Unlocked Pro Trader: AdoptiIon

Readers!

I want to continue what I started last week with comparing Core Sets in an article I called “Adoption” so here’s the sequel. It’s the remix to Adoption, another finance concoction, I can’t make you make money but I can give you the option.

Core Set 2021 could be one of the least-opened sets of all time which could lead to a weird situation where the market isn’t sure how to equilibrate the rising cost of singles with the flow ox boxes that trickle in months later than they should have. If the set is largely weighted away from Standard, that won’t matter because it’s never too late for EDH, but if the set was relying on Standard to soak up a lot of the value, at least initially, we could end up with a lot of $5-$10 EDH cards but a bunch of cards for Standard worth nothing which would make the boxes a terrible gamble. The EDH cards are free to grow unbound at that point since the boxes aren’t getting popped to inject those copies into the market. How is the set weighted now?

All I did was search TCG Player by set and then list from highest price to low to see which format the expensive cards in the set are from. The first page is largely sealed product and 12 of the 19 Teferi promos, but Page 2 gets more interesting.

This is where the $15-$10 cards are. Extended Art Azusa is only like $4 more than the regular version, which is wrong but I’m not sure which price is wrong, or whether they both are. There is no third option where both of those prices are correct, they’re too close together to both hold.

Azusa has never really been $8 this decade, but it’s also never really been printed this often. In a normal year where people can draft packs of Core Set 2021, Azusa probably has the capacity to go below like $8 into unprecedented territory, but this isn’t a normal year. If we accept that maybe $5 is the floor for the non-foil Azusa, where is the floor for the Extended Art and foil?

The Champions foil with the OG art is dumb expensive right now but if you look, the reprint took the Masters foil from like $60 to $20. If you assume it settles midway between, this has the capacity to climb to $40 if not reprinted again soon. The non-foil Extended Art will take some of the potential foil buyers out of the market but not enough, I don’t think. If this has the capacity to hit $40, it doesn’t look that bad right now.

If this has the capacity to hit $20 I like it right now. It’s basically the same price as the non-foil. Not to keep repeating myself here, but that means one of these prices is wrong. The non-foil has never hit $8 since people started playing EDH but there is a lot to focus on with this set. I don’t like foils at all but I also don’t like paying as much for a non-foil as I would a foil. That can’t be correct.

All that said, how do you feel about the Extended Art foils at two times the non-foil price? The Extended art is worth 1.5 times the non-foil (and foil) regular border price, so the Extended art foil is merely 3 times the price of the regular foil. Again, these prices are in flux but the ratios are all wrong. It’s basically up to you to bet on which outcome you think is correct.

  • The non-foil price is too high. The foil stays at $8ish and the non-foil plummets to $2 or $3.
  • The foil price is too low. The non-foil stays within a buck or two of $8 and the foil climbs.
  • The Extended Art is too high and converges with the set foil.
  • The Extended Art is too low and converges with its foil.
  • The Extended Art is too low but so is the Extended Art foil and those prices diverge as they both increase.

I think the Extended Art foil will diverge in price from the non-foil and I think we are about to see that people will buy the Extended Art if it’s close to the non-foil. I expect the sheer number of options to depress prices and to the extent that this Core Set is opened more than Masters 25 was, this could make Azusa affordable for a long time. I also think there is still money to be made here. There’s no precedent for the Extended Art foil but it can’t be more than the Champs of Kamigawa foil. Do you like it at $25? I do.

I think $20 for an Extended Art foil is pretty good but I also think this card relies a lot on Standard to prop its price. With Standard played in paper to a non-existent amount right now and this likely to be reprinted the next time Standard could help its price again, I am sort of bearish here. I think this is an interesting benchmark for other prices, however.

This seems really low, especially the foil. It’s a mythic, this set won’t be opened a ton and Massacre Wurm is pretty recent to spike as hard as it did.

Teysa made this go nuts and the odds they print another commander where this effect is doubly good seem high. I think if the non-foil can hit $30, I don’t hate $10 or so for foil Extended Art. There may be better places to park money like cheap Solemns and Scoozes if you can still find them, but this is just as incorrect.

I’m a little worried since these prices seem very wrong, but they seem too low when you would expect them to be very high with less of the set being opened. That said, retailers who ordered long ago and then got what they ordered before the world turned to garbage have nothing but free time to list $3 cards on TCG Player and no one is playing paper so demand is actually lower than supply despite the supply chain being interrupted. That being the case, scooping a ton of copies might be necessary but it also might be pretty lucrative. We’re predicating these buys on these cards not being in Core 2022 and in-person Magic returning before they are reprinted, but I think EDH promos are a fairly sure bet and this is still a card that goes in a lot of decks.

