Oath of the Gatewatch has been out for a while now and the prices have started to stabilize.
Well, mostly, anyway. Right now, Oath has a surprising amount of value, both because it’s a new set and because the Modern Pro Tour just spiked a bunch of the rares from this set.
With 42 rares and 12 mythics, I want to look at where I think prices will settle out. Already, only a dozen cards have a Fair Trade Price at above a booster pack’s MSRP of $4, and there’s a lot of room for them to fall.
As ever, my goal is to pick out the cards that will bottom out when the season of drafting Oath–Oath–Battle for Zendikar ends, and that will have about 15 months of being Standard legal still in front of it, excellent time for it to go back up in price.
Nissa, Voice of Zendikar ($13): Nissa hasn’t made any waves yet and that’s what we want right now. Commander players have mostly picked up their copies at this point and now we are going to let the market drive her price down gradually. I’m hoping she gets to about $7 before Shadows of Innistrad comes out, as that represents a very safe price for a three-mana, steady-advantage planeswalker who still has more than a year of being Standard legal.
For Nissa, everything is going to depend on the current meta. Right now, she’s not very good, and that should hold through April, pushing her price down as Oath packs get cracked in search of more Eldrazi.
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet($20): Maybe, just maybe, his price drops to $15 as more and more packs get opened. Aside from being just a strong, good, powerful card, he’s got very relevant text against decks like Rally, who want to use the graveyard as a resource. This ability seems like it will be even more relevant when Shadows Over Innistrad arrives, and I had been hoping to pick him up about $10. As it is, though, I don’t think he will fall much farther before Oath season ends.
Kozilek, the Great Distortion ($14): The headliner of the set, this Kozilek is actually better than the original, but is definitely harder to cast. The double-colorless restriction is not as bad in Commander, where Sol Ring continues to reign supreme, but it’s got the potential to draw you more than four cards and offers some ability to protect himself with the counterspell ability. I will be surprised if he goes much further down, unlikely to even make it to $10. I do not think he’s going to see Tron play, as those decks had a chance at a guaranteed four cards and passed it up. So only casual demand, or unforeseen Standard play, is going to raise this price.
Chandra, Flamecaller ($11): I think this is about the perfect price for her, considering she’s already seeing a small amount of play. She will never be a four-of, and getting in at this price will at least be stable. I won’t be shocked if she creeps up to $15 in nine months or so.
World Breaker ($10): I didn’t think this would be this high at all! It’s seven mana, for a big reachy body, that exiles instead of destroys. It’s being played as a four-of in some of the new Ramp decks, and that’s fun, but I don’t think the long-term potential is there. This is destined to be $5, at which point I’m still leery of the growth potential. Yes, it’s better than Acidic Slime in Cube, but it’s so expensive!
Mirrorpool($6): This is better than you think it is. It is tricky to use but carries a relatively low cost, since it’s a land and not a spell. This is a card that most Commander decks would enjoy having, as long as there’s enough other sources of colorless mana. I expect this to get to $3 over time, and that’s when I’d like to have a few for the “Wait a couple of years” box.
Goblin Dark-Dwellers($4): This is an intriguing card, even for being the buy-a-box promo. With every three-cost spell printed, this gets better and better. The easy uses involve removal spells (it’s already responsible for recasting many a Crackling Doom, for instance) but there’s more and more utility available as time goes on. I think that this has versatile potential, and I’m hoping this drops to $2. At that point, I’d want to pick up a dozen or so to set aside.
Stormchaser Mage ($2/$17 foil!): This card is getting a lot of buzz as a Monastery Swiftspear with evasion. It’s an uncommon from a small set and it’s quite possible that the price never goes lower. I’m not sold that it’s better than Young Pyromancer, but it’s going to get a crack at Modern or even Legacy play eventually. I’m not going to be aggressive about it right now, but it’s on my radar. Foils being at an 8x multiplier really sets off alarms to me, but without any results yet, it’s hard to say for sure that you should move in. I prefer to wait and get a little more data before buying the foils.
Sea Gate Wreckage ($2): I think this has further to fall, though it’ll never be bulk. It’s an amazing casual card, and while control decks never want to be empty-handed, there are plenty of other decks that will happily dump their hand in order to enable extra cards. When it gets to $1, I’m going to move in on more than a few copies. The foil is currently at $9, indicating the casual appeal is quite strong.
