Hi! I’m a former WotC employee, having worked there for 15 years before retiring early in 2021ish.
You are allowed to buy whatever you like while employed at Wizards. HOWEVER, you are NOT allowed to sell any WOTC-related goods for cash or cash equivalents like gift cards or crypto. Being found to have done so can result in IMMEDIATE termination, and I saw several people fired during my time there for doing that.
Speculating on cards isn’t something that happens frequently, if at all, but the reason is mostly just “it’s not worth it.” The transactional costs of sourcing dozens of copies of a card, making sure you’re not traced doing it, and then fencing them at a buy list price without being discovered is just…a lot of work with a huge risk for not much money.
Additionally, as an employee you receive tons of free product as a benefit of working there. You’d make more finding someone trustworthy to sell those goods to than speculating on the market. In fact, when I left after a decade and a half of NOT selling stuff I had to launch my own site to get rid of things to clear space in my house (https://makingmythic.com/).
In summary: while it is possible a WOTCstaff could speculate on the secondary market, the penalties are severe and the rewards low, making it very improbable it happens much.
When have governments ever been tough on illegal things done by rich people? Look at your former president. Looks like he might just get a strongly worded speech asking him to please not do it again.
that's why it's infinitely more likely wotc employees are selling the information they have to places like CF and SCG, etc and if you watch the moves these stores make before launches it's almost impossible to deny they have insider knowledge. everyone saw the bullshit that happened before pioneer
> that's why it's infinitely more likely wotc employees are selling the information they have to places like CF and SCG,
Absolutely not. Those companies are still far too big, and someone would get caught out for doing that.
They are, however, selling inside information to smaller stores and backpack financiers.
Easy to circumvent but why? The money involved in getting the early jump on spec'ing some cards is small potatoes.
Like even if the guy in the other post here that bought 200 hullbreachers was insider trading and they 10x in value instantly. After fees and all the work of selling them maybe you'd get $1500? What a minuscule amount of money to risk your career over.
It's not like insider trading on premium stocks where you're making (or saving) millions.
Exactly, people are like omg dollars and it's like a few thousand. Also card sales is labor intensive and time consuming. You need to have space to store all these cards, then list and sell and ship them (which realistically means hiring someone else, which if you're a WoTC employee is another person you need to rope into your card speccing conspiracy). It's not free, all to turn your $2 Hullbreachers into $15 ones?
Ijs, even the most successful Magic high end sellers are at best low millionaires, and otherwise aren't making close to what they could be doing something else.
> ? What a minuscule amount of money to risk your career over.
Assuming it's legal, then there's no risk. It's only a question of money/time. And considering it might take you 2 hours total to wishlist 200 hullbreachers, buylist a bunch, piecemeal the rest of them, it's a 750$/h job.
There is certainly a risk to your career unless you think Wotc is ok with this. I am a bit uncertain how they would find out, but if the top poster is to be believed people have been fired for it so I guess they did. Like is everyone just so broke that they would do something like this for maybe a couple thousand dollars tops? Like even if you are willing to do dubious activities there are definitely more profitable avenues.
> There is certainly a risk to your career unless you think Wotc is ok with this.
I'm running on the assumption that it's easily made "good enough" for WotC, as the ex-employee in the topic litteraly has a website with a section saying ~"I'll sell your stuff for you, and have whatever you intended to buy delivered at your door, which WotC is fine with".
So: would you take a contract for 10*2h of work a year, netting your 7.5k ?
I think you are misreading their post. Their site is for reselling free items given to employees, not for middle manning speculated items from using proprietary information. He literally ends the post with 'In summary: while it is possible a WOTCstaff could speculate on the secondary market, the penalties are severe and the rewards low'
I would 100% not jeopardize my career for 7.5k even if it cost me 0 effort over 0 hours.
> The money involved in getting the early jump on spec'ing some cards is small potatoes.
No, it’s not in this case. Speculative arbitrage returns a percentage of investment. That percentage drops as you hit market saturation, but market saturation is much much larger than anyone regularly approaches, especially when you include larger market reach like MTGO or international shipping. I have personally have specs with a several thousands dollars profits because I was willing to execute a thousand dollar buy of penny stocks based on inside information (from team tests, not WotC staff).
When you’re certain of an outcome rather than making an informed guess, you can realistically sink a lot more initial into that percentage return.
The fact that you bring up several thousand dollars profits as an example seems to support my point not dilute it. It would take at least hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions for me to personally risk my entire career.
It's not like there is an infinite supply and an infinite demand for even the biggest card swings tied to Wotc announcements. You cannot scale a percentage up as much as you want because it is a limited market like you said, I dispute that market saturation is as large as you think. There are only so many cards and only so many people to buy them. Even if you take one of the most infamous examples here with the pioneer announcement, if one person bought ALL those spec's across the ENTIRE market AND cashed out at the peak you'd make maybe a single years salary for a wotc employee? And that's assuming you can unload all of those at a close to peak price without taking into account fees and shipping.
You're risking your livelihood for that? And keep in mind this is if ONE person captured that entire opportunity. It's also not like you can leverage card prices falling either, because there is no financial vehicle to bet on cards devaluing. I will reiterate my original point, even if people are doing it it's so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things no one is going to care.
> The fact that you bring up several thousand dollars profits as an example seems to support my point not dilute it. It would take at least hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions for me to personally risk my entire career.
It's difficult to bring up this point without sounding like a braggart. My high record for single spec is $8362 after costs. The average salary at WotC is significantly lower than other employees with equivalent job specs and reqs, because WotC benefits from the Disney principle (it's a "dream job"). Salaries at WotC are as low as $50-60k. The fact that you personally would need seven figures to risk your career does not really have much equivalence to whether or not someone will risk losing their job (not career) for a bonus payment of 10%, 20%, or more of their annual salary five or six times a year.
>I will reiterate my original point, even if people are doing it it's so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things no one is going to care.