I was quite bearish on this card but I’m willing to entertain the notion that it’s more popular than I thought it would be, in which case these prices are pretty wacky.

It’s the 3rd-most-played card of Core Set 2021 so far based on the amount it’s included in eligible decks. By raw numbers, it’s number two after Garruk’s Uprising. If you think being played this much and drawing extra cards and having a $2 foil promo are appealing, I think you will have plenty of chances to snipe these for cheap. For reference, CK wants more for them, but not much more.

OK, not much by dollar amount, so you can look at it as “They want $1.50 more” or “They want twice as much.” – whichever fits your worldview. CK does charge more but I think if they sold out they could be buying these for more than you can buy them for within a few weeks. I don’t know how cheap this card can get, so if you can get these around $2 or less, I wouldn’t hesitate. This won’t get help from Standard, but it probably won’t need any.

I think with retailers sitting on more product than they anticipated and with the free time to list it, it’s a buyer’s market right now on TCG Player. With less access to packs and less demand for paper cards, EDH is going to be bailing the game out harder than ever and it makes sense to look at EDH cards. Will all of these hit? No, but the cheaper they are, the lower the risk. Azusa could do just about anything right now but I don’t see a ton of scenarios where a card like Ageless Insight that is basically a bulk rare yet played more than almost anything else in the set goes down in price. If it goes down, buy more until you’re happy with the average price you paid.

That does it for me. Since I hit the grandmother of a WotC employee with my car and she cursed me, it will be spoiler season until the heat death of the universe so I’ll be back next week to talk… sigh… Double Masters. Until next time!

The Watchtower 07/20/20 – Looking Back At Core 2020

Jason’s article last week that compared last year’s Core Set 2020 to this year’s Core Set 2021 got me having a look at cards from last year’s set that could still be good spec targets, and I was pleasantly surprised. You should view the cards I’m talking about today on a longer timeline than some of my usual picks, but I think that these are great ones to stash stacks away for a couple of years and pull out to buylist or sell individually, depending on your setup and how much the card has moved by then.


Icon of Ancestry (Foil)

Price today: $3
Possible price: $10

Icon of Ancestry is one of a few different ‘Lord’ effects for tribal decks (cards that give a certain creature type +X/+X), but it’s actually the lowest cost one we have that can slot into any deck. The closest comparison would be Adaptive Automaton, and although being a creature means that Automaton can attack and block, I’d argue that the unfortunate attribute of being able to be removed much more easily than a non-creature permanent means that it has greater downside than upside.

Icon is in close to 7000 EDH decks registered on EDHREC now, and that number will most likely have another spike when people can finally start to get their hands on their Jumpstart cards, a lot of which are tribal-based and have already shown to be popular with the EDH crowd.

There aren’t a huge number of foils left around, with 30 listings on TCGPlayer for the regular versions and less than that for the prerelease and promo pack versions. I don’t mind the non-foils here too, but bear in mind that this would be a very easy card to reprint in a Commander product in non-foil, so foils are the safer play here.

Tale’s End (Foil)

Price today: $3
Possible price: $10

Tale’s End isn’t in as many decks as Icon, at just under 4000, but there’s no doubt that it’s a powerful card. Being able to counter someone’s Commander unconditionally for 2 mana is a very good rate, and with the second mode of the card being a good old Stifle, it’s hard to go wrong with this card.

It’s very popular in mono-blue counter/control/combo decks like Baral and Gadwick, as well as being included in a plethora of other blue-based decks. The only good reason not to play this in a blue spell-based deck might be because it’s ‘unfun’ playing a card just to counter peoples’ Commanders, but I can definitely think of much more obnoxious things that people don’t bat an eyelid at.

Anyway, supply again on this isn’t too deep, with only 19 TCG listings for set foils of Tale’s End and a nice ramp up towards $10. I think that this is a very solid card that should perhaps see a little more play than it currently does, but time will tell. Non-foils under a dollar are fine here too, if you can find a decently sized pile at once then even better – they’ll probably buylist for $3 or more down the road.

Scheming Symmetry (Foil)

Price today: $6
Possible price: $15

Tutors have always been a popular effect to utilise in EDH – just take a look at the numbers for Demonic Tutor (over 63k decks) and Diabolic Tutor (over 40k decks). Scheming Symmetry is a unique effect for a tutor, but still very powerful at just one mana and has made its way into just under 8000 decks. You just have to try and make sure that whatever you’re tutoring for is better than what your opponent is going to fetch!

