Sunday, May 9, 2021

Show me the fetches

 In response to someone predicting the fetches would tank in value in the near future:

It will be great if your predictions prove correct, but you have several major unkowns, and any or all can make prices stay the same, even go higher:
  1. We don't really know when people will be back at 90 percent of LGSs. When this point is reached, there will be a wave of demand for everything TCG.
  2. There is a lot of pent up demand for fetches. Wizards knows this, and has been able to use fetches to prop up products.
  3. Modern could experience a come-back, a resurgence.
  4. There may be enough speculators in Magic post the trillions of free government tendies to fuel a wave of non-player increases in the value of fetches, and that wave could take one, two, three years to finally dissipate.
What will help your prediction:
  1. A bad economy, and no one is seeing this in like the next five years.
  2. The LGS model continues an inevitable decline.
  3. Modern does not pick up steam.
  4. Wallet fatigue finally catches up to Wizards reprinting many versions of the same card in many different products.
  5. Speculators find some other shiny object to speculate on and move on from fetches.
I think in balance the four aspects of fetches continuing to be valuable, even increase in value, seem a lot stronger than the four aspects pointing to a decline in valuation. The valuation of the fetches has a lot more to do with the ABU lands being in the reserved list than any other factor. Add to this that Wizards is giving Modern the appeal Legacy used to have: a really deep card pool and pushed decks that are very powerful. Wizards has a ten step program to turn Modern into Legacy minus the Reserved List, and two or three Modern Horizons sets down the line, fetches could be as valuable to players as the ABU duals are today. I think the speculation on fetches cointinuing to go up in value is where the money will go.