Ruins of Oran-Rief ($.50): If this didn’t enter tapped, It would likely be in Affinity decks. As it is, I love this as a bulk card going forward for the casual player. It’s not going to light the world on fire, but it’s steady advantage and upgrades everything in an artifact deck or a Devoid deck. It might end up in the quarter bin or even the bulk box, but even at fifty cents I like having a few.
Sleep is for the weak. At least that is what Jason and Marcel want you all to believe as they both pick the first week of February to have their kids. Marcel has to bow out this week due to child-related obligations so the gang gets a very special guest to fill in – Mr. Frank Lepore (@FrankLepore), hot off of his first ever PT where he finished Top 8 which we hear is pretty good. Frank has a lot to talk about and the gang wastes no time interrogating him. Want to know the future of Modern? Look no further.
Frank Lepore (@franklepore) is our guest this week
How did the PT go? (Spoiler Alert – Top 8)
How did the Eldrazi deck perform
Bans necessary?
What stops the Eldrazi decks?
Shadows over Innistrad discussion!
Pick of the WEEEEEK! It’s baaaaack!
Support our Patreon! DO IT. You know this cast makes you more than $1 a week
MTG Fast Finance is a new weekly podcast that tries to break down the flurry of financial activity in the world of Magic: The Gathering into a fast, fun and useful thirty minute format. Follow along with our seasoned hosts as they walk you through this week’s big price movements, their picks of the week, metagame analysis and a rotating weekly topic.
Inkmoth Nexus, MRB: $40 to $50+ (+25%, 0-6 months)
Pia & Kiran Nalaar, ORI (Intro Foil): $11 to $20+ (+80%, 6-12+ months)
Stone Haven Outfitter, OGW (Foil): $2 to $5+ (150%, 12+ months)
Disclosure: James is holding or acquiring all of the above cards.
Travis Picks:
Collected Company, DTK: $15 to $25 (+67%, 6-12 months)
Spreading Seas, ZEN: $1 to $3 (+200%, 0-6 months)
Shrine of the Foresaken, BFZ: $1 to $3 (+300%, 0-6 months)
Disclosure: Travis is holding copies of Collected Company.
Segment 3: Metagame Week in Review
The guys reviewed the results from the SCG Open Standard tourney in Columbus, Ohio, noting that Gideon, Ally of Zendikar appeared as 4-of in three different decks. The Modern Classic event at the same tournament was won by UG Infect, with Tron, Scapeshift, Burn and Jund all in the Top 8, in clear opposition to the Eldrazi dominated Pro Tour this past weekend.
Segment 4: Topic of the Week: Is MTG Too Expensive?
The guys made predictions as to the likelihood of the Innistrad Echoes promo cards being included in Shadows over Innistrad as rumored, and discussed which cards might be included.
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
You are probably wondering why you didn’t get an article out of me last week. There’s a very simple explanation for that – I didn’t write one. I fully intended to, I was even looking forward to talking about more EDH goodness and to encourage those of you who are ProTrader members to hit the forums more often. There are a lot of single card discussions being generated about Standard and Modern cards but nothing really for EDH. Are our cards not worth money? Do they not gain? Prick them, do they not bleed? Well, OK, EDH picks aren’t sentient, but they’re worth discussing and if you’re a ProTrader, hit the forums and help me get some EDH pick discussions going. If we’re good I can see about adding our own category just for EDH picks. We’re people too, dammit.
So since I had a lot to talk about last week, why didn’t I? Well, the answer is pretty simple – I was somewhat preoccupied. I write these on a Monday and last Monday at 3:11 AM my wife and I summoned our first Planeswalker. We named her Liliana, which I realize is a basic baby name at this point. “What’s wrong, Jason? Was the hospital gift shop out of ‘Khaleesi’ license plates so you audibled?” Look, in my defense, there’s a bit of a story behind it. Basically, every name my wife liked was terrible. Like… terrible. One a scale from 1-10, the names were “If you name a boy like that, they will have to remove the underwear from his asscrack surgically.” I’m kind of glad we didn’t have a boy because she likes the name “Rowan.” Not like the Magic card, that’s “Rowen,” but like this guy.