There are a bunch of different ways you can make this card much better than it might appear on the surface, including effects that tax your opponents for searching their library (Ob Nixilis, Unshackled, Leonin Arbiter etc.), mill effects and more. It’s also great in combo decks, and has the added bonus of your opponent not knowing whether they’ll need to find an answer to your threat, something to fight against your counterspell, or more threats of their own.

These foils start around $6 on TCGPlayer, with only 22 vendors holding copies. Interestingly there seems to be a plethora of the promo pack foils around, so I’d steer clear of those for the time being (especially seeing as Card Kingdom is paying less on those than pack foils, which isn’t a particularly common occurrence). The set foils will be the pick of choice for most players pimping out their EDH decks, so that’s the direction I’d be inclined to move in with these, and ride them up to $15 or more within 12 months.


David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern, EDH and Pioneer. Based in the UK and a new writer for MTGPrice in 2020, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.

War of the Spark at Rotation

We have almost exactly two months until the official release of Zendikar Rising, and that means we’ve got that much time until War of the Spark rotates out. In addition to being a blast to draft, and introducing a lot of planeswalker variations (static abilities, uncommon power level, Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God having every other ability, etc.) we’ve got to decide what to buy and what to avoid from this set for the long term.

Remember, we’re looking for things that are awesome in the Eternal formats (Vintage, Legacy, Modern, and Pioneer) or in casual/Cube/Commander. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this is the last set with the old rules: there are regular copies, and foil copies, and we’re expecting the foils to be about 3x the price of the nonfoils. The War of the Spark uncut sheets that got sent out last year don’t seem to have made a dent in those foil prices, if you were worried about it.

The foil multiplier rules don’t apply to newer sets, but let’s look at what data we have.

First of all, I need to take a moment and repeat what we’ve been saying on MTG Fast Finance: the alternate-art Japanese planeswalkers in foil are being siphoned out of the market by collectors and players, with the Holy Grail of the Yoshitaka Amano art for Liliana, Dreadhorde General going on eBay for $2,300 or more. That’s the most expensive card possible from a Standard booster pack that I can think of. Expensive boosters are from long-out-of-print sets, and even the lesser planeswalkers in alternate foil are going for $50+.

Suffice it to say, keeping Japanese sealed War of the Spark is an excellent investment. The rise in price of the foil alternates will keep rising, and that will drive up sealed prices. They haven’t gone crazy yet, but the prices of the singles involved will make this climb like mad. 

Finale of Devastation ($20 nonfoil/$35 foil) – Being a mythic is part of what’s driving this, but it’s also an upgrade/backup to Green Sun’s Zenith. It’s in 15,000 decks on EDHREC, which is pretty great for a card a little over a year old. It sees some Modern play, because it can go get any part of an infinite combo and isn’t restricted to green creatures. It’s also a finisher, giving +X/+X to the team and wiping out other players. It’s too popular not to get a reprint, though, and that’s the only thing making me pause. 

That’s not what a graph of a rotating card usually looks like. That’s a card on the rise, and I have to say it: Get your personal copies now, because while the chance of a reprint is high, we’ve no way of knowing when it’ll be. It’s a little too pricey to be in a Commander deck already. If it dodges reprint in Commander Legends later this year, then it’ll take off. If you’re comfortable with the reprint risk (and a downshift to rare is quite possible) then it’s a great target, because any Commander decks with Green in the colors ought to be running this.

Teferi, Time Raveler ($15/$27/$44 in Stained Glass) – Big in Modern, Pioneer, Legacy, and Commander, this is THE card if you want to have a warm safe feeling that comes from none of your spells being at risk. It’s also the mirror-breaker, the card that can shut down a whole strategy. Being this much of a staple means that it’s got a lot of legs going forward. There are also several versions to watch out for, so aside from the original, there’s also the Secret Lair stained glass and the alternate art in Japanese. 

I think Teferi is a good pickup, especially if the price falls a little farther. Ten bucks is a super-reasonable price for a long-term investment, but if it stays at $15, that’s going to take a while longer to get into profits.

Narset’s Reversal ($5/$12) – I didn’t think this would be any good, but you know where it’s phenomenal? Commander. It’s listed in 20,000 decks! The idea is that you’re going to use this spell on a giant haymaker of a spell, something for extra turns, a Comet Storm for 40, or the game-ending Insurrection. The pedigree is there and I think the foil is a solid pickup. This isn’t seeing any play in other places, which means copies are not circulating once they are put into Commander decks.

