Much has happened over the past couple months. In addition to the nonstop flow of information about upcoming products, we’ve also seen the Modern metagame completely turn on its head. A few innocent bannings, the printing of a couple Eldrazi critters, and the announcement of a new set has created endless turmoil in the MTG market.
I love the volatility.
As long as you stay on top of trends, you should too. This movement has created a ton of opportunity for profit significant amounts in short periods of time. Consider Meditate, for example, which I managed to snag a few copies of in the $4 range before they shot up to $12 on buy lists!
Or, consider what Eldrazi speculation in Legacy has done to the price of Thorn of Amethyst.
It’s not common practice for me to write articles following the prototypical format of “buy this, sell that”. However, this week merits an exception. There’s simply been too much movement in the markets to ignore, and I believe now is a critical time to re-evaluate portfolios to make sure we’re well positioned to succeed in the next couple volatile months.
I’ll do this format by format…
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
To learn how ProTrader can benefit YOU, click here to watch our short video.
At least Firestorm sees play (in Dredge) whereas in the last few years I have only seen Dreadnought in “fun” FNM-like builds; folks experimenting and having fun with things like Cloudform but not actually strong enough to be competitive.
I haven’t seen Dredge be relevant in a while though. Do all Dredge variants even play Firestorm? I don’t know…just feels like that card doesn’t belong.
Stifle-nought has had a few flashes in the pan, but I suppose you’re right in that the strategy hasn’t been relevant for years. Even the unbanning of Illusionary Mask couldn’t make Dreadnought playable as a Tier 2 Legacy strategy.
Still…doesn’t the 1 mana 12/12 trampler feel more iconic to Magic and Legacy than Firestorm? It does to me, but perhaps this is personal bias showing through. The last time an opponent turn 1’d me with a 6 Damage Firestorm, I proceeded to win the next turn (I was playing either storm or Reanimator, I forget).
MtGStocks deck database shows 7 T8s for Firestorm in 2016, all in Dredge (http://www.mtgstocks.com/decks/formats/Legacy/card/9612).
In these lists it is 3 or 4 copies in the SB. It is fantastic against Elves and some other decks. I think it is a meta call. Turn One discard two dredgers to kill DRS can turn a game around.
The last copy of Dreadnought in that database is this one from October 2015 (http://www.mtgstocks.com/decks/105025).
My point is that Firestorm is a played card in Legacy whilst Dreadnought barely qualifies for the status.
Also, those 7 T8s for Firestorm are also 100% of the Dredge T8s in the same period showing that the card is in the large majority of successful Dredge decks.
Well met, I concede the point.
Trying to move Eldrzai stuff is hard, even my lgs wont touch my mimics that I keep getting in drafts because they have a stack they cant move. With a “ban” shadowing over its hard to move them even as a discount, any suggestions on how to get rid of them?
This goes out to all the writers interested in legacy. A strange thing has happened, I’ve noticed like 4 people talking about wanting to build a legacy deck as my lgs. A modern player, a modern/standard player, and two EDH players. 2 young and 2 old. No one plays legacy or even talks about it at the store, so this was quite interesting to hear people talking about. Maybe Eternal Masters is better at performing CPR on legacy than we could expect.
No doubt they’re interested, but I think they’ll get frustrated really fast if they eventually discover they’re starting each game with 2-6 life less than their opponents because they have to play Shocks instead of Revise dual lands… or get bored of Eldrazi.
We still need some better non-Reserve cards that compete with some of the staple Reserve cards in the format to bring it back to life. WotC is doing this, just kinda slowly.
I chuckle at your Eldrazi comment. In reality, the deck seems to be very strong and other than City of Traitors, isn’t nearly as expensive as other Legacy decks. No fetches, no duals, no Force of Will. Perhaps Eldrazi is not ALL bad for Legacy.
The longer WOTC takes to bring better cards into Legacy, the more expensive Dual Lands will become. I don’t see them ever outclassing Duals…
In terms of moving Eldrazi cards – I’d use online buy lists if traditional means aren’t working out. A friend of mine runs All The MTG (alltheMTG.com) and he was recently buying some of the Standard Eldrazi creatures fairly aggressively to restock his store. You could try there. I can vouch for the site. Otherwise, there’s always the big sites like SCG, Card Kingdom, Channel Fireball, etc.
I haven’t been to my LGS in forever, but I appreciate the anecdote. I wonder…if this type of Legacy chatter increases in the coming months, perhaps the format can grow once again…keep us posted!
Thanks,
Sig