Unlocked Pro Trader: The Grand Scheme

August 3, 2021 Jason Alt

Readers !

I have mostly talked about how popular the AFR commanders are relative to each other, which is useful for determining the degree to which a new card from, say, Asmodeus is limited in its potential impact relative to a commander like Prosper or Volo. That is very useful (I think, otherwise why would I do it? Like, at this point am I trying to convince you or myself? How bad does it look that I’m trying to convince anyone of anything without anyone asking me to? Pull it together, Jason. Focus. You got this), because it lets us focus on the truly popular commanders first which have the potential to move cards, if not the farthest, at least the fastest.

The thing is, there are gaps, and without any context, it’s tough to know how big those gaps are. What do I mean by gaps? Why tell you when I can SHO-… whatever, here’s a picture to look at.

The gaps to which I’m referring are, for example, the gap between the 343 Prosper and 250 Volo decks. That’s a gap that could or could not matter. 100 decks seems like a lot, and relative to the number of Volo decks, it seems like it should be a lot. The difference between first and second place here is more decks than were built around Oswald Fiddlebender, a card that made people say “ZOMG BIRTHING POD FOR ARTIFACTS BAN INCOMING.” Still, we have been saying “Prosper is #1 and Volo is #2” (Volo was #3 last week; Tiamat fell off hard) without acknowledging how profound the gap might be. The gap between Prosper and Volo is half the amount of Volo decks there are. That seems like a lot. Is there a way to contextualize the gap? Well, it turns out there is, and it’s… kind of not pretty.

Lately I have mostly been looking at ranking the commanders by set because there is a new set every few weeks and I just want to see what’s moving relative to the other commanders in the set. If we have more time like we do now, it helps to plug in commanders from other sets, something you can do on this page. This is the top commanders of the last week, and you can do last 2 years and last month as well. Does checking the top commanders of the last week fill in the gaps between Prosper and Volo? It does! And the results sort of threw me for a loop.

If you look at the decks registered in the last 7 day period, the period where Tiamat went from second-most-built in AFR to 4th and Volo went to 2nd, Volo was NOT second overall that week. Prosper at 220 decks is #1 and Volo at 138 decks is… #13. More people buit Golos than Volo. I mean, more people built Ur-Dragon than Tiamat, which is in itself a pretty scathing indictment of the erstwhile #2 commander in AFR. More people built Ur-Dragon, Korvold and Kaalia than Tiamat last week. More people built Sythis, a commander that, and I can’t stress this enough, does not have a win condition (I wrote an article about it in case you care) than Volo. The gap between Prosper and Volo is ENORMOUS. You can fit an entire format in the gap between Prosper and Volo. More people built Anowon and Lathril, the precon commanders from Return to Return to Zendikar, than built Volo. Volo is not #2, Volo is #13. Volo is sucking the tailpipe of Atraxa, ATRAXA. Do you have a Atraxa deck? Cool, good for you, I’m not talking about you unless you saw AFR come out and said, “yeah, you know what? I’m going to need to build a precon commander from 11 years ago. I have some great insight on how to build the most popular commander of the decade today, in 2ktwenty-one.”

“But Jason,” you’re probably saying to yourself, “what about the new cards from AFR that are so good in Atraxa, people had to update their lists. They’re probably not new decks, they’re probably updates.” That’s a really good point, let’s look at those new cards.

Yeah, I don’t know if that’s the case.

I don’t bring up the decks between Prosper and Volo to say we should be digging into Osgir for potential specs, per se, but I did want to mention that when you pan out and look at the format, a lot of the “#1 commander in the set” commanders don’t make the list for the two years, or even the month.

Sweet, how did Extus do this month?

103rd, right above Marrow-Gnawer, a deck that got, what last month?

Sweet, very sweet. This is how much Extus, the #1 commander in Strixhaven was built in the last 30 days. Now, the set is older than 30 days old, and there are 1206 Extus decks total, good enough for a rank of 127th overall in the last 2 years, which isn’t shabby. So it’s 1st in the set, 102nd for the month, which is a huge drop-off, but then it’s 127th for the last two years, which is NOT much of a drop-off considering it’s only been a few months and some of the decks it beat out have had two years to get built.

