Monthly Archives: May 2016

City of Traders

UNLOCKED: Returning to the Scene of the Crime

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of MTG Fast Finance! An on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important Magic economy changes.

This article was originally posted 5/3/16 as ProTrader only. Due to the feedback received, I’ve chosen to make the part of this article relating to reprints public. Enjoy!

Not as Easy as it Looks

This all blends into a much larger discussion of reprints as a whole. It’s been a hot topic again recently, with the removal of Modern from the Pro Tour circuit. Without a Modern PT, there’s concern that WotCaHS (Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro Subsidiary) won’t reprint nearly as many staples, and it will lead to players being priced out of the format. I understand the concern here, and it comes from a well-intentioned placed. However, reprints are not nearly as simple as “shove card X into set Y.” Check out this recent Rosewater Tumblr post on the topic:

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He states it blatantly. Yes, we’d like to do something about making Modern more accessible, but no, jamming everything into Standard isn’t the right path.

Corbin Hosler had an excellent string of tweets not too long ago documenting one piece of this rather challenging puzzle. He probably should have made it an article, but he didn’t, so instead I’m stealing his content and using it for mine.

Chronicles was a disaster for Wizards back in the day, and it was cited by Aaron Forsythe as exactly what they wanted to avoid when discussing how to manage Modern Masters. It’s far safer to underprint a product like that than overprint, because overprinting can ruin future profits, and thus the health of the game as a whole. If it’s $400 for a tier one Standard deck and $450 for a tier one Modern deck, how many people would play Standard instead of Modern? Many fewer packs of the new set would be opened, and Wizards would end up cannibalizing their own product’s long term health for some short term profits. They’re already bad about that as it is with regards to MTGO. Do we really want paper Magic to begin experiencing the same failures as MODO?

Right Bullet, Wrong Target

One of the more common proclamations is that WotCaHS should give absolutely zero consideration to maintaining collection values of the enfranchised, so that new players can get into the format. Slash and burn card prices, screw the privileged elite, and let everyone into the party. It sounds great, right?

As someone who owns a set of Tarmogoyfs, let me say this: I don’t care if they reprint him as a rare in Standard. I don’t care if Goyf’s price drops. I’ve had them for years, will continue to have them, and wouldn’t sell them unless I was selling the entire damn collection, which is a long ways away. They represent only a small portion of my collection’s value.

However, I’m not the average player. Most people don’t own nearly as many cards as I do, and a $600 set of Tarmogoyfs is a much larger percentage of their total collection’s value than mine. If you reduce that number by $500, you’ve just taken a humongous chunk out of the average player’s Magic gross worth. Why punish those that don’t have a house’s value tied up in cardboard?

Going beyond that, assuming you don’t care about the 1% of Magic players that wouldn’t be bothered by a drop in Goyf’s price, what about all those players out there that are actively working towards sets? Nearly 4,000 non-foil Tarmogoyfs show up on Want lists right now on PucaTrade. Imagine spending however many months it may take to earn enough points for a Tarmogoyf, receiving it, and then finding out it’s showing up at rare in Eldritch Moon. Poof, there goes $100 worth of card value that you just spent six weeks grinding out. Is it fair to those players? Forget about guys like me, I’m not the one that a Standard reprint would hose. It’s all the mid-level players that those reprints really screw. Reprinting Tarmogoyf in Standard at rare is a dramatic example, of course, but you get the idea. Crashing card values doesn’t harm the hoarders like myself nearly as badly as it harms the thousands of people trying to scrape together a reasonable Modern collection.

It’s First Order or Something

Corbin spoke about how it’s important for WotCaHS to manage the cost of entry of Modern and Legacy relative to Standard, so as to avoid cannibalizing their own product. We talked about how crashing card values harms players, but not necessarily the players you’d expect it to. Now, let’s look at another facet: reprinting Modern cards tends to ruin Standard.

