MTG’s newest premium Commander product seems to have a story of its own. The Warhammer Collector’s Edition decks have been making headlines consistently throughout the past few weeks. Whether its players concerned about the quality of the product, the spike in price to four digits due to allocation, or how hundreds of MTG players are seemingly getting access to these for $1, it looks like Warhammer Collector’s Edition is going to be one for the books. Whether players are actually getting these products for $1 has yet to be seen. That said, the intention behind this seems to be malicious.
A Strange TCGplayer Market Anomaly
The picture above has been taken from the current market history for the Warhammer Forces of Imperium Commander deck. On the eighth of October, for an extended period, it seems that someone was purchasing copies of this deck for $1, with some orders (as pictured above) selling hundreds of copies of the product.
This is an incredibly unusual phenomenon, as prices on either side of this outlier are all well above the $200 mark. This clearly can be seen in the picture above clearly, but it also persists before this weird $1 bubble starts.
This market history image comes from recent sales of the Ruinous Powers Collector’s Edition Warhammer deck. Like what was seen with the Forces of Imperium example above, there seems to be a significant outlier present on October eighth, where ‘players’ were buying hundreds of copies of this $200+ product for $1. The same pattern is seen with the Tyranid Swarm Warhammer Collector’s Edition deck. This trend is strangely missing from the Necron Dynasties Collector’s Edition Commander deck, which is the most expensive deck by a wide margin.
Market Manipulation?
This bizarre pattern may be pretty difficult to explain, especially if players buying these products are not real players. Fortunately, this strange correlation did not escape the eyes of MTG Redditors, and they have a few guesses as to what the objective of these outliers were.
“It’s also to catch legit stores in the mess. Folks who automate their price can be manipulated to sell cards for a lot cheaper with these tactics,” states NotSourced;
“I’ve seen this over the past few weeks with high end RL cards. Stores with low/no feedback listing high end RL for 50% less than current low prices.”
“Yeah I’m assuming that’s their goal in manipulating the market price. One of the options sellers have on tcgplayer when updating their inventory in bulk is to match all prices to the market price.” – Carldamonkey
The market average charts from all four TCGplayer Warhammer Collector’s Edition decks are Pictured above. As you may notice, there are three significant drops in average market price amongst these pictures, while the fourth only has a slight price decrease. As you may expect, the outlier here is the Necron Dynasties deck. In other words, this $1 outlier temporarily tanked the market average on TCGplayer for these products.
As pointed out by Carldamonkey, one pricing option for TCGplayer sellers is to match the market average for any product. Any larger stores that choose to automate their pricing this way will now be selling their cards for a considerable loss. The drops on these were so massive that players who may have managed to take advantage of this blip would be able to buy the Warhammer Collector’s Edition Commander decks for half their initial value! That’s about $125 in savings on average per product.
Most Redditors are pretty certain that these ‘fake’ sales are the work of a malicious party trying to take advantage of a bug in TCGplayer’s market average system. This unknown party quickly attained the title “scalper,” a group of people who make a profit by buying and reselling products in demand for a much higher value than market averages.
Will This Continue?
Some Redditors were put into the bizarre position where they had the opportunity to buy these $1 decks but knew that something suspicious was afoot when seeing the prices. One particular Redditor has a different take for readers to consider:
“This isn’t a weird conspiracy, it’s an inventory error.
Someone transposed their quantities and prices, inadvertently entering x boxes for $1 each instead of 1 box for $x, a bunch of pricing bots followed the mistake down the hole, and a number of folks who spotted the errors went ahead and bought the $1 boxes on the off chance that the sale would somehow be honored, but probably guessing it was an error.
This happens a lot. I caused it once as a seller, and I’ve seen it happen following other prices.
TCGPlayer just cancels the sales, blocks feedback on the transactions, and everyone goes about their day.
No conspiracies, no price manipulation, just compounded human error.” – Jaded-pain
Regardless of the real reason behind these bizarre TCGplayer sales, don’t expect to suddenly find Warhammer Collector’s Edition decks going for a dollar. Should you, for whatever reason, find a deal like this in the wild, take it and run. You can enjoy a new beautiful Commander deck or resell it for a chunk of cash! Just don’t use your Credit or Debit card.