Extus was built as much in two months as Kruphix was built in two years. Granted, it’s been a LONG time since Kruphix was new, but all context is worth looking at. If we’re interpreting the numbers the way I think they should be interpreted, people aren’t sleeping on Extus, it’s in the top 150 of all the decks we measure and it’s only been built for a couple of months, but it’s basically not being built anymore. It did 90% of the work it did to climb to the 127th spot the first month. Why did that happen? Put simply, there are too many products.

Before the set even came out, I brewed Extus Goblins, which isn’t revolutionary maybe, but it’s not a deck I saw anyone else brewing. Ask me how it’s performed on camera.

Not great bob! | Tv quotes, Mad men, Best tv

I didn’t even finish the deck because 5 sets have come out since Strixhaven back in… MAY. I have built two different decks since, neither of them Extus and I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it.

People have less time to build their decks with new ones coming out constantly. What does this throw off? I have no idea! But I am going to posit that the Extuses of the world have their staples languish a little bit while the Prospers of the world, er… well.. experience success (I’m not going to say prosper, I’m not a hack).

So let’s wrap this up with some specs, and let’s start off with one that sort of undermines my hypothesis a little bit and also makes me look like I don’t know what I’m doing.

Hell yeahhhhhh.

Twinning Staff is currently basically selling out because, despite being the 13th-most-built commander this month, it’s still a good card in a deck built the second most in a bad set. Twinning Staff HAD a lot of copies when I tweeted my tweet literally 48 hours ago and in that time, a bunch of copies vanished and I talked about this card on BSB. No one has even heard the episode yet. I thought I had time to bring up this exchange on the podcast and clue people in that I had noticed inventory was moving, but no. Twinning Staff is, in fact, good in Volo and enough Volo is getting built that a card from literally last year’s EDH precons is in play. That’s sort of the thesis of what I talk about every week but when someone asked about a card I hadn’t considered, I thought cards released in the last year had too much supply.

Could there be anything else in Volo that is just taking its sweet time going up?

With the exception of Twinning Staff which was at $2 and a million copies when I first started looking at Volo specs, this is all format staples. The high synergy cards aren’t much better.

This is all format staples. I wish I’d bought in harder on Spark Double a year ago, I wish I had bought in harder on Tendershoot Dryad two years ago but overall, this is $0.17 that will never be a dollar and cards that are expensive because every deck with Green printed in the last year wants Second Harvest and Beast Whisperer.

With so much garbage, it’s either excusable we overlooked Staff or inexcusable because everything else is so obviously bad. But like with Uba Mask, we have to dig deeper so let’s dig deeper.

I’m not just picking something to pick something – I legitimately don’t hate Syvlan Caryatid at its current price.

Caryatid has demonstrated it has the ability to get to $13 with some help from other formats. You know what else currently costs less than that $13 it got to at one point?

The Buy-a-box foil, something Ck no longer has NM copies of. Just sayin’. I like a former $13 at $6 for a unique foil promo, and I like the non-foil under $5 a lot. This seems like a card that Modern could make a real pick again.

This is already beginning to shake off its Double Masters reprinting. If you can get these under $5, it’s clearly on its way to $10, but another reprint likely spells doom. I am no longer a believer in the “some cards can shake off unlimited reprints” wisdom from 5 years ago.

If a card gets punched every year, there are only so many times it can get back to its feet.

This is done getting reprinted. It’s demonstrated its ability to hit $10 before and it has Beebles on the good art. This should be in more decks and thanks to Volo, it is. I think Cloudstone Curio is too high a buy-in but I like it for the same reasons – Curio is obviously better but Equilibrium is just fine and is a pet card of mine, as is…

Not that Trade Routes is a Volo pick, just sayin’.

I made fun of people for playing Realmwalker which is a bad, narrow version of this. “People shouldn’t play Realmwalker if they don’t play Vizier of the Menagerie.” Well maybe people are going to start playing Vizier, which they should do before they play Realmwalker. Vizier is better than it has performed lately, but it’s flirted with $10 before and I bet it gets there again, which makes those $5 copies pretty alluring.

I miss things and I have biases but I am not asking you to copy my picks, I am teaching you my method and I hope it works for you as well as it’s worked for me. EDH is real weird and with a new product every month, it’s tough to stay on top of it, but it’s worth it. The best time to buy cards was 1993, the best time to sell them is don’t sell them, they keep going up. Buy more copies than you need to play with and you’re like 75% of the way there (get it?). OK, I’m done this time, I promise. Until next time!

