PROTRADER: Buyouts, Buyouts Everywhere

I don’t even know where to begin. I spent last week in Florida, enjoying a pleasant New Year vacation while largely disconnected from the MTG world, though I did check in from time to time.

I come home, and everyone’s gone crazy.

The Buyouts

First, I want to link to Jim Casale’s piece on the use of the word “buyout.” In most cases, it doesn’t mean what you think it means, and the negative connotation attached to the word doesn’t always ring true.

Take, for example, Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple. Sure, in the simplest terms they were “bought out.” But rather than plummeting over the next week as the race to the bottom began and people saw that the market manipulation couldn’t hold true, the prices actually held over the course of the week. That doesn’t happen unless there’s real demand for a card, and it’s another bit of proof that shows that manipulating the market is not as easily done as many like to claim. Anyone can buy out TCGplayer and move the price of a card for a day, but all that really matters is where those prices settle after a few weeks or months. Simply raising the TCGplayer average doesn’t make anyone a profit, and I’ve written before at length about The Myth of Making Money.

So where does that leave us today?

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Painful Choices

Welcome back to another Thursday installment of my article series. I really appreciate you reading these, and I’m hoping that you had a wonderful New Year’s celebration. I know that last week I said I would bring back an old persona of mine, but a spoiler came up that I think is a bit more pressing. I was going to just write this article on the running MTGPrice spoiler coverage, but it ended up being a lot longer than a quick blurb about a card’s price that I’m trying to restrict myself to. If you’re not tired of me bombarding you with green link text yet, you can go check out our running spoiler coverage right there in that convenient link.

The card/bulk rare I want to spend an entire article talking about is none other than Remorseless Punishment. The most recent in the line of “your opponent chooses which bad thing they want to happen,” this five-mana sorcery has gotten a resounding “meh” from the Spikey players of the world, and a “I want to copy this with Howl of the Horde and then Increasing Vengeance from the non-competitive players that I see and commonly interact with on Facebook. If you’re one of the former, you can probably agree with me that this will not see competitive Standard  play, and we certainly won’t be seeing it in any Modern lists. Five-mana black spells in Modern are reserved for game-winning effects like Ad Nauseam, and this is not going to have that kind of impact unless your opponent is sitting with no creatures, no hand, and has three life left.

remorselesspunishment

If you’re not planning on sleeving up Grixis Twin for your next PPTQ and you just like to jam Magic cards with your friends over a kitchen table, you probably have a bit of a different opinion on this card. Your wheels are turning on how to make this deal 10 damage, or how to combo it with Liliana’s Caress to limit their options further. My co-reviewer Jason Alt said that this is going to pre-sell for more than it should, although I don’t think SCG is going to pre-sell a rare for less than $.49. Vendor confidence in this card is extremely low, and I can’t say that I blame them. This is not the (potential) Constructed all-star that Kozilek’s Return is. This card has an entirely different market, one that I have quite a bit of experience interacting with.

Browbeat

You knew Browbeat was worth $1.50, right? I think that’s one of the more well-known “picks” that is impossible to keep down in price. It was in a Planechase a while ago, and then reprinted in a Duel Deck, but is still rock solid and easy to sell at $1 locally (or $.50 on a buylist if you’re lucky).

Browbeat

On Jason’s paragraph about Remorseless Punishment, he talked briefly (and linked a very helpful article from 2006) about something called the “Browbeat effect.” The shortened version (I’m assuming you’d rather stay here and talk with me instead of leaving this page), is that while both effects of Browbeat are very powerful and cost-effective on their own (a 2R Lava Axe is incredibly powerful and undercosted, as is a 2R Concentrate), the power in these diminishes significantly when your opponent gets to pick their poison. The common sentence that I hear a lot to describe this is: “The card will never do what you want it to do, it will do what your opponent wants it to do.”

