Calculating the "cost" of the Type 1 card pool..

[brturn]

This is kinda random, but I thought someone might find it interesting.

I was curious what the 'cost' of a full set of tier-1 vintage cards would be.  I took Philip Stanton's July Metagame card list and set it up as an apprentice deck format such that each restricted card was included once, and every other card was a 4-of.  Then I imported the list into the AnyCraze deck database.

AnyCraze has a new feature that you can 'buy' a deck.  So, it calculates the cost of each card and adds it to your shopping cart.

The result?

----------------------------------------------------------------
Deck size:  880
Lands:  115 (13%)
Creatures:  236 (27%)
Enchantments:  78 (9%)
Artifacts:  230 (26%)
Spells:  301 (34%)
White:  28 (3%)
Blue:  163 (19%)
Black:  100 (11%)
Red:  122 (14%)
Green:  94 (11%)
Gold:  28 (3%)  

Buy This Deck:  
Sub-Total: $3,970.00
10% Off: - $397.00  (AnyCraze gives 10% off for buy-a-deck)
TOTAL: $3,573.00
----------------------------------------------------------------

The obligatory comparison with Type-2, based on some rough eBay searches for the legal sets in standard:

4x each of 8th Edition, Fifth Dawn, Darksteel, Mirrodin, Onslaught, Legions, Scourge.

~$2,040.00

While these numbers aren't directly comparable (ie: Type 2 players don't need to get 4x of each set, etc.) I find it interesting that they are not far apart in value.  A typical 5-proxy event means that both formats are essentially equivelent in cost.

--Bryan

[LoA]

I'm pretty sure I'd have a tough time explaining to my wife that something that costs $1500 more is "essentially equivalent," but it's pretty interesting to see how this breaks down.

I've lost track of how often sets rotate in Type 2, but it would be illustrative to demonstrate cost over time for Type 2 vs. Type 1 so you could establish at what point you're better off financialy playing Type 1.

[Jacob Orlove]

This is very interesting, but it's kinda in the wrong forum. I'm gonna go ahead and move it to basic community.

[brturn]

Oh.. Woe is me!

AnyCraze messed up in loading the 'deck' and said it had all the cards but did not calculate the correct value (I thought it seemed awfully cheap, especially at retail prices)..

I uploded the deck in 3 parts, then added them together to get the final result.  All the statistics were the same as before, but the cost was different, looks like I found a bug in their database!  

The corrected cost:

Sub-Total: $11,103.25
10% Off: - $1,110.32
TOTAL: $9,992.93

*sigh*  Well there goes the argument I was forming to my girlfriend about T1 being cheap..

Still.. after removing the Power 9 and the fat lands, the cost is somewhat more reasonable:

Sub-Total: $5,439.25
10% Off: - $543.93
TOTAL: $4,895.32

--Bryan

[Jacob Orlove]

That's merely proof that anycraze is ridiculously overpriced.

[Ephraim]

However, consider that part of that markup is the cost of the convenience of purchasing all of the cards in one place. The 10% markdown is reasonable for a bulk purchase, but you'd spend a lot more time and effort, not to mention shipping/handling getting all of the cards on EBay. If you want them all at once, there's going to be an associated cost.

[Ifflejink]

I've found that the prices on Anycraze are often 1.5 times to 2.5 times the price of the card on say eBay or MOTL. That $500 discount doesn't make up for how overpriced Anycraze is.

[arj]

I think it's worth noting that vintage list includes more or less all cards that are currently played. You need probably 100 cards or so to make a good deck + sideboard. I've seen comparisons of different decks and stax is by far the most expensive one, but the others like 4cc control are not that much off. Maybe a better comparison would be to get the price of some of the most played decks of both formats. Type 1.5 might also be interesting after the new B/R list, but I guess a lot of decks in that format has changed since the new B/R list.

[Whatever Works]

www.coolstuffinc.com is about 20% cheaper then crappy anycraze on a sidenote, and what exactly would be on the list of "must haves" for the type 1 cardpool, and if your counting the entire needed cardpool thats somewhat unrealistic, because most people i know only get the cards for 1-2 pimp decks, and trade away cards for 1 of the decks or other random jank to be able to get the "next big thing."

[Rastadon]

http://www.cardshark.com/default.asp?referral=darktemplar286&source=link

This site's great. While you can't buy whole decks and have to scrounge up the parts yourself, they offer great deals and come within the week.

Mod, if this is considered advertizing, I'll delete it myself.

[Kowal]

Thread necromancy isn't cool.