Watchtower

Finding a Niche

August 2, 2021 David Sharman

It’s easy to look at the big movers and shakers in formats like Modern and forget about the little guys, but it’s often the little guys that can end up making you the most money. The big cards like Ragavan and Lurrus are likely past the point of speculation, and so we need to dig a little deeper to find some of the cards that people aren’t necessarily paying the most attention to, but are still important parts of the metagame. Four-ofs that give a deck consistency, sideboard cards and more play these roles, and so that’s what I’m looking at today.

Utopia Sprawl (Non-foil/foil)

Price today: $7.50/$30+
Possible price: $15/$50+

It’s hard to believe that we’ve only just had the third ever printing of this card, but here we are. The common that was first released 15 years ago in Dissension has only since seen reprints in Masters 25 and now the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms Commander decks. It’s always been a popular EDH card – in nearly 18k decks on EDHREC to date – and has dipped in and out of the Modern meta over the past few years as well, notably in Ponza and midrange decks, and most recently being a staple in both the Enchantress and Elementals decks.

This consistent popularity across multiple formats has led to a steady price increase over the past couple of years, making for a $7-8 common and $30+ foil. There’s a lot more supply around with the new Commander decks being released, but prices are still $8+ for those and I don’t know that we’re going to see that going down to be honest. This influx of new supply is quite a lot, but it’s going to get sucked up by EDH players relatively quickly, and CardKingdom is already paying $6 cash/$7.80 credit for the new copies on their buylist which is a huge indicator that they’re very bullish on it.

I quite like grabbing a stack of $7-8 Utopia Sprawls here, and if you can find any foils on the cheaper end (A25 under $30 and Dissension under $50) then you’re probably going to do well too. All versions are a little cheaper in Europe right now but not by much at all, and supply is similarly low for older copies and foils. This is a card that’s going to be heavily played in EDH forever and likely to be a reasonable part of the Modern meta for the foreseeable future, and given the fact that we’ve just had a reprint I think you should be safe there for a good while.

Engineered Explosives (All versions)

Prices today: $15-$40
Possible prices: $30-$80

Engineered Explosives used to be a huge part of the Modern meta, and could be found in a huge proportion of sideboards across a large range of decks. It did fall out of favour for a little while, and that coupled with its reprints in both Ultimate Masters and then again in Double Masters tanked the price for a while. However, its popularity is back on the upswing and with that copies are draining out of the market and prices heading upwards again.

Explosives got as low as $3 last year, and so if you were in on copies back then, more power to you – but I think that there’s still good money to be made on the $15 copies. The fact is that supply has been draining and even for the Double Masters version, the ones that should be in the most plentiful supply, there are only 23 NM non-foil listings on TCGPlayer and fewer foils. We have a few different printings of the card but all are in short supply, and I think that you’ll do well on anything you pick up now. The Inventions are the only ones I might not advocate for right now, but even then if you snap off the cheapest copy on TCGPlayer ($120) you’ll probably make money on it; there are only five listings for it and they ramp up steeply.

This is also a great arbitrage opportunity, because Europe hasn’t caught up yet and still has a bunch of €5 ($6) copies available alongside €30 ($35) Box Toppers and €50 ($60) Inventions. If you need any copies for Modern then scoop them up quickly, because I think that prices are going to keep heading upwards for a fair bit before we see another reprint.

Kaheera, the Orphanguard (FEA)

Price in Europe: €5 ($6)
Price in US: $15
Possible price: $30

I’ve written enough about the Companions from Ikoria before that you should know I’m generally a fan of them as specs. Lurrus is still dominating in multiple formats (and is currently the most played creature in Modern), and Yorion and Obosh are still relevant in Modern too. Now with the rise of the Elemental tribal deck, Kaheera has pushed to the forefront of the meta too, having previously been relegated to just being a ‘free card’ for creatureless control decks to play as a Companion.

It may only be played in a couple of Modern decks, but it’s relatively popular both as a Companion and as part of the 99 in EDH and supply has been dwindling on FEA copies for a little while now. TCGPlayer is down to just eight listings for NM foils, and so I’m looking at Europe for cheaper copies instead. Over here you can still pick a reasonable number up from €5-10, including some Japanese copies if you’re feeling particularly spicy.

These should make for a nice flip and short hold – there’s no more Ikoria supply inbound and I highly doubt we’ll see another FEA Kaheera printing for a little while to come, so you should be good to grab a few of these confidently. I’d also take a look at some of the other popular Companions that haven’t quite popped yet, because the same logic applies and I’d expect to see them following the same path before long.