Hello, ladies
Not happening. Her picks for girl’s names weren’t much better, frankly. I mentioned Liliana and she actually liked it. It was basically the only girl’s name we can agree on. Are there a lot of nerds naming their kids after Magic Planeswalkers these days? Yes, I guess there are. But there aren’t any in my town and she’ll be the only one in her class with that name and I can live with that. Those who think I lack originality should remember they picked their kid’s name out of a book and if you make fun of my daughter’s name within her earshot, she’ll make you discard a card. My kid is the best.
Temporary disruptions to my writing schedule aside (my sleep schedule is permanently disrupted, but I was on standup comedian time anyway, so it didn’t take much) we have some stuff to discuss, so let’s, you know, do that.
Exposure
I’m a chemist by training, so I think in those terms sometimes. It isn’t always relevant to MTG Finance, but in one way I think it can be. As an EDH financier, I like to make calls that are a ways off. First of all, outside of new sets making profound things happen, most of our calls are long-term, slow-burn (what am I, Styx?) cards. For every Sage of Hours shooting up overnight because of Ezuri, we have 10 Primal Vigors, chugging away because fewer are being opened and more are being jammed in decks because Primal Vigor is very good. We could transition into a discussion about a spike versus a correction versus inevitable price increase based on supply and demand but this isn’t that kind of article. I’m even going to talk about specific cards in a minute so hold onto your hats, nerds. Thinking about how EDH cards increase in price got me thinking about the concept of upside and upside got me thinking about chemistry.
Exposure is a word I like to use in relation to upside. The more upside a card is exposed to, the more chances it has to go up. Think about it – which card is exposed to more upside, Mutavault or Sliver Hive? The cards play very differently but they also behave very differently. Mutavault was a juggernaut of a card and if it hadn’t gotten reprinted, it would have continued to climb in price. Any cool tribal card can give Mutavault (or maybe this $7 beauty)
some upside whereas only cool new Slivers have a chance to do anything to the price of Sliver Hive. This is one way to think about how much more upside Mutavault is exposed to. The price reflects not only the disparity in utility but also in the different strategies Mutavault boosts (it doesn’t suck as a vanilla stand-in for Mishra’s Factory, either) even though in a Sliver EDH deck, Mutavault is pretty meh and Hive is pretty outstanding.
When I was an undergraduate, one of the last projects I worked on was Grubb’s Catalyst, a catalyst for which Robert Grubbs was awarded a Nobel Prize. Grubbs’ catalyst is special because it helps certain chemical structures undergo a process where closed ring structures like you see on the left become more “open” structures like the one on the right. I’m super oversimplifying (if you want to learn more about ROMP there are good resources out there) but the gist of it is, this catalyst can make closed ring structures which exist discretely as their own little unit open the rings which creates two bonding sites where there used to be 0. Suddenly these rings can be chained together where they previously could not. The difference in potential between a closed ring and a structure that has a huge increase in new bonding sites is gigantic and that’s why this catalyst’s discovery was worthy of a Nobel prize. More bonding sites means more exposure to potential “upside” if you really stretch the metaphor. I think about EDH cards that have potential to affect Modern or maybe even Legacy the same way.
Let’s go back to a card I mentioned above, a card that sold out so fast that some sites are still telling our algorithm that it’s $1.
This was growing. If you picked these up at $0.50 you’re really glad today but you were even glad last week when some sites had them at $2. A quadruple up is never a bad thing, after all. Tribal stuff in fun in EDH and casual and new, good tribal cards get printed in every block. This card was going to climb steadily and those $0.50 investors would have felt great when this hit $3 later this year.
Was Descendants’ Path a good spec? Yes, of course. Almost all tribal stuff is and we have EDH and casual to thank for that. If you bought in at $0.50 and outed them for $1.50 to a buylist you’d clear some real money after fees if you bought in deep enough. Best of all, these were very easy to trade for and I got these in bulk all the time.
What took this from a good spec to a great spec was people playing it with tribal eldrazi in Modern. All of a sudden people were flipping an Emrakul off of the top way too early because Eldrazi can cost 0 mana these days. Turn that 0-drop Mimic into a 15/15 and threaten lethal, all because of Descendants’ durdly Path. When Modern players decide to start doing the kind of unfair stuff we do in EDH, they’re going to need our cards and we’re happy to sell them to them, provided we were invested first. Modern playability exposed Path to a ton of upside and that paid dividends this weekend.
It wasn’t just tribal cards, either.