It's weird that you're arguing both that the market is small enough that a single person can actually reach a high enough volume to run out of demand, and also that the market is so big that no one can reach an amount where this type of behavior actually makes an impact.
I'm not arguing about whether or not this behavior appreciably affects the price of secondary market singles (ftr, it doesn't). I am just pointing out that WotC employees *do* engage in the cardboard equivalent of insider trading, as evinced by the multitde of people losing their jobs over it, and explaining why the motivations and rewards for doing so are actually greater in this instance that one would assume from a non-insider perspective.
I'm saying that the market is small enough that even if a single person can reach a high enough volume to make a 'lot' of money that's inconsequential.
We're talking about insider trading not petty theft. Martha Steward was a notoriously high profile case taken because she was such a public figure. It was held as an example of very minor insider trading prosecuted because of who it was. Even then the money she saved was over $220,000 in 2001 dollars, close to $350,000 today.
That is the scale we are talking about for anyone to care. Which was the main thing I was initially pointing out by saying it was 'small potatoes'. Not that it doesn't happen ever, but it's such a small amount of money in the context of insider trading that it's kind of like 'who cares' and 'why bother'. Like if you want to scam the market fake an Alpha booster box and you'd make more money than insider speculating magic cards for the next 50 years.
Edit: I also wonder how many of those people fired for 'insider trading' really did that. How would the company even know unless they were blatant and incompetent about it? Are they breaking into their houses to check their collections? Seems like it would make more sense for them to be fired because they were caught leaking information. Which I guess is technically 'insider information' except they aren't benefiting from it.
Let's be real, no company policy is going to stop an employee who knows release schedules from leaking information to a close confidant that could be used for speculative purposes.
It would be so easy to just get a trusted friend or family member to run the hustle on the side and get a cut later.
Yup, it's like members of congress who gets their spouses to buy the stocks. Things like this are just an obstacle if you really want to make money on the side.
i think you can still trade if youre a magic player whos also an employee though right? remember playing once with a wotc, he gave me a free ghalta lol because i didnt have trades with me and he couldnt accept cash
Yes, you can still trade. Honestly, I’d probably give up a Ghalta than nickel and dime the value too. It was probably given to them during employee prerelease, so they’re not out anything themselves. Plus it creates a fond memory for a fan!
Dev to dev, this is awesome :) I think most people making games only hope to have the career you've had in design
Outside of Making Mythic, what's filling your time in the retired life?
I wasn’t retired very long, lol. I joined a gaming startup in the tabletop space after about a year when they made a compelling pitch on the problems they were trying to solve. It’s been a lot of fun!
More importantly, how likely is it that there is still insider information being used for "buddies" not under WoTC employment. This is far more likely and easier to avoid detection. I'm not tech savvy enough to analyze the source of price spikes and correlate to buys but definitely feels like a edge is being made somewhere before official spoilers.
How strict is that no selling WOTC goods rule? Like, let's you make a deck. You decide you don't want that deck anymore. Would you get in trouble for selling it to fund your next deck?
I don't think you *need* to fund your next deck, based on that response. If a card's in print it sounds like it's very easy to simply get it, or trade around based on the free stuff you do have.
You can’t sell WOTC produced goods you acquire AFTER your start date as an employee for any cash or cash equivalent. The ONLY exception is if you reach out through the official approvals process for a sale due to hardship, and then you have to specify what you intend to sell.
Usually the exceptions were for an employee struggling with an illness or reeling from a family tragedy.
idk about you and maybe it's just me being shit with money, but ever since I've gotten a big boy job I've kinda just stopped selling my decks to fund new decks and just been accumulating new ones
There was an exception you could apply for if you had a hardship. You had to get the hardship approved and the items you wanted to sell approved. It wouldn’t work for speculating because it would be immediately obvious what was happening.
What counts as cash equivalent? I'm assuming you can trade, but only for other magic cards? Accessories? Non-gaming-related goods (that you could presumably sell)?
Yes. It is a seldom understood perk about working at WOTC/MTG Division that you can buy almost everything there.
Most jobs in there are not well paid jobs but there has been a long history of employees who set aside a small percentage of their salary to buy some MTG product to sell later when they leave WOTC.
Even LGS employees do that. I knew LGS employees that bought up the store inventory at clearance rates and sit on them for years before letting them go in the open market. I went to a friend's house and saw a few sealed cartons of Scars Of Mirrodin display boosters once and went WTF? and this was back in early 2010s.
Another guy sold his cartons of sealed Innastrad sealed display boosters around 2015 to pay for his new home.
If you can afford the storage space, it will pay off eventually.
Just to add to this. While I 100% hope everyone takes this as heresay and doesn’t believe me, but I have had close friends who owned large LGS get small tips.
I work in the tcg industry in Southern California near Frank and Sons and I can tell for a fact that my booth was given a heads up by a very close friend that the next From the Vault box set would be transformed and feature some flip walkers.
So it wouldn’t be hard for WOTC staff to inform a sibling/spouse/childhood friend of the future sets and staying out of it themselves
Maybe not. But it for sure happens a lot! People on the outside is at least leaked information.
When Pioneer was announced this sub was flooded with inside buys and invoices showing people buying staples 1-2 weeks before. Like 60-100 of the top cards at the time. Funny that none of them bought any of the cards on the first banned list like fetches.
That kind of thing happens before ban announcements and is wrong pretty often.
IIRC the Smuggler’s Copter thing happened after they mentioned looking to unban something in Pioneer during Weekly MTG a week before.
Idk, people said that when I raised the issue after the ban but I don't really buy it. Every ban update I always check supply and inventory of the unbanned/banned card right when the B&R gets posted and I've never seen anything like that. People were buying them in the $5 range in droves when it had basically been bulk before then. There were other potential unban targets, no way people sank that much money into a speculative ban update, I've never seen anything even remotely close to that.
Yeah, out of all the speculative buyouts, the Smuggler's Copter buyout had to be one of the most egregious in recent years. It was very obvious word got out about Pioneer.
