Tom the Bomb

Tom Bombadil is a goofy little creature in Middle Earth who’s magic enough to be unaffected by The One Ring but doesn’t help save Middle Earth by bearing it and throwing it into Mount Doom.

I’m not saying it would have been trivial for him to simply walk into Mordor, but him refusing to help always made me laugh. Why do that when you can frolic in a meadow?

The thing is, we need to give old Tommy Bombs (as he likes to be called) a break, because while he didn’t help to save Middle Earth, you know who he did help? Me! And he can help you.

I was going to write about the cards in the Tom Bombadil deck, but Cliff beat me to it. So I wrote about something else. I wish I had written it first - I wanted to be the first to point out how juicy a certain card looked on the EDHREC page for Bom Tombadil.

As you can see, EDHREC’s latest scrape reports Card Kingdom has Historian's Boon at $0.50 while TCG Player has it at $1.50. I used to say this all the time in my MTG Price articles - Card Kingdom is almost never cheaper than TCG Player. TCG Player is a marketplace where hungry sellers undercut each other so their copies sell first, resulting in races to the bottom. Card Kingdom gets a ton of business by being Card Kingdom and they can charge what they want. If Card Kingdom thinks a card is way, way more than it is on TCG Player, I pay attention, because they will sell at that price and sometimes you can literally just buy on TCG Player and arbitrage the copies and come out way ahead with the trade-in bonus. Anyone who has traded a stack of Whim of Volrath for a Serra's Sanctum can tell you that it’s fun and works.

You Like Pictures? I Got Pictures.

OK, so we established Card Kingdom can stay in business selling cards for more than TCG Player is, but what has happened when they’re cheaper on Card Kingdom? Well, there are a myriad of factors we could list, but we can shortcut all of that mental energy expenditure with this simple heuristic - click on both links before you use your gourd at all. 99 times out of 100, the many factors that could be at play don’t matter because when TCG Player

 

is cheaper, it’s almost always for one reason. 

While it’s obvious that a card with the word “Saga” on it was going to be in play with the Saga commander coming out, there are a few other cards from the Tombadil deck that I am keeping my eye on, and I want to look at every other instance where Card Kingdom is cheaper to see if they have any stock left. 

Hello, gorgeous. This likely means what it almost always means, right? Let’s take two seconds and due a little do diligence (leave it, Andy, you coward), shall we? 

One of these prices HAS to be wrong. But which one? Let’s check the TCG Player graph. 

It seems like CK has Hex Parasite for too cheap. You’re unlikely to believe this, but this was the first discrepancy I found and looked into, which appears to fart on my heuristic a bit, but in actuality this was our preferred outcome. This seems like a solid “buy on CK” given the velocity on TCG Player. People aren’t buying NM copies right now, they’re buying one of the cheapest. 

This is what it looks like when people buy cards to play with. Card Kingdom is simply underpriced, and we identified this card in like 30 seconds of scanning prices for an instance where CK was cheaper. 

A Parasitic Theme

Thrull Parasite still seems real cheap, but it costs twice as much today as it did yesterday. 

There are a lot of these for cheap, including two foils. This is selling. And when cards sell quickly, TCG Player automatically adjusts, but CK might not. This also seems very tempting, especially given that this card was touted before and it was a card Cliff mentioned in his piece. I also tweeted about this card a few weeks ago, on the basis of a different deck and the fact that people should play it. Extort is broken and this is very good. 

They’re not all going to be winners.

Is That a Fish, Or…?

Cards under $2 are kind of tricky, and the Card Kingdom API occasionally hits something like an oversized copy or some wild, terrible variant when the other stuff either sells out or costs more. In this case, it’s the ugly variant of Decanter of Endless Water that’s $1.29.

I would pay way less for the horniest card art ever, personally. 

Seems I am not alone in that. 

In under a minute of scanning, I identified three instances where CK was cheaper. In two of those cases, it identified a buying opportunity, and in the third it identified an alt art that looks funny to 8th graders. And the world needs stuff like that, too. 

This method is far from foolproof, but it doesn’t take much time, and EDHREC is kind enough to put those two prices next to each other by default. You aren’t obligated to buy from CK, certainly. Even if CK is cheaper, you should still look at those weird hole-in-the-wall websites with three copies that you think no one else in the MTG Finance community knows about (remember Card Shark? I buy specs there all the time).

This is just another tool to have in your belt. And if a tool can do a good job in ten seconds, you should probably use it. 

Tom Bombadil	CardKingdom $2.49	TCGPlayer $2.36
Hex Parasite	CardKingdom $7.99	TCGPlayer $7.69
Decanter of Endless Water	CardKingdom $1.99	TCGPlayer $2.29
Thrull Parasite	CardKingdom $0.69	TCGPlayer $0.80

Check out these other articles:

Price of Knowledge - Cyclonic Rift by Ryan Cole

Modern Times: The State of Modern Speculation by Corey Williams

Hidden Gems - Lords of the Rings: Tales of Mr. Moth by Adam Berg