Timetwister costs three mana and lets you shuffle your hand, graveyard and library together and then draw seven cards.
The Mox cycle of cards are a marginally less broken version of a Black Lotus. Each one gives you one mana for no mana but, unlike Black Lotus, can be used multiple times. Mox Ruby gives you Red mana, and has been used in a plethora of decks since they were released.
This is a fun one; Mind Twist is a card that can be used to make your opponent discard their hand. That, as it turns out, pretty much wins you the game… most of the time. We come to the first of the dual lands on our list.
The dual land cycle includes ten lands, each of which represents a different colour pairing. Volcanic Island is the Red and Blue land. Land is an important part of MTG, and the reason that these ones cost so much is that there is no downside to playing them.
Of course, this is also on the Reserved List. It turns out that gaining access to cheap resources is something that comes at a premium in MTG. Where Black Lotus gives you free mana, Ancestral Recall gives you very cheap card draw. If you play this, it causes any player to discard a card every time they draw one.
But condition is everything; a graded 8. Candelabra of Tawnos comes from the Antiquities expansion, only the second expansion Magic: The Gathering ever saw and was released in Since this is the only version in existence, it has made it rather rare. Beyond that, this card skyrockets in value. Blue focuses in card draw and control, stopping opponents from casting their spells.
Instead of using it as mana, you can tap it to draw two cards and discard three. It was from the Arabian Nights expansion, which was also the very first one, in This special land from the Antiquities expansion could be really useful in an artifact-heavy deck as it lets the player tap for three colorless mana as long as it is used to cast an artifact.
The international reprinting of the Mox cards have been banned in all competitions, which is probably one of the reasons why they are so much cheaper to purchase than the first or second printings.
Though those are only allowed in vintage tournaments. This legendary land could be useful against someone running a creature-heavy deck but the caster would need to be careful. It makes it so all creatures require 1 mana to be paid in order to keep it on the field.
But it could stop some players from playing more spells if all their mana is tapped out in order to keep their creatures from being destroyed. Useful, but certainly not worth it outside of a collecting standpoint. Via: mtgproxies. Via: cardmarket. Popular Comments. There are no comments yet for this card. DJFalcon: Read the flavor text. Not all moats are filled with water.
Thistles stop merfolk, lack of water stops boats, and things best left unseen stop leviathans. Report Abuse. Has anyone seen how much it costs to get your hands on one of these??
Companies can bring their supply chain partners, industry peers, and corporate subsidiaries into a single channel to share files, negotiate deals, and make decisions. The more work companies conduct in Slack, the harder it is for them to churn.
Tech analyst Ben Thompson points out that:. Slack Connect allows organizations to collaborate on the messaging platform. Source: Dispatch. Slack will need to maintain and grow its moat as competitors such as Microsoft loom large. When Gillette first started selling its safety razors with disposable blades in , the innovation of replaceable blades immediately made shaving more convenient, eliminating the need to send razor blades for sharpening.
A low-margin product is priced low enough to attract as many people as possible, while a high-margin product is priced just high enough to create healthy profits. Repetition is the key here. After a customer makes the low-margin purchase, they must make the high-margin purchase continuously.
In other words, people who buy cheap Gillette razors tend to keep buying Gillette blades. Over time, because those customers keep generating high-margin revenue and have an in-built tendency to stick around, a moat is created.
Protecting that moat means reinforcing the value of the product and the brand name, which Gillette has done largely through offering new products. New razor systems serve a dual purpose for Gillette. First, they reinforce the value of the Gillette razor, encouraging people to maintain the investment they keep making in the products.
Second, each iteration that increases the number of blades generates a new, more expensive blade that can drive more revenue. Gillette has also sought to protect its moat through advertising. Since the s, Gillette has been one of the biggest names in advertising, especially through sponsorships of US sports. Instead, it priced both its razor and blades at a high cost.
A hundred years after the first Gillette razors appeared on the market, Gillette was still the clear market leader in the space, selling about 5x as many razors as any other company. One challenge is cultural. There is less social pressure to shave, for both men and women, than at virtually any time since Gillette was founded. The Covid pandemic also impacted Gillette. The company reported a drop in net sales as consumers shaved less during the pandemic.
Because these companies sell blades directly to consumers rather than primarily through retail, they have been able to sell at a lower cost than Gillette and other big-box competitors. Ultimately, while Gillette is still the largest force by market share in shaving, it is no longer the only powerful player. The Government Employees Insurance Company was founded in to sell insurance to government employees, which were considered a less risky pool of customers than the general public.
From this simple beginning came a critical business model decision. The basic advantage that GEICO discovered was that marketing directly to consumers gave the company a significant amount of leverage on price. Over the next several decades, the decision to go direct-to-consumer would propel GEICO to become the fifth-largest auto insurer in the country.
One of the first changes that Buffett enforced after Berkshire Hathaway finished its acquisition of the company in was increased spend on advertising. The idea was that to protect its cost advantage moat, the company should invest in brand, building an emotional connection with customers to ensure that it remains the top-of-mind choice for low-cost car insurance. The head start GEICO gained through its marketing and pricing strategy has allowed it to spend more freely than any of its competitors.
AWS publicly launched in — 2 years before Google launched its competing Cloud, and 4 years before Microsoft launched Azure. That head start paid off. The original idea of AWS was to take all of the back-end infrastructure and server work needed to create a website or internet service — things like image and video storage — and make them easy and affordable for anyone looking to build on the internet.
AWS is a business that benefits from scale. Over time, the business has expanded to encompass more and more services. AWS customers can access all of these, and integrating them is also significantly easier since they already run the rest of their stack on Amazon.
Ultimately, being both low-cost and high-capability gives Amazon a highly advantageous position. This cost advantage moat has been achieved by leaning on regional networks of stores. The company realized in its early days that individual stores have little negotiating power with suppliers. But a centrally coordinated network of, for instance, stores that can buy in bulk and serve millions of customers can achieve huge scale efficiencies.
As a result, the retailer was able to keep prices and costs low. Walmart took power away from individual stores. In doing so, the retail giant started exploiting the economics of the network to gain an edge over its competitors.
Kmart, for instance, allowed each store to pick vendors, choose products, and set prices. But this practice, as pointed out by Richard P. Stores that do not choose the same vendors or negotiate the same terms cannot benefit from an integrated network of data and transport. Walmart integrates each store into a wider logistics, computing, and supply chain network. This is a common practice today, but some 30 years ago, it was an innovative move.
Today, Walmart is faced with a different kind of challenge. The rise of e-commerce and the competition posed by online retailers such as Amazon has forced the company to develop an online business. The company leans on its vast network of stores in the US to ship orders. Shoppers are provided with a relevant mix of products in stores and online while enjoying fast delivery and personalized deals.
Third-party sellers are also able to sell on Walmart Marketplace. As a result, Walmart is reporting growing demand across various sales channels and can maintain its strong bargaining power with suppliers. Not all companies build moats from structural factors like cost or network effects. While these are powerful ways to keep customers around and fend off competitors, huge companies have been built off intangible factors like brand and tradition as well. Brand-based business moats protect a company from competition through some kind of unique value proposition, culture, and messaging.
With a strong, recognizable, and valued brand, companies can get their customers to pay a premium for their products and come back for repeat purchases — a powerful moat generator especially for companies selling a commodity. Tradition-based business moats protect a company through the values and beliefs of the culture around that company. Some products, however, continue under patent or tradition to only be produced by a single company, like the situation with Marmite in the United Kingdom.
With these kinds of products, companies can sustain a moat solely driven by the culture around them and its need to use or consume their product.
The outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia is well known for its commitment to environmental and sustainable causes. Brands like Patagonia grow more powerful moats over time, because consumers judge the virtue and ethics of a brand partly by how long it has been consistent. Patagonia has supported environmental groups for more than 40 years and has been at the cutting edge of sustainable causes.
This doubling down on the commitment to sustainability is part of what turned the company around from its darkest hour in the early s. At the time, Patagonia had to lay off a fifth of its workforce, and founder Yvon Chouinard considered selling the business.
Instead of selling, Chouinard spent the next several years looking for ways to bring the company closer in line with its sustainable ethos. As Patagonia grows, it could be challenging for the company to maintain the same clarity and purity of mission — especially as both bigger brands and new, smaller D2C brands tout sustainable practices.
If one ingredient of a powerful brand is time, another equally important ingredient is consistency. Consistency creates a unified experience that is powerful for building a brand — one great example is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola turned its soda into one of the biggest brands in the world largely by manufacturing and shipping the same product to customers all around the world, years before logistics and infrastructure would make this an easy task.
The Coca-Cola brand differentiation began with its bottle, which was designed with a highly unusual contour for the time in order to shape the perception that it was a premium product.
The Coca-Cola brand extended to the way that the drink was stored, how it traveled, and how it looked on store shelves. Coca-Cola insisted that bottles of Coke needed to be served at no more than 40 degrees and sent its own salespeople out to new stores carrying Coca-Cola to ensure compliance. The bottling and distribution strategy that Coca-Cola pursued in these early years was defined by the desire to give every consumer the same, optimal experience every time they tried it.
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