This is the fourth in a series of blog posts discussing the trading card game Magic The Gathering (hereafter shortened to just “Magic”) and its connections to the world of sales.
Sometimes the creators of Magic The Gathering, Wizards of the Coast, design cards with mechanics that are too overpowered. This happens when cards are not play-tested well enough by the R & D department and are released without a sufficient enough understanding of how they will warp formats upon their arrival. (For a detailed description of the different formats in Magic The Gathering, see my last post here.) This occurrence leads to cards being put on what is known as a “banned list” by Wizards. All formats have a banned of some kind, but each format has its own different banned list. Based on format descriptions, a card might be legal in multiple formats but could be banned for being too overpowered in one specific format.
Magic’s Modern format was created in August of 2011 and a certain card called “Jace, the Mind Sculptor” was included on the initial banned list after a reign of terror that got it banned in Standard only a month prior. Jace, the Mind Sculptor was included on Modern’s initial banned list because it is a low-cost card with incredibly strong repeatable effects.
With Jace, the Mind Sculptor having been banned from the start of the Modern format, it came as an immense shock to players when Wizards announced last month that they would be unbanning this card from Modern at the end of February.
You might ask, what effect did this have on Jace’s price on the secondary market? Well, let me tell you: the card’s price shot up overnight. In his most recent printing, Jace had stabilized for months at a price of $65, but within two days of Wizards’ unbanning announcement, the card had reached a record high of $140 (data from one of my favorite Magic finance sites, MTG Goldfish).
What Jace’s rapid price increase demonstrates is that while Wizards doesn’t directly interfere with the secondary market, their decisions when it comes to banning and unbanning specific cards certainly has a great effect on the market.
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