut-and-paste features, from good old DOS' "edit" all the way to Unix's "emacs".
* If you have to differentiate between print runs (especially important now that Ice Age and chronicles are out), use the following identifiers *after* the properly spelled card name, separated by one space:
(A) Alpha
(AL) Alpha
(B) Beta
(BE) Beta
(UL) Unlimited
(RV) Revised
(4th) Fourth Edition
(AN) Arabian Nights
(AQ) Antiquities
(LE) Legends
(DK) The Dark
(FE) Fallen Empires
(IA) Ice Age
(CH) Chronicles
For example:
Card of Doom (IA)
If you don't do that, data for the expansion-set specific version will get totalled with the rest of the data for that card name.
How to interpret the data in this list:
---------------------------------------
The output file now has lines in this format:
| card | price | stddev | average | high | low | change | Raw N |
| ---- | ----- | ------ | ------- | ----- | ------ | ------ | ----- |
| Card of Doom | 1.93 | 0.42 | 1.93 | 2.50 | 1.50 | -.32 | 11 |
| Card of Greater Doom | 4.54 | 1.12 | 4.55 | 9.00 | 1.00 | 1.06 | 104 |
Here's what all of those columns mean:
| card: | The name of the card. |
| price: | The average of the raw prices that are plus or minus one standard deviation from the raw average. |
| stddev: | The standard deviation of the raw prices. |
| average: | The average of raw (unfiltered) card prices. |
| high: | The highest value within 4 standard deviations of the raw average. The idea behind using 4 standard deviations for finding the high price is to include most of the data while throwing out really bad data before calculating a high and low, since the really bad data probably isn't an actual card price. |
| low: | The Low value within 4 standard deviations of the raw average. |
| change: | The difference between this list's price for each card and the price for that card in the last list. A positive number indicates that the value of the card has increased, and a negative number indicates that the value of the card has decreased. |
| raw N: | The number of data points for the raw average. |
As a point of interest, average/stddev is the signal-to-noise ratio for the data; I have not made a column for it since it doesn't seem all that interesting and can be generated easily enough by anyone who wants to know it.
These statistics help compensate for the fact that the program doesn't distinguish between print runs by giving you an idea of the distribution of prices. As always, use your best judgement when using this list to bid on cards or to help conduct an auction.
I have noticed that adding the one-standard-deviation filter typically lowers the prices. This is because errant data points tend to be on the high side rather than the low side. I'm not sure why that is, but be aware of it.
Probably the most important thing to be aware of when reading this list is to note that the program makes no attempt to differentiate between print runs. This is because there isn't any reliable way of determing what print run a card is from just by looking at the line of text that has the card name and price on it. So if you're looking for an Alpha or Beta printing of some card, expect to pay more for it than the price in this list. Conversely, if you're looking for a Revised or Fourth Edition printing of the same card, expect to pay a little less.
How is the list organized?
--------------------------
I have received some questions on how the list is organized. For Magic: the Gathering, it is alphabetical within category, with the these categories in this order:
Lands
Artifacts
Legends and other Multi-Colored cards
Black
Blue
Green
Red
White
If any new categories of cards are introduced, they will probably be added between Legends and Black, unless there is some motivating reason to add them somewhere else.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
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Q: Why is "Mountain" so expensive in the M:tG list?
A: It's not a bug, it's an Arabian Nights card. Most people forget (or weren't aware) that the AN expansion printed a regular old Mountain card, the one with the greenish sky, but with the scimitar symbol on it. Those Mountains are quite collectable, and have been the most highly valued basic land ever since I've been making these lists.
Q: Why do the prices for M:tG basic lands vary so much from week to week?
A: Several reasons. The first has to do with their names. "Island", "Swamp", and "Mountain" are all substrings within other card names like "Island Sanctuary", "Sol Kanar the Swamp King", "Magnetic Mountain", etc. Mangled versions of these other cards often cause my program to treat the citation as one for a basic land, and this invariably throws bad data into the pot for those lands. I do my best to fix this sort of thing every week, but with the amount of data I'm dealing with, I'm bound to miss a few.
The second reason has to do with rarity. As time goes on, Alpha and Beta prints of lands are actually starting to become worth something. Some weeks there are a fair number of these on the market, and that will push the average price up. Other weeks there aren't, and the price is lower.
The third reason (and, IMHO, the most annoying) is that sometimes basic land names are used to differentiate between artwork variations on wholly unrelated cards. For example, I often see things like:
Urza's Tower (Forest)
That in itself isn't so bad, because I've programmed around it. But couple that phenomenon with people who like to put the main card name on one line, and the differentiation and prices on following likes, like this:
Urza's Tower
Forest 5.00
Island 5.00
Mountain 5.00
and it's pretty obvious why my program gets confused. If you're running an auction, please don't do that. See above section on making your auction compatable with my software. It's really not hard to do, so please do.
Q: Why have the basic lands been increasing in value so much lately?
A: There are two reasons for this. One is that people occasionally sell several lands for a combined price, as in:
Island (lot of 10) 2.00
I try to catch those cases and edit them down to a per-card price, but I don't always catch them all.
The other reason, and by far the more influental, is that alpha and beta lands are starting to command respectable prices. Especially for cards in mint or near mint condition, prices of one to three dollars are not unusual.
Q: Why have M:tG prices been dropping lately, especially for some of the more expensive cards?
A: Most likely that card was out of print for a while, but has come back into print with the fourth edition. I believe that this is also responsible for the recent downward trend in M:tG card prices overall.
Miscellaneous Notes and Disclaimer:
-----------------------------------
I do not consider this program to be finished. There are several improvements I want to make, including:
* Differentiating between different versions of the same card. For example, making a difference between the different versions of land cards. I may never actually do this, because there has been no great call for it, and the lack of standardized names for card variants makes doing this difficult. However, if I get a chance I'm going to take a stab at doing this soon.
Update: I've been forced to deal with this a little bit because of the Ice Age expansion; see above. My strategy for this will probably get better as time goes on.
* Coming up with a way to reliably recognize other things, like full sets of cards, boxes of boosters, etc. Again, the lack of standardized names makes this unlikely.
If you have further suggestions as to how this program could be made better, please don't hesitate to send e-mail to me at cloister(at)hhhh(dot)org.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a perfect programmer, and there may be bugs in my program that result in incorrect prices. These problems are typically caused by people not spelling card names in their sales and auctions the way they are really spelled on the cards. Please help by spelling card names properly.
This list is in no way official. It represents the current state of what people on rec.games.deckmaster.marketplace are willing to pay for these cards, and nothing else. Neither Wizards of the Coast nor any other trading card game manufacturers sanction this list (yet, anyway). I do not expect anyone to rigorously adhere to the prices in this list; they are here just as a guideline. As with everything that is bought and sold, its value is nothing more than what the buyer is willing to pay for it.