If that statement is true, then why is the card constantly bought  from my display case at $1 a copy, and why is it immune to reprints from a value perspective? Well, probably because the vocal and competitive minority are looking at the card from the wrong perspective. In order to “properly” evaluate the card (and the “Browbeat effect” as a whole), let’s step into the shoes of somebody who has never been to a Magic tournament and just wants to slam cardboard with their friends with 78-card unsleeved decks.

Hi, my name is Johnny. I’m a fictional character that DJ made up for the purposes of this article. I really like to play red and black, and enjoy effects that burn my opponent. Unfortunately, red doesn’t have cards that draw more cards consistently; that sort of thing is left for blue, green, and black. Thankfully, Browbeat is really good in my burn deck. My friend Sam really hates taking direct damage, so he pretty much always lets me draw three cards off of it, even if he’s at full life points. I really love the look on some of my other friends faces when they’re thinking about what to do, because either way I get a really powerful effect for three mana!

Thanks for the interview, Johnny. I’ve had multiple conversations that were similar to this, and stitched them all together to sort of represent the type of player who is comfortable paying $1 for a Browbeat to jam it in his burn deck. The kitchen-table grinders who really want to upgrade on the arms race are the ones who give Vexing Devil a reason to be $10. As someone who regularly plays against (or as) the burn deck at Grands Prix, you laugh at Vexing Devil because it’s a burn spell that gets countered by Path to Exile or a 4/3 that gets countered by paying four life. Johnny sees a way to “guarantee” four damage for one mana on the first turn of the game, especially since the “control decks” full of wraths, counterspells, and planeswalkers that we know and love are much less common in the non-competitive world that’s mostly made of tribal, mill, ramp, and combo.

Vexing Devil.full

So the argument against this card is that it doesn’t do what it wants you to do, right? What if your primary goal of building the deck wasn’t winning? If the endgame of building your kitchen table burn deck is simply having fun and enjoying a game with your friends, the bar of “what do I need my cards to do” changes. Now you want your cards to help you have fun, and Browbeat fills that void for the invisible crowd that most of the competitive crowd doesn’t interact with anymore. Just like Dash Hopes and Vexing Devil, it’s a lot of fun to start throwing Lava Axes for just a fraction of the price; even if the card sometimes only ends up being a Concentrate or Counterspell.

Now, the other assumption used in the debate is that your opponent will always choose what mode is best for herself when it comes to these punisher cards. But again, we’re looking at this through a different lens than most of the rest of the world here. If you’re sitting at table 547 in round one of a Grand Prix and you slam Browbeat on turn five, your opponent is more than likely going to have the game experience and knowledge to analyze the situation and then select the option that hurts themselves the least. However, that’s not where any of these punishers are going to see play.

When we’re slamming cardboard on kitchen tables, the players involved in the game are statistically going to have less experience playing at a highly competitive level. I don’t think it’s wrong to assume that even though there’s almost always a “correct choice” when presented with a Browbeat scenario, the opponent of someone actually playing the Browbeat is not going to always choose that correct option. When this happens, Browbeat actually does do both of the things that the caster wanted it to do: it gives him the Concentrate when he was hellbent, and it helps him have fun by casting a red card draw spell.

So how does all of this factor into Remorseless Punishment? It obviously doesn’t go into the same deck as Browbeat, unless you want to build some sort of weird R/B “bad choices” deck. It has the potential to do twice as much damage as Browbeat or Dash Hopes, but you have to put in some serious effort to get those kind of results out of the card. Like Jason said, it’s probably going to be a more expensive Blightning most of the time. However, I don’t think that’s going to stop the player casting it from having a lot of fun forcing his opponent to make two painful choices, and the kitchen table player still has room for his opponent to make a mistake.

The point of this article is not to tell you to go out and buy Remorseless Punishment at 49 cents each from SCG. This is not a Wasteland Strangler. This card is a Crucible of Fire. You wait until you can buy these at 10 or 25 cents, and then wring your fingers together like a villain until your #mtgfinance cabal of 300,000 non-competitive players slowly scoops up supply over the course of two years until it’s a $2 card. Even if you never get the chance to buy in at 25 cents or lower, I would still respect the potential demand for this card and treat it differently than other true bulk rares.

