I am a father, teacher, cuber and EDH fanatic. My joy is in Casual and Limited formats, though I dip a toe into Constructed when I find something fun to play. I play less than I want to and more than my schedule should really allow. I can easily be reached on Twitter @WordOfCommander.
Try out my Busted Uncommons cube at http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/76330
Magic’s structure was the very first collectible card game, commonly called a CCG or now a Trading Card Game, the TCG in TCGPlayer.
A whole lot of Magic’s value is tied up in the collectibility of these cards, in how we can get some unique or special or exotic versions of a regular card.
Interestingly, though, not all collectibles are created equal, and definitely show unequal levels of growth. Let’s dive in, shall we?
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Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
There was a time that I used to take bets on cards getting banned.
And then Hogaak happened, where Wizards first decided to ban an auxiliary card in a format’s new and overwhelming deck, and I lost money because I didn’t think that they would just let it go.
After that, they DID ban Hogaak, causing me to lose money again because I figured they’d made it clear that the old cards were the problem, not the new one that could still be opened.
Now I’m wiser. I don’t have any idea at all what’s going to happen on Monday. Will Oko, Thief of Crowns be dethroned? Will there be collateral damage?
What I do know is, there’s plans to be made in either scenario.
First, let’s take a moment and appreciate something truly special about Oko’s price: the heavy weight of an expected banning.
Yes, dear reader, CoolStuff was selling Oko for a month at $90, while it was being opened. Then the oppressive nature of the card, and its compatriots in Standard, started dragging the price downwards.
There’s some hay to be made about how the value of any set goes down over time, and I’m planning on exploring the effect that Collector Boosters are having on the finance of the game, but really, Oko ought to be much more expensive than it is.
The saturation is quite real:
69% of the Day 1 metagame at the Mythic Championship was some form of Oko deck. There’s a lot of variations, and I appreciate snappy deck names such as Cat Food, but the dominance of the deck in Standard got more profound in Day 2, where the percentage went up, despite the pros knowing it would be popular. Noxious Grasp and Aether Gust were in maindecks all over the place and it didn’t matter much.
Oko is showing up in a lot of Modern decks. Whirza likes a copy. Amulet Titan has a couple to play with. There’s some artifact-based decks that are trying to go off with Oko.
Legacy has copies in winning Temur Delver lists.
Vintage is rocking Oath of Druids with Oko, powering down their artifacts and giving them creatures to let your Oath resolve. Nasty and powerful.
It’s Oko’s world, until Monday. Oko’s price has been dropping since the dominance started, in defiance of all expectations. When Wizards banned Field of the Dead on October 21, you’d think that Oko (and Oko-related cards) would spike as that deck took over, but it seems people bought in quite reluctantly.
So, we have two scenarios coming next week:
If Oko gets banned
I won’t be shocked if some other green cards get the hammer too, for the record. The only thing that will shock me is if Wizards just unbans Field of the Dead and tells the pros “You figure it out!”
Oko’s price will fall some. Not by much, due to demand in the other formats, and that includes Cube and Commander. Oko’s flexibility and power cannot be denied. I doubt the price will go much below $25, frankly. A lot of Oko’s current price point is tied up in the expectation of getting banned.
Long-term, however, I think Oko has a lot of potential. Foils of Oko are very low price compared to the original. On TCGPlayer, you can get NM foils for $40, which seems like a very good price even if it’ll never get the heights that the borderless foil has gotten to. Oko is too good in too many formats to stay cheap. Around the time that we start opening Theros: Beyond Death boosters, I want to be picking up Oko for the long term.
What gets unlocked if Oko and some accomplices get banned? Aggro decks get a lot better, and the card I love most in those lists is Embercleave.
Yes, it’s no longer $5 but it’s gettable at $7.50 and a total face-wrecker. Aggro decks are generally playing three, and if the format swivels to being super fast, this is going to hit $20 again.
I’m also a big big fan of picking up Murderous Rider at about the same price. We’ve seen what powerful, flexible removal spells do over time, and the trajectories of Vraska’s Contempt and Hero’s Downfall tell me to buy while it’s cheap:
If Oko isn’t banned
It seems super implausible that Wizards would try something like banning Once Upon a Time, Gilded Goose, and Nissa, Who Shakes the World but not banning Oko directly…but it could happen.
My impulse would be to snap-buy all the Oko copies currently languishing on eBay in the $25 range, hoping to resell at $45 or $50 to the people playing Standard or realizing how good the card is in other formats.
Given that everyone already expects a banning, this might not work, though. Maybe the price doesn’t change because everyone will expect the next banning to finally take down the menace. Maybe people will expect that the card sucks, without all the good accessories to play with.
To those folks, I’d point to Hogaak. The meta immediately settled on a Bridge from Below build that self-milled wonderfully and then really kicked into gear. Banning the Bridge merely made the deck change to a more Vengevine-focused one. Trying to ban around Oko is going to make some currently cheap cards into very expensive ones, and my best advice there is to make sure you’re primed and ready on our Discord channel.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that Oko was going to be $100 and going to be banned. Eventually, Wizards will see the light and ban the card, and from the ashes, a new Standard will rise.
Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
Normally I’d be all over the Mythic Championship, held at MagicFest+ Richmond, which included a Hall of Fame induction and some more changes to the Players Tour…and I can’t keep it going. Why is high-level Magic so confusing?
My true interest, though, has been these damn Mystery boosters. I can’t remember the last time a set was completely unknown until packs started getting opened, and that’s an experience I love. I dive right into other peoples’ Cubes, and the only thing I want to know is if it’s got Power in it. Fresh Magic experiences are to be savored, and Mystery didn’t disappoint.
We are going to get the official card list on Monday, but there’s already some things we know and some things worth acting on…
First of all, the only new cards revealed so far (subject to change come Monday) are the Playtest cards. These are printed cards made to look like Wizards’ own internal playtest cards, which are stickers slapped onto older cards. (A friend of mine who designs games once said that the greatest thing Magic ever did was put millions of free cards into the hands of would-be game designers, and now the circle is closed!)
The Playtest cards are super neat and do some really interesting things. They are all marked as “Not for Tournament Play” and I imagine that individual Commander groups are going to decide for themselves if they are going to allow someone to play a Sliver Eldrazi, or the dying-to-be-broken How To Keep An Izzet Mage Busy.
Financially, the Playtest cards are going to struggle to be expensive. Every MagicFest is going to have Mystery events and this will be a thing until they run out of packs sometime next year. There might be one or two that are expensive because of niche appeal or the meme value (e.g. Dr. Richard Garfield, PhD.) but these sorts of things, even if rare, aren’t automatically expensive. I stocked up on foil Cogwork Librarian back when Conspiracy first came out, and over five years, that card hasn’t budged. The Conspiracies from CN2 are the same way. Hard to use and incredibly powerful, the niche wasn’t there and they aren’t expensive.
If you want to collect the Playtest cards for fun, do so. Magic is really catering to those who like different things, and there’s been a run of stuff worth collecting for the fun even if the long-term value might not be amazing: the JPN alternate walkers, the Showcase frames in Throne of Eldraine, and now these. I don’t anticipate the full set of Playtest cards being a super-chase item though.
More relevant financially is that the set is otherwise 100% reprints, and it’s not the Pioneer Masters people predicted/hoped for. It’s a Chaos Draft + Future Sight environment, one where the packs are seeded for color but not rarity. Here’s Gavin Verhey on Twitter: “Each pack has 2 C/U of each color, 1 Multi C/U, 1 artifact/land C/U, 1 playtest card, 1 M15 forward R/M and one pre-M15 card in its original frame.” Theoretically, a pack could have 13 uncommons. Or 13 commons. In browsing streams and Twitter, I saw that the pre-M15 card was occasionally a rare, so double-rare or double-mythic packs were possible too.
Notably, no foils. That’s a big ouch for the people who paid $75 to be part of the first event.
We were told this morning by Mark Rosewater on Tumblr that the game store version of Mystery will not have these playtest cards. Most likely, that’s a foil slot opening up but we will see.
Now, the reprints. They are keeping the original set symbol but these are reprinted cards, and are marked as such by a planeswalker symbol in the lower left. These cards were reprinted direct from the old card files, so the old copyright date and original printed text are on the cards. Odd aesthetic choice, but what the heck.
Thanks to the efforts of people participating in the Discord channels (and really, you ought to be a participant) we’ve identified 15 mythics and 62 rares, as of Monday morning, as well as some reprints in the common/uncommon slot that are notably expensive.
Given that these packs are going to be opened at MagicFests for the next year or so, plus the amounts of Mystery packs going to local stores, I’d expect that all of these prices take a small hit. Keeping the original look, including original set symbol, but adding the planeswalker symbol is probably equivalent to a new card with a new set symbol.
A couple of cards you ought to know about:
Bloom Tender ($50 nonfoil/$300 foil)
Eventide was a small set, and was the last set before Magic’s rebirth in 2009 with Magic 2010 and Zendikar. Stock was never high on this card, and every time it wasn’t reprinted, the price ticked up more. I’m glad we are finally getting more copies of this on the market. It’s not the most broken mana generator, but it’s capable of some disgusting jumps in mana.
I would expect the originals to lose maybe $10 or $15, before stabilizing. The new ones are going to end up in the $15 range once the initial feeding frenzy ends.
Mana Crypt ($190/$250/$400 Invention)
Let’s take a moment and toast a card that has gone from $50 a bare eighteen months ago to $150 now:
Then let’s reflect on what a new influx of supply means. Is Mana Crypt going to be $50 again? Probably not. EMA was pretty heavily opened by drafters and collectors alike, and we’ll see if Mystery gets the same level of attention. Is it a $75 card? Maybe $100 fresh from a pack? I’m not sure where it ends up but I do know that when the Mystery packs are no longer being opened, I’ll want to pick up a few of these for the inevitable rise. The only worry about this card would be a Commander banning, likely on the same day that Sol Ring gets hit. (So, basically never.)