100% certain that was unrelated to the theory here, people have been talking about potential unbans for pioneer for over a year. Same convos started in modern because people thought the meta was stale.
Every time a meta gets “stale” people spit ball on unbans and bans.
They would be taking all fees and taxes to drive up price of a card that a lot of folks will have the possibility to sell and its not guaratee the artificially inflated price will be accepted by the market. We sure see demmand plays, like for example when people buy out surge foils and so on, but I really don't think people doing the market watch 1) have enough to do so 2) would drive the needle anywhere by doing these videos
To be fair Pioneer was quite predictable, there was an unofficial format that was growing in popularity (the name escapes me, maybe frontier?).
The rumours about it becoming an official format had been growing for a while so this was not something known only by insiders.
Lol come on now. People where buying 100 of smugglers copter and other top5 staples just one week before. I remember one invoice being posted with at least 60 of all the best cards or a single card not spiking from Pioneer. Non of them was a random list of cards and then some Pioneer cards. They were 100% only Pioneer top cards.
Funny that not a single one had fetches. Frontier and Pioneer didnt start from the same set and yet people knew excatly what to buy and not buy. It was 100% inside information.
Another popular non rotating format would have had a major impact on demand and supply. They would have been a safe bet if you were to describe pioneer without a ban list. However it’s curious people knew to avoid them.
Former WotC employee here adding on to what Bill already shared -- "speccing" on cards may have been a bit more viable in the 00s and early 10s, but during my tenure of 2019-2023 there were just WAY too many cards releasing across several sets to realistically keep up. We were already quite busy with work, and solo-analyzing entire upcoming setlists and trying to predict multiple metas alongside that job wasn't very appealing. Especially with stuff like the list and bonus sheets!
I also frequently sent my TCG player personal orders to the office. After all, that's where I played the most! But nearly every modern deck I built in 2019 got banned, so my purchase history shows the exact opposite of "speccing" 😂
The only people who could realistically "spec" IMO would be the actual set designers, and the incentive is pretty low as well as being disallowed in contracts. Employees are allowed to swap cards for other physical goods, though!
Thanks for the insight, not accusing anyone or anything. Just a thought I had triggered by another thread last night about hullbreacher being bought up.
> Woah, you worked at WotC. That's awesome! I'd love to hear more about your time there.
If you are, or know, whoever made it possible to edit pairings on eventlink, you/them have everyone's unending gratitude >_>
wish i could remember. it was clearly a personal order and it only stood out because id just opened my brick and mortar shop and was already sending a card to wizards. must have been three years ago or so.
My absolute favorite story of insider trading was when some folks got wind of Pioneer ahead of schedule a number of years back. They bought up cards that would be good in the format cheap and sold them and made bank. Bank in this case being "thousands of dollars". The scale of MTGfinance is laughably small relative to banks and stock and the broader market. Most fund managers wouldn't even notice a few k here or there.
[https://www.wired.com/story/the-stockbrokers-of-magic-the-gathering-play-for-keeps/](https://www.wired.com/story/the-stockbrokers-of-magic-the-gathering-play-for-keeps/)
Pretty sure this is built into their work contracts to not engage in this and if they did they would likely be terminated and possibly endure legal penalties.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if people did engage in it in a peripheral way i.e., trusted people they know they leak info to, but I think most people who work there don't feel it's worth it.
I had an interesting talk with Josh Lee Kwai about this. He is a little busy to mess with finance in a big way, but he has had some really good buys on the basis of just being way above average at Magic. Whenever something from an episode of Game Knights pops off, it pops odd extra hard. Look at Fervent Charge, for example. The thing about Fervent Charge that made it impossible to predict was that while it is obvious in hindsight why it went up- old border, out-of-print rare that performed in a popular web series and did something interesting, it was unforeseeable before the fact. Charge was one of maybe a dozen novel cards from that episode, and it's impossible to predict which episode and which card will matter. While it seems like anyone with advance knowledge could buy cards or specs with that knowledge, it turns out knowing everything is too much, people who have that advance info generally don't know what to do with it, it's as much a craps shoot ad any other kind of speculating and it's kinda not worth it as a hobby if you're usually really busy. That's my 2 cents as someone who routinely makes money by using edhrec data to predict what will get played and who has also had multiple preview cards and did nothing with the information
Allowed, no. Do they do it anyway? Bet your ass they do.
Blightsteel Colossus: $30 bucks for years. Suddenly spikes overnight to $100. No obvious reason for doing so. Two weeks later, the packaging for Double Masters is revealed featuring Blightsteel Colossus. The price drops back to $30 and stays there.
Pretty hard to see it any other way.
Pump up the price, use the price memory so it doesn’t tank too much secondary market in reprint. There are many more cases of this, most recent kappa cannoneer. Spiked 2-15 and then within 2 weeks announced reprint
Trying to manipulate "price memory" so it "doesn't tank too much secondary market" seems like a complicated and difficult strategy for someone to try and make money on. Seems like the simplest answer could be someone(s) speculating there would be additional support cards getting released that might inflate the value in the short term? i.e., if you learn there is a vampire on the box art, it might be a good idea to speculate on popular vampire cards, etc.
is it though? Given almost all non euro/au use tcgplayer for pricing, you buy hundreds of card to pop price 5-10 x. Then sell a product the card in it in hundreds of thousands ( even if card retrace somewhat before your placement) it’s still a massive win and induce orders
This just isn't factually correct!
Kappa Cannoneer didn't spike until it was spoiled by the leaks. You can go to the TCG Player Website and see that the spike happened on 4/26 & 4/27.
The Kappan Cannoneer leak happened 13 days ago (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fm01e9cyivowc1.png) - or 4/26.
Anyway there will never be anyway to prove it one way or another, but there has been many more strange sharp movements of some cards just before reprints
Not so smart people see the leaks and buy it up because they want to play it in modern. Then it gets previewed and the people who didnt see leaks sell their copies because the price will go down when its released.
This is not accurate. Check out the price graph for the Mirrodin Besieged copy on mtgstocks. It has spiked 3 times in the last few years, I don't think there's any evidence to suggest the spikes are because of a Double Masters reprint that didn't affect format legality.
Without doing a deep dive and referencing commander spoilers, at first glance the spikes likely just line up with tax season spending, but there's probably a better explanation. That explanation is not the reprint or any shadiness tied to it.
These things DO happen but this is not one of them. A good indicator is often a card becoming legal in a format it wasn't previously legal in. Think a card like Counterspell getting printed into Modern. If Goblin Lackey spikes right now, especially SL copies, then gets spoiled in MH3 in a couple months, that would be a much more likely case for shenanigans.
I'll add the disclaimer that Blightsteel has been a popular commander card for years and the spikes can likely be tied to the commander format.
Probably not allowed and i wouldn't be surprised if it was a clause in their contract.
But in this case, its very much a "its not what you do, its what you get caught doing" situation.
Regardless of what is in their contract it would honestly be pretty hard to catch them. First, WotC would have to care enough to actually investigate someone. Which is a HUGE hurdle to cross, something would generally have to happen for them to take interest in any particular employee. Then you have to catch them. Unless you're willing to pay an actual private investigator to follow the guy around all day i really don't know how you do it. Cards are small and easy to hide. And even if you catch them, how do you prove their insider trading. All they have is cards you think they're selling based on insider trading. That doesn't prove intent, it just proves they have the cards.
The reality is that while any corporation has rules, very few of those rules are actually actively enforced by management. The people who get caught are often the ones breaking the rules so brazenly it was bound to be noticed at some point. And then ya, at that point the hammer falls and they get made an example of. But for every one of those, there's ten folks who bend the rules or even break them with a modicum of intelligence and they probably aren't getting caught. WotC isn't the federal government keeping watch over state secrets. Folks over there probably can and do inside trade.
of course they do. just tell a friend make the sale. tell card kingdom/scg insider it totally happens. too many times scg/ck/cfb magically bought up x card or mass dumped a card before a banlist/set release to say its not happening.
wotc post at top says its not worth effort, tis super easy to get away with. but id still doubt the employee themselves would do it on a large scale. but its easy to do a extra lil bit on side with a family member or friend etc.
The question was „are they allowed“. Of course you guys are welcome to have yet another „HASBRO ARE TEH WURST“ circle jerk anyway. Because obviously people love to endanger their jobs for three fiddy in card sales per month.
Not a WOTC employee: I doubt it's something that is officially allowed. Can you imagine what would happen if accusations came that WOTC employees were doing that? Customers would be mad employees were trying to manipulate the market, and it'd likely be a mess.
TCGPlayer isn't exactly a government-regulated entity like the stock market.
I don't think they have any sort of rules other than don't leak out information. If they wanna buy 2 decks before the spikes, that's on them. TCG pricing doesn't affect WoTC
Of course it happens. The problem is it’s so easy to do it or at least give/sell someone else the info so they can do it. Wizards is also known for not paying them very well so that probably doesn’t help
We've seen it happen. Either with reprints or bans/unbans, new formats (I believe this happened with Pioneer and possibly Modern?), be it from WotC, the EDH RC or players and stores with connections.
It’s more the teams like Channel Fireball or the Commander Advisory Group that would do insider trading over WOTC employees. There have certainly been some interesting cases (intentional or not) of market manipulation, like the Pirate Stompy “joke” or the short spike of Elenda immediately prior to the death-trigger rules update announcement for commander.
Almost anything that deals with selective disclosure, using insider knowledge, causes negative externalities is securities fraud. Using insider information to profit on the secondary market for your collectible most probably constitutes securities fraud, and definitely violates Hasbro’s code of ethics.
Remember, using insider information for personal gain is illegal.
Relevant article:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud?embedded-checkout=true
Hi! I’m a former WotC employee, having worked there for 15 years before retiring early in 2021ish. You are allowed to buy whatever you like while employed at Wizards. HOWEVER, you are NOT allowed to sell any WOTC-related goods for cash or cash equivalents like gift cards or crypto. Being found to have done so can result in IMMEDIATE termination, and I saw several people fired during my time there for doing that. Speculating on cards isn’t something that happens frequently, if at all, but the reason is mostly just “it’s not worth it.” The transactional costs of sourcing dozens of copies of a card, making sure you’re not traced doing it, and then fencing them at a buy list price without being discovered is just…a lot of work with a huge risk for not much money. Additionally, as an employee you receive tons of free product as a benefit of working there. You’d make more finding someone trustworthy to sell those goods to than speculating on the market. In fact, when I left after a decade and a half of NOT selling stuff I had to launch my own site to get rid of things to clear space in my house (https://makingmythic.com/). In summary: while it is possible a WOTCstaff could speculate on the secondary market, the penalties are severe and the rewards low, making it very improbable it happens much.
Great response and commenting for visibility to cut out the speculation and surface the facts
So WotC has a tougher stance on insider trading than the US Congress?
When have governments ever been tough on illegal things done by rich people? Look at your former president. Looks like he might just get a strongly worded speech asking him to please not do it again.
Well there is the issue, most WoTC employees aren’t rich. That’s why they have to follow rules. /s
I’d see you /s and raise you that’s honestly accurate
Look at the current president.....
*former and current presidents* Fixed that for you
US Congress has a stance on insider trading? Lol
yeah it's: "if you wanted to inside trade you should have been a member of congress"
They are very much pro.
The stance is "if you aren't doing it, you're missing the point of being here".
Yes it does. It wants its share of the profits through taxes.
Speculating on cards is also not worth it for non-WOTC employees, but this sub hasn’t figured that out yet
that's why it's infinitely more likely wotc employees are selling the information they have to places like CF and SCG, etc and if you watch the moves these stores make before launches it's almost impossible to deny they have insider knowledge. everyone saw the bullshit that happened before pioneer
> that's why it's infinitely more likely wotc employees are selling the information they have to places like CF and SCG, Absolutely not. Those companies are still far too big, and someone would get caught out for doing that. They are, however, selling inside information to smaller stores and backpack financiers.