End Step

  • ‘Tis the season for Modern-legal cards to spike in price! One of the sideboard cards that I think some people have forgotten about since about a year ago is Night of Souls’ Betrayal. It saw play as a two-of in the sideboard of the mono-black Eldrazi deck that saw camera time in the Modern Open, and I’m pretty sure there are only seven copies left in all existence because it’s a rare from Kamigawa block. I’m not saying that this is a spec target, but I think you buy your copies now if you think you’ll need them.
  • In other news, can someone please explain to me why foil copies of Genesis Wave only have a multiplier of two compared to the non-foil? It’s the epitome of “cast big spells and big things happen” in Commander, has one printing from half a decade ago, and I see almost every green player in my local group sleeving it up. While EDHREC disagrees and suggests that only the mono-greeniest of mono-green generals play the card in high percentages, it just strikes me as odd that such a Commander-iconic card only has the standard foil multiplier of two.

PROTRADER: Oh Yeah, This Series is Called “City of Traders”

By: Travis Allen

It’s Monday evening and I’ve got the last mouthful of a 10-percent barleywine swishing between my cheeks, savoring the flavor.  I’ve been cooking my chicken chili for the last hour or so, and I’m finally sitting down for the first time today. It’s a solid barleywine, by the way. Not my favorite, but definitely drinkable. Reasonably sweet with obvious flavors. Beer Advocate tells me I’m tasting caramel and toffee. I wouldn’t buy this again, but you can do a lot worse, and if you find my typical recommendations too sweet, this backs off on the sugar content a bit while maintaining some of the strong flavors I’m so drawn to. I’ve been posting short beer reviews occasionally as I discover them in the wild, and you can find them over on my Twitter. The easiest way is to just look through all my tweets with photos. I could not be further from a sommelier if I was a dead raccoon on the side of a hot desert highway,  though I enjoy drinking beers that offer an experience, and people apparently wanted to hear about them. If you’re a fan of huge, heavy, barrel-aged stouts and rich barleywines, see if anything in my Twitter profile is available in your area.

Anyways, where was I? Right, I had just polished off a 10-percent beer 30 seconds before realizing I needed to write an article tonight, a responsibility that had slipped my mind for the last five days or so. Hrm. I’m swimming just a little right now, and I need to pound out 1,500 words good enough to warrant a ProTrader subscription. I pinged my black-ops Magic finance encrypted cartel chat (typically used for coordinating buyouts of TWoo-hyped cards) that an article needed to be written. Jeremy was quick to respond with a great idea. If you aren’t following Jeremy on Twitter, by the way, that’s a huge mistake. While he claims to attend school, I don’t believe him. What I do believe is that he spends all his waking moments grinding Magic sales and travelling to GPs and SCG events to buy and sell. For all the broadcasting I do from my writer’s pulpit, you can’t substitute hard hours on the ground, trading with the masses. His instincts are on point and you’ll make money if you listen to what he has to say. I’ve learned to pay attention to people who invest this much time and money in the field, and you should, too.

This week it’s a collaboration—he told me what cards he thinks are hot, and I’m writing about it. You get his insight and my verbosity. A win-win situation, I assure you.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Going Mad – Spring is Here

By: Derek Madlem

Like a bear that catches the scent of spring it’s time to crawl out of your cave and care about Magic again. I admit that the last couple months have been exceptionally unexciting for me and that I had a real hard time paying any attention to the game. It’s really hard to care about another week of Siege Rhino, but there’s gotta be an end in sight right?

Modern

This past weekend we saw some major Modern action in Cincinnati, with 1,000 players showing up to sling some spells. While Wizards of the Coast is still trying to reconcile the discrepancy between the cards they’re trying to sell and the formats we want to play, players and speculators alike are setting the secondary market ablaze.