Ashiok, Dream Render ($1.50 – $100, depending on printing and finish) – There is currently one foil Japanese alt-art copy on TCG for $100, and I don’t think that’s unreasonable for a card with this level of usefulness in Commander. I don’t advocate picking up nonfoil English, but I think Secret Lair stained glass in the $13 range is a fantastic purchase. This shuts down tutors, and exiles everyone’s graveyard, both eminently useful abilities in Commander. Get it, keep it, use it.

Nissa, Who Shakes the World ($5/$12/$40 stained glass)

The graph is helpful here: 

That’s a card getting dumped before rotation. The problem is that it’s one of the most-played cards in Standard right now, being best buddies with Uro, Growth Spiral, and Ugin. Your exact configuration may vary, but this Nissa has been a big part of Standard her whole career. There’s just enough interest in Modern and Pioneer ramp, plus her Commander appeal, to make this a very solid pickup once she bottoms out, perhaps as low as $3 right after rotation. There’s a rumor that she’s in all the Godzilla land Secret Lair drops, and if that’s the case, I’ll be looking to pick up stained glass copies on the cheap as they flood the market.

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.

Unlocked Pro Trader: Adoption

Readers!

I know I say this all the time, but today I’m going to try something new. I don’t know if it will work and you’re going to get me trying to construct some sort of way to compare two sets released at drastically different times under drastically different circumstances and try to draw some conclusions we can use to make some money from. Sound good? It doesn’t sound… like, ideal to me, but that’s what’s going to happen.

What can we figure out about Core Set 2021 by looking at Core Set 2020 and also just relying on stuff that we know?

There, that’s the thesis statement for this thing we’re doing here. Yes, it seems loose to me, too. That said, Core Set 2021 may have some very ambiguous and confusing pricing based on the myriad factors that made this release very abnormal but it does not have ambiguous adoption numbers – those are pretty clear. Some of them are surprising but I don’t expect them to change drastically enough for me to be able to get out of admitting I was wrong about, for example, Teferi’s Ageless Insight. For the most part, though, there aren’t too many surprises which makes me think the data we have is “stable” (as in not likely to change in proportion as it changes in value – we’ll have more decks playing Garruk’s Uprising in 6 months but the percentage of eligible decks playing it shouldn’t change).

If we can assume the numbers are stable enough, we can try and figure out what the prices should do and see if there are cards we can identify that are good buys at their current price or figure out if there are cards we should watch. Will prices go down as boxes are opened more? Maybe? They certainly should, but boxes are being opened and singles are being introduced to the market very slowly and inefficiently. I don’t think anything in Core Set 2021 will get as cheap as an “equivalent” Core Set 2020 card, but we can at least look at the ratios between the prices in the set and try to make predictions.

Let’s look at the new set, shall we?

Here is the order commander from Core 2020 are being built. No real shockers here because all of them are really bad. I mean, Radha and Vito are fine, I guess, but Vito is boring in the command zone and everyone already has a deck like Radha and they’ll just make Radha and Mina and Denn swap spots.

The cards in the 99 are a little more interesting.

So is $1 on Teferi’s Ageless Insight Showcase versions good? How about $0.50 on Sanctum? Will $15 for Ren and Stimpy hold up? Let’s look at Core Set 2020 and see if we can learn anything.

Maybe it’s because I’ve had an additional year to play with them, but these cards just seem better. I don’t know if the price matters, but I’m certainly interested in the ratio of prices. Is Drakuseth worth twice as much as Seraph and can we say that Terror of the Peaks will be worth twice as much as Mangara? That seems doubtful on all counts. What is interesting is that a lot of the cards used most in EDH were also used a lot in Standard. Will that be the same with Core Set 2021?

Moldervine Reclamation is in quite a few decks. It’s in the same percentage roughly as Veil of Summer, but over the period since Core Set 2020 has been legal, twice as many decks that have Green but no Black have been built as decks with Green and Black both. Does that mean that in a year we’ll see Garruk’s Uprising in twice as many decks as Moldervine Reclamation? If we do, do we think it has any upside?

If you think Garruk’s Uprising has twice the potential of this foil that is now $3 and climbing, does that mean we might want to look at foil Uprising?

Does this $1.50 foil double or quadruple, then? Will it be $3 or $6? Here’s a huge potential complication.

