In my previous article, I managed to provide some initial figures about the price trend and number of available items of cards on cardmarket for Innistrad: Crimson Vow. Thus far, I only managed to provide some data for the regular art of these cards and my rudimentary excel skills have been applied to provide their visualization. With Magic: The Gathering’s next set Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty approaching, with a prerelease on 11 february and an actual release the week after on 18 february, I’ve been hard at work in obtaining more data and to update my tools in order to facilitate it’s visualization. For a couple of days now, I’ve been tracking the alternate art cards of VOW and applied some more rudimentary python skills to automate the visualization. The process has been fun and I’m happy to share some of my visualizations I created during the this period (and some of the insights it provided). Please, feel free to provide your insights, reflections and feedback in the comments below, which might steer my next article. The information provided hereafter provides some broad strokes about the market movements of Innistrad: Crimson Vow cards and only reflect data obtained from Cardmarket.
How many mythics, rares, uncommons and commons on the market, at what price?
We at the brink of a new set release, so I imagine we can say that the current market trends of the current set won’t see that much changes anymore: the number of available items and their corresponding prices are no longer in a fluctuating state like they were around the prerelease and release dates.
Please note that the cards talked about in this section only concern the “regular art version”. The “alternate art” versions are discussed in a lower section. The dotted black vertical lines each represent the prerelease and release date of VOW, respectively 12/11/2021 and 19/11/2021.
Number of available items
The following figures depict the number of available items on Cardmarket grouped according to their rarity. On the left side, we have the nonfoil cards, on the right side, the foil cards.
These figures explicitly indicate what we might have already known. The number of available mythics is far less then the number of available commons. Foil versions are even less available. The outliers we see for the commons are our well-known mana-providing lands.
What stood out to me as well, is the little dip in availability around Christmas and a ramp up again after new year. I imagine people are purchasing cards as gifts. After new year the available items are increasing again as people might be offloading the cards they got or maybe from packs they opened.
How does this relate to the price trend?
Well, we can already anticipate that the going rate for mythics will be a lot higher then your average common. And the following figures will back that up with some data. These figures give a broad idea about the market trends and provide a reference base for detecting outliers and interesting events.
The color coding used for the figures below is the same as the color coding used for the respective figure in the figures with the available numbers. So for example, the price trend of a non foil mythic card represented by a red line, will be represented by a red line in the corresponding figure above that depicts the available items.
Some findings
Interesting to see the broad movements, but interesting to look at some individual cards as well.
Some mood swings
Mythic and rare cards have the most interesting market evolutions. When I went over the individual nonfoil mythic cards, 2 of them stood out to me. The first one being Cultivator Colossus, which had a nice jump in valuation since it’s prerelease price:
The other one being Manaform Hellkite, which has lost a lot of value since its prerelease price:
Available items and price trend correlation
Another thing that dawned on me from looking at these data is that the amount of available items is no guarantee for the card’s value. Both “Chandra, Dressed to Kill” and “Volatile Arsonist” currently have about 1000 items on the marketplace whereas Chandra is about 4 times higher valued then the Arsonist.
Not being an economist myself, but I guess, this gives a clear indication that it is not so much the amount of cards that defines the price, but more likely, the card’s demand. The amount of cards available is probably a parameter in the price setting, but certainly not the only one.
Rares
Most of the nonfoil rares can be said to fall below the 2 euro price trend, as can be seen below.
“Hullbreaker Horror” clearly breaks away from this relatively low price for rares, as it is by far the best performing nonfoil, regular art, rare.
As an additional observation, there is the land cycle that is also doing better then the average rare in VOW. We are looking at Deathcap Glade, Dreamroot Cascade, Shattered Sanctum, Stormcarved Coast and Sundown Pass.
Runaway Uncommon
The uncommon that dwarves all other uncommons, relatively speaking (:)), is “Wash Away”. If you ask me, with a relatively high prerelease price for the foil version. Both price trends for the foil and nonfoil version can be seen hereafter.
What about alternate arts?
The cards I’m referring to, are gathered in Cardmarket’s custom set “Innistrad: Crimson Vow: Extras”. If you are an avid scryfall user, you would typically know these cards as “borderless planeswalkers”, “alternate-art borderless cards”, “showcase cards”, “dracula series” or “extended art cards”… such as the showcase card of Henrika Domnathi or the extended art card of Hullbreaker Horror shown hereafter:
I sadly don’t have much data to show for since I only started tracking them recently, so no idea about the actual price evolutions of these cards. Nevertheless, when putting the little data I have for these cards into figures, I especially wanted to share mythic foil cards’ available items and price trend:
These figures allowed me to quickly identify the highest valued card from the Innistrad: Crimson Vow printings. Kudos here go to the showcase foil Sorin the Mirthless, which sells for a price of 135.00 euros at 96 available items, today (23/1/2022) on Cardmarket. I wonder what the price evolution of this card would look like.
That’s it for the time being.
What’s up next
I would be glad to hear what data and comparisons you would like to see in an upcoming post. Feel free to leave a comment below. For me personally, tracking data from Innistrad: Double Feature might be of interest to see how this set will influence the price trend. As from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty onwards, I’m hoping to get all data from the alternate art cards as well, with the intention to correlate data for the different printings and finishes for a card in that set.
Besides those, high on my to-do list, is figuring out some heuristics for the demand of a given card.