Leading into this weekend the new hot fire was Bx Eldrazi, or as I prefer to call it: BadTron. This deck capitalizes on the interaction between Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Eye of Ugin. Eye of Ugin effectively taps for three mana when casting colorless Eldrazi spells…you know things like Oblivion Sower and Wasteland Strangler, add in a few Eldrazi Temples and you have a deck full of Ancient Tombs, minus any drawbacks. While this deck seemed at first to be the next big thing, it ultimately didn’t put up very great results with only a single copy in the top 32.

Turns out that Urza’s real estate combined with his robot butler are just a more powerful threat when it comes to casting big stupids in Modern, but that didn’t stop the speculation:

Eldrazi Temple – $7+
Eye of Ugin – $25+
Relic of Progenitus – $7+

Yeah…maybe we’re going a little deep combining Relic of Progenitus and the processors we saw in Battle for Zendikar, but it does draw a card! These cards are already coming back down to Earth as armchair vendors are digging through their bulk boxes and draft scraps for Eldrazi Temples and Relics of Progenitus and flooding the market, there’s probably still a time to cash in. If you’re like me, all your Eldrazi Temples cost you was not throwing them away, so any dollar amount is basically pure profit. I expect we haven’t seen the last of this archetype as there is sure to be more “colorless” Eldrazi in Oath of the Gatewatch to benefit from Eye of Ugin’s cost reduction powers, but I’m feeling pretty fine calling this the high tide marker for this archetype.

We’re also seeing the beginnings of another price surge for Modern staples, Scalding Tarn has always been a good barometer of things to come and it’s price is reaching a boiling point…in any other week the 19% increase would be pretty impressive, but it’s buried under a list of Eldrazi nonsense that’s casually up 300%.

Spoilers

Official spoiler season is now under way. So far what we’re seeing out of Oath of the Gatewatch is a heavy planeswalker subtheme and a ton of cards that get cheaper when you (or your 2HG partner) are casting multiple spells in a single turn. While the Surge cards are hardly exciting, the planeswalker related spells so far have been pretty sweet. I know that my five color planeswalker EDH is already out of room, so I may have to break it into a Super Friends deck and a Legion of Doom deck just to contain all the planeswalkery goodness.

Oath of Gideon

I’m not planning on being particularly crazy for many cards in Oath of the Gatewatch, thanks largely in part to Expeditions making another appearance and the extreme internetification of Magic, but these cards do give us some insight into what people will be trying to build in the future. Just as Battle for Zendikar reignited the fire for Eldrazi related things (looking at you Spawnsire of Ulamog), I expect Oath’s planeswalker accessories to push other planeswalker accessories in popularity. Like what?

How about everyone’s favorite planeswalker related card:

Doubling Season

Doubling Season comes from a time before planeswalkers and sort of backdoors the rules based on some quirky wording, but the long and short of it is that your planeswalkers all enter the battlefield with twice as much loyalty which is usually enough to use their ultimate immediately.

Doubling Season is a pretty low-risk spec target because this card has been popular for years and years. The ability to effect all varieties of counters AND token creatures gives this card plenty of appeal. Doubling Season also feels relatively safe from reprinting because we’ve seen Wizards intentionally printing around Doubling Season without being doubling season (Primal Vigor, Parallel Lives, etc).

Ajani Steadfast

If there any card that says “play with planeswalkers” it’s Ajani Steadfast. Ajani is pretty much every planeswalker’s best friend as he tromps through the multiverse being the exact opposite of every cat I’ve ever known – helpful and caring. Steadfast has been sitting pretty flat with a very gradual decline forever despite being one of the most synergistic planeswalkers you could include in a Super Friends deck. At $6, this sees like a pretty safe pick up as the worst case scenario here is that you still have a planeswalker.

Ajani, Mentor of Heroes

Ajani does what Ajani, Mentor of Heroes does – helps planeswalkers. Like a cat sifting through a litter box, Ajani sifts through your deck hoping to get his sock hooks on some planeswalker friends. Ajani has been pretty stable since rotation thanks to saying things like “put counters on dudes” and “gain a hundo life” but the desire for planeswalkery things might reignite the demand for this iteration of Ajani.