Do people want this, the set foil?

Will they want this non-foil showcase version? I hate foils but like premium versions so this would be my preference. But this isn’t the “best” version for people who like to optimize.

There’s also a foil version of the showcase version. That said, there isn’t much price difference with the 2 showcase versions right now.

Based on the current price of Moldervine Reclamation, I think that Uprising has as much or more potential. The 4 different possible version and 3 versions that feel “premium” complicate matters a lot, but I think if there is no downside to buying the foil Showcase version, you might want to have a diverse portfolio. We don’t know what all of these different showcase versions mean to EDH players and instead of betting on one outcome, cover your bases since the price is so similar for all versions.

Currently it looks like Vito is outperforming Vilis 2 to 1 and while that might not hold, Vito is VERY strong in the 99 and probably about as boring as Vilis in the Command Zone, but it could see more play potentially than does Vilis. Vilis saw play outside of EDH very briefly and maybe Vito will, too. If Vito doesn’t, we’re looking at him merely doubling the inclusions Vilis has, and if that holds, we could see a better price outlook. Let’s look at Vilis’ graph. Fine, ugh, graphs. See? This is why I don’t like to talk about foils, then you always have to talk about foils.

When it got a little play outside of EDH, it hit $6, briefly, after peak supply. Not bad at all.

The foil shot to $15.

One thing I will say is that it’s less likely anyone uses Vito outside of EDH in paper because, duh. I think it’s going to have to be EDH that makes this price go. The foil’s buylist price is creeping up a bit but the foil and non-foil are kind of flat. Basically, if you bought some copies at peak supply, you had lots of opportunities to double up on the non-foils, a small window to sextuple up, a small one to triple up, and you may need to hold another year to get more than you paid if you still have them.

Vito is sitting at $4. If we assume the upside is twice as good for Vito, you probably buy at $2 if it ever gets that low and try to sell at $6ish. I don’t think Vito can ever start at $4 and stay above it for long. That said, Vito is the #3 commander in Core 2021 and Vilis is #8 in Core 2020, in case that matters. We’re talking about 362 Vilis decks in the last year – Vito is already at 70 a few weeks in. I expect Vito to be built more. That could give more upside to the foils, which are currently $5 at Strikezone and $10 everywhere else. Hmm.

I’ll buy $5 foils of a $4 card when it’s $10 on Card Kingdom. I’ll do that deal all day. One of you should. I almost did but that would be rude of me.

Things are less promising for the Extended art foils. $13 is a high buy-in indeed, and Vilis needed a lot of help for the foil to even flirt with $15. I am not as bullish on the Extended art foils per se, but I do like non-foil Premium cards so I am targeting the non-foil Extended art copies. This is good in the command zone and the 99 and we have a card played half as much to compare it to directly – seems good to me.

It’s hard to know what to compare Mangara to, but we can compare Mangara to Mangara for one.

So far Mangara is at the helm of 38 decks…

and included in 10 times as many. It’s safe to say Mangara will be a 99-focused card. Do we like it at $6? How many mythics in Core Set 2020 are above $6?

4? Brutal. Unless Core Set 2021 is opened way, way less than Core Set 2020, we’re over a year away from wanting to even look at these cards as cards. What does foil Yarok look like, though, while we’re asking?

It’s on its way back up but all this card did was lose. Yarok is the #10 ranked Commander over the last 2 years and people are more likely to want a foil of their commander than a card in the 99, where Mangara is 10 times as likely to end up. Pair the fact that there are multiple premium versions of Mangara compared to the one of Yarok and how bad Yarok’s graph looks and I think you will forgive me for not even looking up the price of Extended Art Mangara. OK, fine, I’ll do it.

Mangara won’t be built as much as Yarok and that price took a header and is only now recovering. Do you want to bet that supply issues mean Mangara has upside at its current price? I don’t. I’m not saying I think it will or won’t, I’m saying I am risk-averse in my old age and I have the luxury of opting out, as do you. If you think the graph of a card like Mangara could look healthier than Yarok (Mangara isn’t built as much but it will go in way, way, WAY more 99s than Yarok, a Sultai card because Mangara is splashable) go for it. The $10 non-foils look more inviting than the $30 foils, especially for a non-Commander.

That does it for me this week. I think there may be some more analysis in this same vein (Vito joke) to do next week and I’m just the person to do it. Did you like this kind of article? Let me know in the comments below because I really never know whether I should do experimental formats unless you tell me. Thanks for reading – Until next time!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY