The Value of Draft

Hello, interwebs!

I'm never good with introductions, so let's just jump right into why this blog exists.

Last month, I decided that I wanted to do a study into my favorite format: draft. I wanted to see if you can draft your way into a decent size collection given that you start from nothing. I also wanted to see if drafting, from a financial perspective, was an economically effective activity to do. And lastly, I wanted to show the effects of trade and how players are better off (or worst off) from trading in comparison to MTG Arena (more on this maybe next week). With that in mind, I have placed a few key parameters:

1.) All singles must be acquired only through sealed products, events, and trading.

2.) Any cash transaction of cards can only be from selling cards for cash. In doing so, cash will be credited back into income spent.

3.) Trading for store credit is allowed given that singles are still being used as a currency rather than additional income.

When it comes to figuring out card values, I wanted to make sure that I take into account the actual liquidity rate of the card. That is, the instant buy list value of cards rather than their "market" value. While market value is a good indication of how much vendors are selling to the majority of consumers, buy list values are the raw instant cash values of any individual card. Since we are talking about the economic benefits of drafting, I want to use the "stock" value of cards rather than their "retail" value. I'll be using Channel Fireball's and StarCity's buy list and using the median as our cash values. For the sake of keeping the card list relatively short and to highlight only significant cards, I'm only going to catalog cards that are AT LEAST $3 in market value. This is what I consider "significant value" since $3 is right above the cost of a pack that most vendors pay for. Also, CF and SC give out very low-end rates for anything below $3 (or nothing at all) and keeping track of all them would take a considerable amount of time per week. Lastly, we won't consider travel cost, opportunity cost etc. on going to events and drafting. All of the value is consumed and the activity itself will be considered entertainment value.

I also set out a couple of personal goals that we'll revisit come standard rotation time:

1.) I would want to retain AT LEAST 50% of income spent on cards that are of significant value. i.e., If we spent $600 come rotation, can we draft and trade our way to retaining at least $300? (not including dollar rares, bulk, etc.)

2.) I want to consolidate the entire collection in an Ultra Pro carrying case. I want to keep a relatively small collection and trade/sell away anything that I'm not actively using or collecting.

I feel like five drafts are a decent sample size to start recording data. The LGS I play at has $12 drafts pack-per-win. So that comes out the $60 of income spent through five drafts. The following is my record for those five drafts:

2-1

0-2 drop

2-1

3-0

2-1

And the chart below is the collection so far:

Now, to be completely fair, I opened the best mythic and the highest foil mythic in the set. These cards are obviously outliers (IQR is $2). What's great is that even when you remove those two cards, we would still be ABOVE the target of retaining 50% in value. As far as what did transpire, not only did I exceed my target, I actually exceeded the initial income spent by over 39%. Only time will tell if we can continue this momentum and I look forward to posting these new updates every week.

This weekend is GP LA, where I'll add an additional $60 spent on limited events. Let's find out if we can stay in the green, or if luck will start tipping us over into the red.