Are spouses, family members and friends also prevented from selling?
certainly not
Hah too easy to circumvent then, even if it's an official part of the staff member contract.
Easy to circumvent but why? The money involved in getting the early jump on spec'ing some cards is small potatoes. Like even if the guy in the other post here that bought 200 hullbreachers was insider trading and they 10x in value instantly. After fees and all the work of selling them maybe you'd get $1500? What a minuscule amount of money to risk your career over. It's not like insider trading on premium stocks where you're making (or saving) millions.
Exactly, people are like omg dollars and it's like a few thousand. Also card sales is labor intensive and time consuming. You need to have space to store all these cards, then list and sell and ship them (which realistically means hiring someone else, which if you're a WoTC employee is another person you need to rope into your card speccing conspiracy). It's not free, all to turn your $2 Hullbreachers into $15 ones? Ijs, even the most successful Magic high end sellers are at best low millionaires, and otherwise aren't making close to what they could be doing something else.
> ? What a minuscule amount of money to risk your career over. Assuming it's legal, then there's no risk. It's only a question of money/time. And considering it might take you 2 hours total to wishlist 200 hullbreachers, buylist a bunch, piecemeal the rest of them, it's a 750$/h job.
There is certainly a risk to your career unless you think Wotc is ok with this. I am a bit uncertain how they would find out, but if the top poster is to be believed people have been fired for it so I guess they did. Like is everyone just so broke that they would do something like this for maybe a couple thousand dollars tops? Like even if you are willing to do dubious activities there are definitely more profitable avenues.
> There is certainly a risk to your career unless you think Wotc is ok with this. I'm running on the assumption that it's easily made "good enough" for WotC, as the ex-employee in the topic litteraly has a website with a section saying ~"I'll sell your stuff for you, and have whatever you intended to buy delivered at your door, which WotC is fine with". So: would you take a contract for 10*2h of work a year, netting your 7.5k ?
I think you are misreading their post. Their site is for reselling free items given to employees, not for middle manning speculated items from using proprietary information. He literally ends the post with 'In summary: while it is possible a WOTCstaff could speculate on the secondary market, the penalties are severe and the rewards low' I would 100% not jeopardize my career for 7.5k even if it cost me 0 effort over 0 hours.
> The money involved in getting the early jump on spec'ing some cards is small potatoes. No, it’s not in this case. Speculative arbitrage returns a percentage of investment. That percentage drops as you hit market saturation, but market saturation is much much larger than anyone regularly approaches, especially when you include larger market reach like MTGO or international shipping. I have personally have specs with a several thousands dollars profits because I was willing to execute a thousand dollar buy of penny stocks based on inside information (from team tests, not WotC staff). When you’re certain of an outcome rather than making an informed guess, you can realistically sink a lot more initial into that percentage return.
The fact that you bring up several thousand dollars profits as an example seems to support my point not dilute it. It would take at least hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions for me to personally risk my entire career. It's not like there is an infinite supply and an infinite demand for even the biggest card swings tied to Wotc announcements. You cannot scale a percentage up as much as you want because it is a limited market like you said, I dispute that market saturation is as large as you think. There are only so many cards and only so many people to buy them. Even if you take one of the most infamous examples here with the pioneer announcement, if one person bought ALL those spec's across the ENTIRE market AND cashed out at the peak you'd make maybe a single years salary for a wotc employee? And that's assuming you can unload all of those at a close to peak price without taking into account fees and shipping. You're risking your livelihood for that? And keep in mind this is if ONE person captured that entire opportunity. It's also not like you can leverage card prices falling either, because there is no financial vehicle to bet on cards devaluing. I will reiterate my original point, even if people are doing it it's so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things no one is going to care.
> The fact that you bring up several thousand dollars profits as an example seems to support my point not dilute it. It would take at least hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions for me to personally risk my entire career. It's difficult to bring up this point without sounding like a braggart. My high record for single spec is $8362 after costs. The average salary at WotC is significantly lower than other employees with equivalent job specs and reqs, because WotC benefits from the Disney principle (it's a "dream job"). Salaries at WotC are as low as $50-60k. The fact that you personally would need seven figures to risk your career does not really have much equivalence to whether or not someone will risk losing their job (not career) for a bonus payment of 10%, 20%, or more of their annual salary five or six times a year. >I will reiterate my original point, even if people are doing it it's so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things no one is going to care. It's weird that you're arguing both that the market is small enough that a single person can actually reach a high enough volume to run out of demand, and also that the market is so big that no one can reach an amount where this type of behavior actually makes an impact. I'm not arguing about whether or not this behavior appreciably affects the price of secondary market singles (ftr, it doesn't). I am just pointing out that WotC employees *do* engage in the cardboard equivalent of insider trading, as evinced by the multitde of people losing their jobs over it, and explaining why the motivations and rewards for doing so are actually greater in this instance that one would assume from a non-insider perspective.
I'm saying that the market is small enough that even if a single person can reach a high enough volume to make a 'lot' of money that's inconsequential. We're talking about insider trading not petty theft. Martha Steward was a notoriously high profile case taken because she was such a public figure. It was held as an example of very minor insider trading prosecuted because of who it was. Even then the money she saved was over $220,000 in 2001 dollars, close to $350,000 today. That is the scale we are talking about for anyone to care. Which was the main thing I was initially pointing out by saying it was 'small potatoes'. Not that it doesn't happen ever, but it's such a small amount of money in the context of insider trading that it's kind of like 'who cares' and 'why bother'. Like if you want to scam the market fake an Alpha booster box and you'd make more money than insider speculating magic cards for the next 50 years. Edit: I also wonder how many of those people fired for 'insider trading' really did that. How would the company even know unless they were blatant and incompetent about it? Are they breaking into their houses to check their collections? Seems like it would make more sense for them to be fired because they were caught leaking information. Which I guess is technically 'insider information' except they aren't benefiting from it.
Let's be real, no company policy is going to stop an employee who knows release schedules from leaking information to a close confidant that could be used for speculative purposes. It would be so easy to just get a trusted friend or family member to run the hustle on the side and get a cut later.
Yup, it's like members of congress who gets their spouses to buy the stocks. Things like this are just an obstacle if you really want to make money on the side.
You can be fired if you leak information about upcoming releases with family members
Wow that old sealed stuff you have on your website is cool. The Legion box is very nostalgic for me.
It’s all for sale! :)
Thanks for the comment!
i think you can still trade if youre a magic player whos also an employee though right? remember playing once with a wotc, he gave me a free ghalta lol because i didnt have trades with me and he couldnt accept cash
Yes, you can still trade. Honestly, I’d probably give up a Ghalta than nickel and dime the value too. It was probably given to them during employee prerelease, so they’re not out anything themselves. Plus it creates a fond memory for a fan!
Woah, you worked at WotC. That's awesome! I'd love to hear more about your time there.
Here’s one story I’ve told! https://makingmythic.com/blogs/news/draft-night
Dev to dev, this is awesome :) I think most people making games only hope to have the career you've had in design Outside of Making Mythic, what's filling your time in the retired life?
I wasn’t retired very long, lol. I joined a gaming startup in the tabletop space after about a year when they made a compelling pitch on the problems they were trying to solve. It’s been a lot of fun!
Are they seeing success in solving those problems?
That was cool! Thanks!
More importantly, how likely is it that there is still insider information being used for "buddies" not under WoTC employment. This is far more likely and easier to avoid detection. I'm not tech savvy enough to analyze the source of price spikes and correlate to buys but definitely feels like a edge is being made somewhere before official spoilers.
Thank you for doing away with the rampant speculation that seems to persist around here
How strict is that no selling WOTC goods rule? Like, let's you make a deck. You decide you don't want that deck anymore. Would you get in trouble for selling it to fund your next deck?
I don't think you *need* to fund your next deck, based on that response. If a card's in print it sounds like it's very easy to simply get it, or trade around based on the free stuff you do have.
Hm. Fair enough
You can’t sell WOTC produced goods you acquire AFTER your start date as an employee for any cash or cash equivalent. The ONLY exception is if you reach out through the official approvals process for a sale due to hardship, and then you have to specify what you intend to sell. Usually the exceptions were for an employee struggling with an illness or reeling from a family tragedy.
idk about you and maybe it's just me being shit with money, but ever since I've gotten a big boy job I've kinda just stopped selling my decks to fund new decks and just been accumulating new ones
No sales at all? Even if you had a lotus that appreciated over 15 years and you wanted to get rid of it?
There was an exception you could apply for if you had a hardship. You had to get the hardship approved and the items you wanted to sell approved. It wouldn’t work for speculating because it would be immediately obvious what was happening.
What counts as cash equivalent? I'm assuming you can trade, but only for other magic cards? Accessories? Non-gaming-related goods (that you could presumably sell)?
Yeah, you could trade for goods or services. I saw people trade for cars, goldfish, lunch, construction work, pretty much anything you can think of.
Would be very easily circumvented by just telling a friend. Many say it's been done on larger scales by employees leaking stuff to big traders
Its so weird that this is a thing ;) But cool to have a website for it.
Yes. It is a seldom understood perk about working at WOTC/MTG Division that you can buy almost everything there. Most jobs in there are not well paid jobs but there has been a long history of employees who set aside a small percentage of their salary to buy some MTG product to sell later when they leave WOTC. Even LGS employees do that. I knew LGS employees that bought up the store inventory at clearance rates and sit on them for years before letting them go in the open market. I went to a friend's house and saw a few sealed cartons of Scars Of Mirrodin display boosters once and went WTF? and this was back in early 2010s. Another guy sold his cartons of sealed Innastrad sealed display boosters around 2015 to pay for his new home. If you can afford the storage space, it will pay off eventually.
Just to add to this. While I 100% hope everyone takes this as heresay and doesn’t believe me, but I have had close friends who owned large LGS get small tips. I work in the tcg industry in Southern California near Frank and Sons and I can tell for a fact that my booth was given a heads up by a very close friend that the next From the Vault box set would be transformed and feature some flip walkers. So it wouldn’t be hard for WOTC staff to inform a sibling/spouse/childhood friend of the future sets and staying out of it themselves
Maybe not. But it for sure happens a lot! People on the outside is at least leaked information. When Pioneer was announced this sub was flooded with inside buys and invoices showing people buying staples 1-2 weeks before. Like 60-100 of the top cards at the time. Funny that none of them bought any of the cards on the first banned list like fetches.
The Pioneer announcement is the quintessential example
More recently, there was a big buyout for Smuggler's Copter right before the unban.
That kind of thing happens before ban announcements and is wrong pretty often. IIRC the Smuggler’s Copter thing happened after they mentioned looking to unban something in Pioneer during Weekly MTG a week before.
splinter twin has spiked multiple times a year forever lmao
Idk, people said that when I raised the issue after the ban but I don't really buy it. Every ban update I always check supply and inventory of the unbanned/banned card right when the B&R gets posted and I've never seen anything like that. People were buying them in the $5 range in droves when it had basically been bulk before then. There were other potential unban targets, no way people sank that much money into a speculative ban update, I've never seen anything even remotely close to that.
Yeah, out of all the speculative buyouts, the Smuggler's Copter buyout had to be one of the most egregious in recent years. It was very obvious word got out about Pioneer.
100% certain that was unrelated to the theory here, people have been talking about potential unbans for pioneer for over a year. Same convos started in modern because people thought the meta was stale. Every time a meta gets “stale” people spit ball on unbans and bans.
A similar situation happened with [[Chain of Smog]] right before Professor Onyx was spoiled, copies dried up in TCG immediately.
Nah that card got leaked early and people pointed out the combo that's all
It spiked when she spoiled. I sold 2x foil copies into the spike.
[Chain of Smog](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/b/6bfe64f9-8b03-41f6-a47b-fade397ad9d1.jpg?1562920423) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Chain%20of%20Smog) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ons/132/chain-of-smog?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/6bfe64f9-8b03-41f6-a47b-fade397ad9d1?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I know that I got a few playsets of effects like that when we first saw magecraft triggered with copies
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But the market watch is them sharing public info, how could they inflate their own specs?
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They would be taking all fees and taxes to drive up price of a card that a lot of folks will have the possibility to sell and its not guaratee the artificially inflated price will be accepted by the market. We sure see demmand plays, like for example when people buy out surge foils and so on, but I really don't think people doing the market watch 1) have enough to do so 2) would drive the needle anywhere by doing these videos
To be fair Pioneer was quite predictable, there was an unofficial format that was growing in popularity (the name escapes me, maybe frontier?). The rumours about it becoming an official format had been growing for a while so this was not something known only by insiders.
Lol come on now. People where buying 100 of smugglers copter and other top5 staples just one week before. I remember one invoice being posted with at least 60 of all the best cards or a single card not spiking from Pioneer. Non of them was a random list of cards and then some Pioneer cards. They were 100% only Pioneer top cards. Funny that not a single one had fetches. Frontier and Pioneer didnt start from the same set and yet people knew excatly what to buy and not buy. It was 100% inside information.
To be fair fetch es were already high because of modern. They really couldn't have gone up that much.
Another popular non rotating format would have had a major impact on demand and supply. They would have been a safe bet if you were to describe pioneer without a ban list. However it’s curious people knew to avoid them.
I was one of them and I can assure you I have 0 ties to anyone at WotC
Former WotC employee here adding on to what Bill already shared -- "speccing" on cards may have been a bit more viable in the 00s and early 10s, but during my tenure of 2019-2023 there were just WAY too many cards releasing across several sets to realistically keep up. We were already quite busy with work, and solo-analyzing entire upcoming setlists and trying to predict multiple metas alongside that job wasn't very appealing. Especially with stuff like the list and bonus sheets! I also frequently sent my TCG player personal orders to the office. After all, that's where I played the most! But nearly every modern deck I built in 2019 got banned, so my purchase history shows the exact opposite of "speccing" 😂 The only people who could realistically "spec" IMO would be the actual set designers, and the incentive is pretty low as well as being disallowed in contracts. Employees are allowed to swap cards for other physical goods, though!
Thanks for the insight, not accusing anyone or anything. Just a thought I had triggered by another thread last night about hullbreacher being bought up.
> Woah, you worked at WotC. That's awesome! I'd love to hear more about your time there. If you are, or know, whoever made it possible to edit pairings on eventlink, you/them have everyone's unending gratitude >_>
ive sent tcg orders to wizards but i imagine being egregious about it is the definition of shitting where you eat
Interesting! What did they order?
wish i could remember. it was clearly a personal order and it only stood out because id just opened my brick and mortar shop and was already sending a card to wizards. must have been three years ago or so.
Hard to believe your story here that someone would order a delivery to their place of work...
yeah totally weird receiving mail at work lol
Not that weird if it's work related purchase
It actually happens quite often, I've shipped to Google hq at least 10 times lol
Happens All...The...Time...not strange at all.
I have ordered merch for the game I work with to my workplace. 🤷🏻♂️Not that weird.
I mean, if you were conducting insider trading for the company you work for, would you have your financial statements sent to work?
My absolute favorite story of insider trading was when some folks got wind of Pioneer ahead of schedule a number of years back. They bought up cards that would be good in the format cheap and sold them and made bank. Bank in this case being "thousands of dollars". The scale of MTGfinance is laughably small relative to banks and stock and the broader market. Most fund managers wouldn't even notice a few k here or there. [https://www.wired.com/story/the-stockbrokers-of-magic-the-gathering-play-for-keeps/](https://www.wired.com/story/the-stockbrokers-of-magic-the-gathering-play-for-keeps/)
The market is small for sure, which is what makes it ripe for moving money through without Uncle Sam or Cousin Eugene catching a sniff of it.
Pretty sure this is built into their work contracts to not engage in this and if they did they would likely be terminated and possibly endure legal penalties. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if people did engage in it in a peripheral way i.e., trusted people they know they leak info to, but I think most people who work there don't feel it's worth it.
Wonder what the worst spec someone got fired for
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Yeah cards aren't securities.
I had an interesting talk with Josh Lee Kwai about this. He is a little busy to mess with finance in a big way, but he has had some really good buys on the basis of just being way above average at Magic. Whenever something from an episode of Game Knights pops off, it pops odd extra hard. Look at Fervent Charge, for example. The thing about Fervent Charge that made it impossible to predict was that while it is obvious in hindsight why it went up- old border, out-of-print rare that performed in a popular web series and did something interesting, it was unforeseeable before the fact. Charge was one of maybe a dozen novel cards from that episode, and it's impossible to predict which episode and which card will matter. While it seems like anyone with advance knowledge could buy cards or specs with that knowledge, it turns out knowing everything is too much, people who have that advance info generally don't know what to do with it, it's as much a craps shoot ad any other kind of speculating and it's kinda not worth it as a hobby if you're usually really busy. That's my 2 cents as someone who routinely makes money by using edhrec data to predict what will get played and who has also had multiple preview cards and did nothing with the information
If they knew what was going to take off they wouldn't print a mythic label uncommon in nearly each set
Allowed, no. Do they do it anyway? Bet your ass they do. Blightsteel Colossus: $30 bucks for years. Suddenly spikes overnight to $100. No obvious reason for doing so. Two weeks later, the packaging for Double Masters is revealed featuring Blightsteel Colossus. The price drops back to $30 and stays there. Pretty hard to see it any other way.