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, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.

Casual Fridays

What I have and Haven’t Bought

July 30, 2021 Cliff Daigle 1 Comment

Every once in a while, it’s good for me to be transparent about the purchases I’ve made. Generally, you can expect that I’ve been making purchases of things I pick, or at least I tell you what price I’m looking for. I want to tell you about the things I’ve picked up that I didn’t necessarily write about.

I’m also going to make a distinction between the things I buy for speculative purposes (the things I intend to resell later for profit) and the things I’ve purchased for my own Commander decks.

Did buy: Most Dragons for my Ur-Dragon deck

As a five-color deck, I get to have my pick of all the dragons ever printed. My deck is heavy on the slam and roar and attack, nothing too fancy. Because of The Ur-Dragon’s ability (and btw he’s overdue for a reprint in some way) to lower casting costs on Dragons, it’s really easy to overlook what it does.

Especially when I’m adding Iymrith, Desert Doom for $18 and Ebondeath, Dracolich for $15 in borderless foil. It’s possible that those drop down another buck or two, but I’m not going to sweat that too hard. Vendors and dealers have gotten their allocations and are cracking like mad, so there’s still space for the chase versions to go a little lower when individuals get their sealed product this week, and usually put it on the market the second weekend of availability.

Ebondeath is a card I might go a little deeper on if the borderless foil starts knocking on $10. It’s recursive, which is good, but it’s also a Dragon Zombie, an intersection of two extremely popular tribes. $15 is a bit high for my taste when I don’t have any special reason to like a card, but recursive threats in good tribes catch my eye.

Didn’t Buy Yet: Tiamat

There was a point this past weekend, on 7-23, when Tiamat in borderless foil could be had for $50. It seems odd to me that the chase mythic of the set would be a five-color Commander, which hasn’t yet been the case with other Commanders. The foil is back over $70 this week, but I’m expecting this price to tumble back down. Right now, we’re still seeing people buy this card in a hurry to upgrade their Commander decks. I respect that, but I’m not going to spend $70 when a couple weeks’ patience will save me $25 or more.

If you don’t believe me, allow me to share the graph from a card sought after much harder than Tiamat at the beginning, and also in a set that’s relatively underpowered: Phyrexian Foil Vorinclex.

There’s a whole lot of copies under $160 for this card, there’s not just one outlier making things difficult for the algorithm. The hype has died down, and while I know I could get the best price by waiting three months, I’m willing to pay Tiamat’s price in about 3-4 weeks because I really want to play with the Dragon God.

Did buy: 2x Champion’s Helm (Invention) at $60

Granted this was about a month and a half ago, and the price is a little higher now, but there aren’t a lot of cheap Inventions left in the world. This one is near and dear to my heart, as I have lots of Commanders who love hexproof. This has had exactly two printings: Commander 2011 as a nonfoil, and then this as the only foil version out there. There’s a lot of good Equipment out there for Commanders, but one mana for a big buff and that wonderful, wonderful feeling of hexproof is high on the list for me.

Did buy: 16x Foil Unholy Heat under $4

There’s more copies out there on TCG under $4, but I don’t like buying single cards and having to unpack them from shipping. It’s worth a little more money from me to get several at once, rather than save 15% but have 16 different envelopes to open. That’s something I do–if you don’t mind getting more letters, then rock on.

Unholy Heat has taken Modern by storm. Dragon’s Rage Channeler already pushes you to want delirium, Mishra’s Bauble doesn’t really cost a card in enabling that status, and if you get there, the rate on Unholy Heat is the best ever. And it’s an instant, and can even take out planeswalkers! I have high hopes for this card, common or not.

I don’t think these are going to spike or anything, but this is the cheapest they will be going forward. Go ahead and get the ones you want/need.

Did buy: 12x FEA Path of Ancestry for about $4 each

I’m unlikely to go deeper on this, because I worry that Commander Legends 2 will have this as a reprint next year. We aren’t going to get CL2 in 2021, but it seems a lock for 2022. Path is a five-color utility land that really rewards tribal decks, and even though the basic one comes in most Commander decks, there have only been two foil versions. Over on EDHREC, it’s registered in 53k decks, proving what a staple it is.