There’s a lot more to come, but I’m already over my word count and the full list is coming. Maybe we won’t get foils after all? Let’s find out Monday!
Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
I think that Wizards really appreciates Commander as a format. If it hadn’t been invented and codified years ago (remember, the first release was 2011!) then they would have had to do something to come up with a format like this.
A nonrotating, variable power level format where 99.9% of cards are legal, allowing players to pursue the foils, the foreign languages, the miscuts, the alters, just to make their deck unique.
If it weren’t for Commander, I don’t think we’d have the wide range of products and versions of cards that we have today.
Commander is also responsible for a big slice of the #mtgfinance pie. For a certain set of cards, the question is ‘When will Commander players notice this card and make it jump 5x in price?’ and that’s both a silly thing and a very very relevant thing.
This past Wednesday, Wizards gave us a few tidbits for what’s coming up, and there’s a lot to unpack in the announcement…
Here’s the first quote that is relevant to us: “I can’t possibly reprint everything, but I think many of you will be happy with the reprints coming throughout 2020.”
That’s the first set of alarm bells for me.
Next, we are told that the Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths release won’t have Planeswalker decks, but instead will have the yearly Commander release, with more new cards than ever.
Zendikar Rising, the Fall 2020 set, will have a couple of Commander decks too but only three new cards per deck.
Then, the two biggest pieces of information:
The Commander Collection: Green is apparently taking the place of the Signature Spellbook (or alongside it?) and will have eight cards. The higher-level WPN stores will get the all-foil versions for selling, and the more plebian ones will only get the nonfoil packages to sell.
Finally, we’re told of Commander Legends, a draftable Commander set. It’s bigger than a normal set, a foil in every pack and two legends per pack. It’ll have some mix of reprints and new cards: “It is larger than a normal set, with oft-asked-for Commander reprints and new cards alike.”
Wow.
My first reaction is that this is all to the good, that more stuff for Commander players is always welcome. And then I start really thinking about it.
Takeaway #1: Dump anything you’re holding for Commander purposes.
I mean this with every fiber of my being. We are going into a year of heavy-duty reprints. Hopefully, it’s the medium prices like Primal Vigor and the high prices like Bloom Tender. The things that ought to have been reprinted at some point but just haven’t gotten more cards somehow.
I’m going to spend the time between now and Christmas reviewing what’s in my collection, with ‘Is this going to take a huge dive when it gets reprinted?’ as my guiding light.
Takeaway #2: We are going to see a lot of new legends, and therefore a lot of spikes. Be prepared to sell into the hype.
While I’m sorting out the things I want to get rid of, I also need to make sure that what I do have is easily accessible. Maybe you have too many cards for a binder and you’re using a spreadsheet, but the important thing is that you’re able to find the cards when you need to. Generally speaking, you’ve got about two to three days to sell into some hype, and it’s vitally important that you do.
The examples are many, but let’s focus on the sort of spike we’re going to see with new legends. Some new card is released, and there’s new synergies, and all of a sudden, a bulk rare is flying high…for four days. I give you Knucklebone Witch:
Yes, it’s still selling for a big amount more than it was, but you want to be at the height of the wave. Be prepared, and avoid the situation of putting something up for sale, then being unable to find it. It’s a terrible feeling and it’s quite the stain on your reputation as a seller on any platform.
Takeaway #3: Prices will bottom out…but they will rise again.
The thing about staples is that they are super popular. You see this with every reprint set, how the value tanks but then rises again over time. Yes, lots of prices are going to tank, but when they do, that’s the time to pick up spare copies, because there’s going to be more Commander players and more Commander decks built. There’s going to be a lot of reprints in 2020. Not necessarily in 2021, though.
With these ideas in mind, here’s a couple of other cards for your consideration, keeping in mind that they might well get printed at some point, given the sheer number of reprints coming:
Demonic Pact ($1 nonfoil/$4 foil)
It seems likely that we will get another ‘here you go’ Commander in the vein of Zedruu the Greathearted. Black should get a piece of the action this time, as we’ve got cards like Sleeper Agent and Xantcha, Sleeper Agent to fit nicely into such a theme. If you agree with those suppositions, Pact is going to have a great time.
Weatherlight ($.50/$2.50)
I think we’re going to get something that cares about historic cards, and Weatherlight can do some amazing work in that context. Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain might also be a consideration if you’re willing to stomach the reprint risk.
And a couple of cards I know I’m not keeping:
Doubling Season ($40/$160 for Ravnica pack foil)
Having been reprinted several times ad some of that being a promo, you’d think this would stay down. Nope! And frankly, it never will. The Season is going to be printed again, and when it gets back to $20, I’ll happily scoop up lots and lots of copies for the inevitable growth.
Oracle of Mul Daya ($29/$84)
Never reprinted in ten years, one of the most efficient ramping creatures, a card that demands to be killed immediately…and a lock to be reprinted next year. I can’t wait to buy copies left and right at $10, or maybe even less.
Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
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