The Chain Veil

Finally we come to the penultimate planeswalker toy, The Chain Veil. This card is hovering just over a buck and that seems like a modern Greek tragedy to me. Getting double activations out of your planewalkers seems to be living the dream. This card seems like an easy home run if the desire to make planeswalker decks takes hold, and why wouldn’t it?

Oath of Nissa

So a green Ponder with the casual bonus of fixing your mana for planeswalker spells? This is a card that I expect to see heavy play in a lot of green decks. I’m honestly confused how this card even exists with Wizards being so heavily against cantrips in general…oh no I can’t delve it away, it must be garbage!

Really looking forward to grabbing a few foil copies of this card and riding them off into the sunset.

The Other Tribe

Zendikar is home to another tribe that is due for a jump in popularity.

General Tazri

Yes, it is a white card. Yes you can use it as your Commander in a five color ally deck. Thanks to the Bosh rule, legendary creatures can be commanders for decks featuring the colors of mana that appear in their text box. I wouldn’t go crazy buying up all the Angelic Captains you can get your hands on, but there are some sweet allies hiding in Zendikar and Worldwake that are pretty much essential for any deck featuring Tazri as a commander:

Harabaz Druid
Kabira Evangel
Kazuul Warlord
Sea Gate Loremaster
Turntimber Ranger

A couple of these have already drawn the attention of speculators and reached a few dollars, but most are available under a buck. Sure, Allies.dec is just a different iteration of Slivers.dec but for now it’s the budget version and that gives it some pretty broad appeal. I can tell you with fairly good certainty that my shop is already devoid of allies.

With a number of these rares costing less than $1, there’s not a lot of risk involved in buying a small stack and waiting until the casual crowd figures it out in a few weeks.

(Un)bannings?

There’s been a lot of talk (again) about Amulet Bloom getting a ban because it’s “so good” and “unstoppable”. The deck can do insane things, there’s no doubting that. The stories of a player casting Primeval Titan twice on turn two are spreading like wildfire across the internet…how can such a deck be allowed to exist!? I can have a Primeval Titan on turn 2!? ERMAGHERD!!!

Modern is format with plenty of ridiculous crap happening on turn two, have you heard about Griselbrand? How about Glistener Elf? Both of these cards are capable of turn two kills and aren’t constantly the subject of witch hunts…why Amulet of Vigor? The deck is hard to play, IT MUST BE WITCHCRAFT!!

This time around…it might happen. Wizards doesn’t often listen to people (or reason), but when they do, it’s usually a high profile member of the community and we’ve had no shortage of high profile Magic players saying “OMG Amulet is insane, it has to be banned” on social media. I don’t agree with a ban here if Glistener Elf is allowed to roam free but I’m starting to believe it’s a real possibility.

Stoneforge Mystic

Stoneforge Mystic is your Grand Prix promo for the next year. What does this mean? Wizards hates Legacy and wants nothing more than for it to crawl under the porch and die, so it’s unlikely they’re pushing a Legacy staple as their GP promo which leaves us pretty much one option: it’s going to be Modern legal soon.

I’ve long been a proponent of Stoneforge Mystic coming off the ban list in Modern with one stipulation: Batterskull goes on. We don’t have to worry about Umezawa’s Jitte becoming a problem because it’s basically going to stay banned forever, but Batterskull is the card that broke Stoneforge. Sword of Feast and Famine was sweet, but it was the recyclable 4/4 creature with lifelink and vigilance for two mana that really pushed things over the top and lead to Stoneforge being banned in Standard and pre-banned in Modern before it even had a chance to be broken.

What goes up with an unbanning? Well Stoneforge for a while, it takes a few months for those GP promos to really run their course. The real winners are going to be the most playable swords: Fire and Ice, Feast and Famine, & War and Peace in that order. These are already commander all stars so if they start seeing any Modern play you can expect the needle to move on these pretty quickly.

Or maybe they’re mentally unstable and don’t ban Batterskull immediately, in which case you can expect those to skyrocket.


 

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