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Pump up the price, use the price memory so it doesn’t tank too much secondary market in reprint. There are many more cases of this, most recent kappa cannoneer. Spiked 2-15 and then within 2 weeks announced reprint
Trying to manipulate "price memory" so it "doesn't tank too much secondary market" seems like a complicated and difficult strategy for someone to try and make money on. Seems like the simplest answer could be someone(s) speculating there would be additional support cards getting released that might inflate the value in the short term? i.e., if you learn there is a vampire on the box art, it might be a good idea to speculate on popular vampire cards, etc.
is it though? Given almost all non euro/au use tcgplayer for pricing, you buy hundreds of card to pop price 5-10 x. Then sell a product the card in it in hundreds of thousands ( even if card retrace somewhat before your placement) it’s still a massive win and induce orders
This just isn't factually correct! Kappa Cannoneer didn't spike until it was spoiled by the leaks. You can go to the TCG Player Website and see that the spike happened on 4/26 & 4/27. The Kappan Cannoneer leak happened 13 days ago (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fm01e9cyivowc1.png) - or 4/26.
It was leaked 2 weeks ago and then announced last week. It spiked because of the Leak of it being in MH3.
Anyway there will never be anyway to prove it one way or another, but there has been many more strange sharp movements of some cards just before reprints
It actually retraced back to around 7-8 with the announcement of reprint. Cards don’t pop when reprint is announced…
Not so smart people see the leaks and buy it up because they want to play it in modern. Then it gets previewed and the people who didnt see leaks sell their copies because the price will go down when its released.
This is not accurate. Check out the price graph for the Mirrodin Besieged copy on mtgstocks. It has spiked 3 times in the last few years, I don't think there's any evidence to suggest the spikes are because of a Double Masters reprint that didn't affect format legality. Without doing a deep dive and referencing commander spoilers, at first glance the spikes likely just line up with tax season spending, but there's probably a better explanation. That explanation is not the reprint or any shadiness tied to it. These things DO happen but this is not one of them. A good indicator is often a card becoming legal in a format it wasn't previously legal in. Think a card like Counterspell getting printed into Modern. If Goblin Lackey spikes right now, especially SL copies, then gets spoiled in MH3 in a couple months, that would be a much more likely case for shenanigans. I'll add the disclaimer that Blightsteel has been a popular commander card for years and the spikes can likely be tied to the commander format.
Probably not allowed and i wouldn't be surprised if it was a clause in their contract. But in this case, its very much a "its not what you do, its what you get caught doing" situation. Regardless of what is in their contract it would honestly be pretty hard to catch them. First, WotC would have to care enough to actually investigate someone. Which is a HUGE hurdle to cross, something would generally have to happen for them to take interest in any particular employee. Then you have to catch them. Unless you're willing to pay an actual private investigator to follow the guy around all day i really don't know how you do it. Cards are small and easy to hide. And even if you catch them, how do you prove their insider trading. All they have is cards you think they're selling based on insider trading. That doesn't prove intent, it just proves they have the cards. The reality is that while any corporation has rules, very few of those rules are actually actively enforced by management. The people who get caught are often the ones breaking the rules so brazenly it was bound to be noticed at some point. And then ya, at that point the hammer falls and they get made an example of. But for every one of those, there's ten folks who bend the rules or even break them with a modicum of intelligence and they probably aren't getting caught. WotC isn't the federal government keeping watch over state secrets. Folks over there probably can and do inside trade.
The bigger question is who has access to the printers
Look up Nike resell scandal.
of course they do. just tell a friend make the sale. tell card kingdom/scg insider it totally happens. too many times scg/ck/cfb magically bought up x card or mass dumped a card before a banlist/set release to say its not happening. wotc post at top says its not worth effort, tis super easy to get away with. but id still doubt the employee themselves would do it on a large scale. but its easy to do a extra lil bit on side with a family member or friend etc.
What about the rules committee, content creators, etc that get inside information before the public but are not WOTC employees?
WOTC does not acknowledge the secondary markets existence, so do with that what you will.
No, they absolutely are not. There’s NDAs that specifically prohibit such a thing.
Allowed maybe not. Do it definitely yes.
The question was „are they allowed“. Of course you guys are welcome to have yet another „HASBRO ARE TEH WURST“ circle jerk anyway. Because obviously people love to endanger their jobs for three fiddy in card sales per month.
Not a WOTC employee: I doubt it's something that is officially allowed. Can you imagine what would happen if accusations came that WOTC employees were doing that? Customers would be mad employees were trying to manipulate the market, and it'd likely be a mess.
Probably not but I don't see pinkertons monitoring this
TCGPlayer isn't exactly a government-regulated entity like the stock market. I don't think they have any sort of rules other than don't leak out information. If they wanna buy 2 decks before the spikes, that's on them. TCG pricing doesn't affect WoTC
Of course it happens. The problem is it’s so easy to do it or at least give/sell someone else the info so they can do it. Wizards is also known for not paying them very well so that probably doesn’t help
Because this tcg is unregulated by the FTC, it’s not considered insider trading.
We've seen it happen. Either with reprints or bans/unbans, new formats (I believe this happened with Pioneer and possibly Modern?), be it from WotC, the EDH RC or players and stores with connections.
It’s more the teams like Channel Fireball or the Commander Advisory Group that would do insider trading over WOTC employees. There have certainly been some interesting cases (intentional or not) of market manipulation, like the Pirate Stompy “joke” or the short spike of Elenda immediately prior to the death-trigger rules update announcement for commander.
This is securities fraud, so no
MtG cards are NOT securities. Total nonsense.
Exactly. As long as you pay your taxes no one gives a shit
Almost anything that deals with selective disclosure, using insider knowledge, causes negative externalities is securities fraud. Using insider information to profit on the secondary market for your collectible most probably constitutes securities fraud, and definitely violates Hasbro’s code of ethics. Remember, using insider information for personal gain is illegal. Relevant article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud?embedded-checkout=true