Modern Price Trends
Hope you got your copy for your Daxos deck, because this went from about $3.50 to about $35.00 over the weekend. Multiple printings made this a real risky gainer and the fact that you have to keep it and creatures around made it a tough way to stay alive in EDH, but this was always a solid card. Would it have gone up over time as a result of EDH and casual play? Maybe, but I didn’t like the price trend of “super flat for like a decade” enough to include it in the same breath as Daxos when I wrote about Daxos a half dozen times or so between here, Gathering Magic and spoiler coverage. It is a good card (good enough that I bought multiple copies of an Urza’s Saga precon to make sure I had multiple copies for my white weenie deck back in 1998) but kind of wasn’t going anywhere – until you factor in the Pro Tour. Suddenly the card is sold out and Modern, not EDH or casual, got it there.
So what are some other EDH-tier cards that could get a second look based on things happening in Modern?
All kinds of exposure in this article
Expose evil is an okay card in Limited but nothing special. What is relevant is an artifact token that can be used not only to draw a card, but also, as one excited redditor puts it, to build an archetype around.
This is a bulk rare right now and with any amount of upside from turning investigation tokens into Blightsteel Colossus this could be a real card. It’s old enough that cards in this set are valuable. Personally, if a deck with 4 Polymorph and 4 Shape Anew to get Blightsteel wasn’t doing it before, this won’t make it happen in Modern. Polymorph is just better because it can get Eldrazi and make the game end a lot faster and I don’t know about this. Still, if anyone builds the deck, this bulk rare has some upside. Even though I’m not excited at the prospect of this as a spec given the clunkiness of builds like this which already exist and are already clunky, EDH and Modern both influence the future of this card rather than just EDH like for a card like Rite of Replication (I mean, for now). This is a good thought exercise to get us looking at EDH playables (My Sharuum loves Shape Anew for funsies) that are also fringe Modern playables.
Jor Kadeen’s right-hand man here has a decently-high buyin price to be sure, but also has a lot of playability in both formats. The Puresteel deck is fun but is a known quantity although it’s a bit of a Dr Dre right now – not gone but forgotten. That is, until someone got people excited again.
Top 8 at SCG Regionals isn’t exactly on-camera Day 2 of the PT, but it’s online and it’s exciting. While this isn’t necessarily a home run, it’s also a fringe-playable card that has upside based on two different formats. EDH seems to print new equipment and new Kor to wield them in both regular sets and supplementary product with relative regularity and Modern having a deck (though what Tier?) means it gets bought as a 4-of by people playing that deck. Again, whether or not this is a spec I’d spend money on remains to be seen, but what is clear is that this kind of thing makes cards spike hard overnight and being able to see them coming by checking fringe decks like this helps you buy ahead of time. People who buy ahead of time don’t get their orders cancelled. People who buy ahead of time have copies in hand to list at the new price when the card spikes and people are panic buying.
Broken Stuff
We’re used to doing broken stuff in EDH. Modern is so unused to truly broken plays that they see fit to keep Emrakul legal, a card that is no fun for EDH because of how many lives it ruins and how easy it is to get into play in EDH. A steady gainer (until the reprint absolutely pantsed it) like Eldrazi Temple is a great EDH spec until another reprint takes it down or something like this happens. Both are somewhat likely which is why MTG Finance has risks. But when Modern starts looking to do broken stuff, they’ll be coming to EDH, not standard for their goodies. We knew about Goryo’s Vengeance and we loved it, but Modern made it the price it is today. What else could be fringe playable in Modern and suddenly become as broken there as it is in EDH?
Could this see the $5 it once was again? EDH can make this climb a bit but it’s not going to send it into the $10 range the way Modern could.
Imagine my delight when my favorite EDH spec was mentioned as a way to deal with Eldrazi in Modern. I’ve been on this since they were a buck or two and I’ve got a pile going that will make me very happy if Modern makes this a $10 card, but I could also just wait a few years for EDH to hopefully make it hit the same mark. Either I win big by getting lucky or win as big over a longer time by being smart. Either way, looking at cross-format playability is a surefire way to make some money.
Next time you see a card that is talked about in Standard like it has potential bottom out, think about it. EDH is going to make this card gain over time. You have a minimal investment, virtually-assured growth due to power level and all the time in the world to watch this grow. You also have a non-zero chance of something making this go insane in Modern and all of a sudden you dectuple up on every copy. EDH will make you money, Modern can make you money. Put the two together and get some real work done.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
