Friday, October 21, 2011

Market Analysis & Prediction - Glow-Up Bulb

So I have been thinking about doing a Market Analysis on Glow-Up for quite a while, just didn't know what was gonna happen before the announcement of the last 2 promos in the Wave 2 tins.

Many people (including Jeff Jones) predicted that Glow-Up would be the last promo to go along with Darksoul. Troll & Toad wasn't even buying them, even though they still had a pretty decent $35-40 value on eBay (higher for Ultimate). Now they are buying Ultra 1st's at $19.14 while ARG is buying Ulti 1st's at $25 and Ultra 1st's at $30 (kinda strange that they're paying more for Ultra?). Unlimited editions just aren't getting any love.

The primary reason why I decided to write on Glow-Up is because I was looking at Wiki's YGO TCG product release calendar to see what sets came out roughly a year ago. There's a saying/belief in this game that basically says once a set has been out for a year, the cards from it are susceptible for reprints. This isn't concrete of course, since Fossil Dyna came out ages ago, Lyla still hasn't been announced for a reprint, and we're still waiting on that Scrap Dragon reprint as well. On the flip side we got Battle Fader and Drill Warrior reprints very shortly after they got released, but people justify them by saying they've appeared on the anime. For the most part though, I feel that this is a general rule of thumb people should go by. STBL came out on November 16 of last year, so about 1 more month for the 1-year mark.

Glow-Up has been one of my favorite cards for quite a while now and is essential in decks that run the Plant engine, good in Monarchs (depending on build), and just pretty solid overall. He's an easy splash in a myriad of decks; plus'ing for a mill of 1 is pretty sweet. This being said, I feel that this is as good of a time as any to sell this little guy off especially if you aren't running a Plant engine deck as your main or secondary deck. For example if I end up selling my Tour Guides, that makes my Plant deck obsolete (IMO), and thus I wouldn't need my Bulb. The best thing this guy has going for him at the moment is Billy Brake's YCS win at Toronto.

This is the way I see it - if Plants end up winning again, then their value will probably remain relatively the same as what they are now or may see like a $5 price increase. If they don't do well however, and the field is pretty much all DW and Agents, I could see it going down to around $25 on eBay. After fees and shipping you're gonna end up with roughly $18 (see why I prefer to sell in bulk to ARG?). I say this because both of those are structure deck decks and thus easy to pick up. Why would Timmy want to go through the trouble of picking up set cards like Tengu and Bulb when the deck that won came out of a structure deck he can get at Wal-Mart for $10 a pop?

In a nutshell, I'm trying to say that Bulb has more things going against it than it does for it at the moment. Realistically the earliest it could see a reprint is Turbo Pack 7. Six came out in August so we may see 7 around December, and I say this based on 5's release date of April (so roughly 4 months apart). If not in Turbo 7, then Order of Chaos Special Edition, which is way beyond how far I care to look since we don't even have PHSW yet. Who knows, we may get some random-ass product release (similar to Europe's Advent Calendar thing) that sees a Bulb reprint.

You don't need to sell it off immediately or anything like that, but I would heavily consider it if Plants get outshadowed by DW and Agents at Columbus, and you aren't currently playing Plants but have a Bulb for what ever reason. This weekend I will be scouring the forums to see how certain decks do and base my sell decisions from there.

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