Didn’t buy: FEA Hobgoblin Bandit Lord at $3.20 each

While I adore this card and what it does for Goblins decks, I’m not ready to stock up on things from AFR. We’re only a week in, and it’s got plenty of time for the price to trickle farther downward. I do note that there are cheaper individual copies out there, and CK has a set of 8 for $2.50 each, which is a more appealing price. Even with all that, the first week of a set is not the time to be purchasing the long-term specs, so I’m staying away for now.

Watchtower

Feeling Blue? Ask Your Doctor If Modern Is Right For You

July 28, 2021 David Sharman

I hadn’t actually intended to just write about blue cards today, but I ended up doing just that and so here we are. Modern is still great and I’m just going to keep writing about it until someone tells me not to – paper tournaments are slowly returning and people are buying their Modern cards again (me included), so let’s see what we should be buying right now.

Murktide Regent

Price today: $20
Possible price: $40

Murktide Regent has quickly become a staple in the Izzet Tempo decks that are dominating Modern at the moment, and although it generally ends up costing two mana rather than one, it might just be a new and improved Delver of Secrets. With fetchlands in the format it’s not too difficult to cast this for two mana on turn three, and in this kind of deck it’s almost always going to come into play as a 5/5 or bigger. On top of that, any time you delve away any more instants or sorceries, Murktide just grows bigger, and can take over a game incredibly quickly.

All the Delver-esque decks are playing four Regents at the moment, and it’s pretty much become a staple in Legacy Delver decks as well. I don’t think it’s quite powerful enough to get banned, although we’ll have to keep an eye on it – but for the time being I don’t think it’s likely to be unseated from its place in these decks.

$20 is already a high-ish buy-in for a card that’s pretty much at peak supply right now, but if we compare it to other mythics from the set then it’s actually not looking too bad. Ragavan is already a $70 card and Endurance is $35, so $20 for a card with such a high amount of competitive play seems like it should easily get there soon enough. Supply is still reasonable at 125 TCGPlayer listings, but the vast majority of those are just single copies, and MKM is actually more expensive at the moment.

Striped Riverwinder (Foil)

Price in Europe: €2 ($2.50)
Price in US: $???
Possible price: $8

Living End is continuing to put up the numbers in Modern with the new-to-Modern Shardless Agent at the helm, and the Elementals from MH2 in the forms of Subtlety and Grief backing it up. Striped Riverwinder has long been an absolute staple in the deck – one mana to cycle and producing a huge 6/5 Hexproof body is some of the best value you can get with Living End, and so I don’t see it shifting from the list any time soon.

As far as I can see, foils are basically non-existent in the US. TCGPlayer has none, and there are just a sparse few copies across the major vendors. There aren’t exactly a huge number of copies in Europe either, but it’s still a great deal more than there are in the US, and so we have ourselves a nice arbitrage opportunity. This may only be a foil common, but it’s only ever had a single printing and it might be a little while yet before we see another set with Cycling in for a potential reprint. Ikoria had Cycling but no reprint for the Riverwinder, and so as a four-of in one of the more dominant Modern decks at the moment, copies are difficult to get hold of.

If you pick some of these up in Europe I can honestly see them selling for close to $7-8 each on TCGPlayer. People that want them for Living End may well pay a good $30 for their playsets, and being able to sell four at a time makes your life much easier.

Brazen Borrower (Showcase)

Price in Europe: €26 ($30)
Price in US: $40
Possible price: $50

Brazen Borrower has waxed and waned in Modern (and other formats) since its printing way back in Throne of Eldraine, but is back to the forefront of the meta again now. Four copies in the Crashing Footfalls Cascade decks, as well as lots of other decks playing 1-3 copies between main and sideboards – Living End, Izzet Tempo, Jeskai control lists etc. – and it’s the 7th most played creature in Modern right now.

The Showcase versions of these are really nice – Eldraine had one of my favourite Showcase styles that we’ve seen for a while, and people want the pretty ones for their decks. Supply is running very low now with only 24 TCGPlayer listings across foils and non-foils, with non-foils running around $40+ and foils already up at $100. This is a card with a printing in The List as well, but those are the same price and even more sparse.

Europe has copies a bit cheaper at the moment, starting around $30 with a reasonable number of copies there before you get to $40, but again not a hugely deep supply. There’s a nice bit of arbitrage to be had there, and a good opportunity to pick up cheaper personal copies if you need them. I expect to see prices push up to $50 and maybe higher on the non-foils, and I’d keep an eye out for any cheap foil copies too because they could easily crest $130+ before too long.

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