Artificial Price Memory w/ Assets, Investing with Magic: the Gathering (Part 3)

Hello everyone! It's been a while but I still have some topics I'd love to cover regarding gaming assets and how it relates to cryptocurrency. If you missed the previous entires, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2.

To recap, my few years of playing and trading with Magic the Gathering (MtG) have provided a unique insight in how he price of an asset works. The more and more I learned about crypto, those experiences and parallels kicked in so through these posts, my aim is to outline some of those personal lessons.

Let's begin!

What is Price Memory?

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Well with any asset, the price of something is not completely determined by Supply & Demand variables. Let's say I buy a card at $20 by current market price and for some external reasons, the level of play and exposure of the card drops dramatically. Many would expect the price to equally drop in ratio to it's use, but most times this is not the case.

Why? Because assets holders will not buy or sell immediately with market trends. I just spent an Andrew Jackson on that card, do you think I'll be willing to sell it when it drops down to 16 or 10? Misreading the market can lead many buyers to sit on their fat assets (get it? =]). Maybe the price will go up again in the future or a whole bunch of other hypotheticals.

Point is, stubbornness and a certain amount of unsupported expectation can cause an asset to hold at a certain price range. Price memory.

Cards with the Memory of an Elephant

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Let's look at an example.

Karn Liberated is a seminal card in MtG and is the iconic symbol of the age-old and successful modern deck Tron. It's use in tournament play drove the price up to a whopping $54 per copy in 2014. For the next year or so, it hovered above the mid-40 mark.

In 2015, the card was reprinted, spilling hundreds of more copies into the market and the price responded accordingly. By the end of the year, you could pick up a copy for <$30 on the market.

Around early 2016, it's deck resurged in the meta and the demand spiked to above $60... But the strangest thing happened when it was almost completely hated out of the tournament scene. Over the remaining winter and spring months, no-one touched the deck. And yet the price never dropped back below $43.

Today, Karn Liberated is almost $70, even though it's use in the tournament circuit is nowhere near what it used to be.

Karn is one of the highly publicized cards and is now synonymous with high-level play/investment. Even though it may not objectively be used as much today, players are unwilling to sell or trade a premium card that they paid a premium for. With even a small chance that the card may see greater play in the future, 3rd-party sellers are also maintaining an artificial cost.

My Takeaway for Crypto

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Again, what's really important to understand about an asset is that it doesn't react as immediately to market forces as pure fiat currency. If buyers are stubborn and/or believe that an asset may rise again in the future, there is an extra and potentially artificial push to keep prices above a certain threshold.

Think of it as being similar to selling something on Craigslist. Sure, maybe everyone is selling their baseball card collections for around $200. But there's almost no pressure to sell yours for under $250 unless you're financially in need. Who knows, maybe the popularity of the collectible will bounce back!

The reason this concept is imperative to crypto is that the price isn't completely determined by supply/demand. After doing some research, many outlier cryptos seem to be the product of dying off in the market but maintain a fractional price since there are some still left in people's possession. Again, the key thing to factor into consideration is that the price is NOT directly correlated to actual use or supply/demand.

That's all from me today! Be sure to check out the previous posts and let me know what you think. Happy trading!

Previous Magic the Gathering Asset Posts

1 - Trading Crypto like MtG
2 - The Cost of HYPE

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