Here’s my for-fun theorem:

  1. Modern has many more sets legal than Standard
  2. As a card pool grows, it is tougher and tougher for individual cards to rise to the top
  3. Those that do stand out in a card pool are exceptionally powerful
  4. A format is defined by its most powerful cards
  5. Format defining cards are more desirable
  6. Controlling for rarity, the more desirable a card, the more expensive it is
  7. The most expensive cards are the ones most in need of a reprint
  8. Cards that would be identified as ideal reprints are exceptionally powerful
  9. The smaller a format, the more influence a powerful card exerts
  10. Therefore: Modern’s best cards will have a dramatic impact on any Standard format in which they appear

(Yeah yeah I know it’s not a valid or sound proof.)

Because of how good the cards in Modern need to be to see considerable play, they will by their nature impact Standard heavily. We don’t need to look far to see evidence of this. When Thoughtseize was reprinted, it had a tremendous impact on Standard as a whole. Remember Mono-Black and Pack Rat and Desecration Demon? Standard was 50% MBC mirrors for six months. Even without those support cards, Thoughtseize would have been a key player in that format. In fact,  that Temur was basically non-existent in constructed Magic during that time can certainly be at least partially attributed to the presence of Thoughtseize.

Similarly, the fetches in Khans of Tarkir did a lot to Standard. Do you remember what the decks looked like before Shadows over Innistrad? They were all four color messes. Fetches, in combination with the battle lands, were responsible for that. You could make the argument that fetches wouldn’t have had such an impact on Standard had the battle lands not been printed, but that’s sort of the point — WotCaHS needs to bend over backwards to make sure these higher power cards don’t screw everything up.

Heck, look at two newer cards, Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy and Siege Rhino. Neither one is a reprint, but they’re both seeing play in older formats. And while doing so, also made Standard all about them the entire time. Standard only has a handful of exceptionally powerful cards in it at a time, and all the meaningful cards in Modern are exceptionally powerful.

This isn’t to say that Standard can’t accommodate for these cards whatsoever. After all, each of these reprints had to exist the first time, right? Sure, but don’t forget what these looked like the first time around. Tarmogoyf, in conjunction with Garruk Wildspeaker, was a pillar of Standard when it was legal. Cryptic Command was key in 5c Control, another top Standard deck. Snapcaster Mage was all over Standard for two entire years. Did they “ruin” Standard? Probably not. They definitely warped it though.

I fully admit that any card could be reprinted in Standard and the format could be shaped to accommodate it. A great example of this was Mirrodin, where they brought back Atog and Terror. Terror had been an amazingly powerful piece of removal prior to Mirrodin block, but with artifact creatures everywhere, it seemed much less impressive. At the same time Atog, which had been garbage in the past, was now impressively useful on a plane with so many artifacts.

Yeah, we could have Snapcaster Mage in Standard and not have him be the most important card in the format. But it would mean almost no playable one mana instants and sorceries, and the two mana ones would need to be powered down too. Not just in the set he’s legal either. You’d need these restrictions in place in the block preceding him, the block including him, and the block following him. That’s a year and a half of Magic sets that would need to be designed within strict guidelines, just to allow for a single card to be reprinted. And what about the other reprints going on at the same time? And what about the blocks even further out that are impacted by the presence or absence of those one mana instants or sorceries in adjacent blocks? You can see how making room for a single powerful card can impact years worth of Magic design. When Rosewater talks about how difficult it is to balance reprints, he’s not kidding.

QED or Something

I’m not saying reprints aren’t helpful or necessary, because they absolutely are. Without them, formats tend towards stagnation, and if reprints are simply not an option whatsoever, as in Legacy, there is only one conclusion. However, shoving multiple highly-desired cards into Standard sets comes with a host of problems that go far beyond simply costing a handful of enfranchised players some value. WotCaHS runs the risk of alienating burgeoning players, crashing markets, cannibalizing future Standard sets, and driving players out of the game altogether. When you consider how bad the consequences can be, and how many ways there are for things to go poorly, it should come as no surprise that they’re (rightfully) erring on the side of caution.

Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Blueprinting 101

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Written By:
Douglas Johnson @Rose0fthorns
__________________________________________________

Welcome back

Hey there friends! I apologize for not managing to get an article out last week; final exams have been pretty stressful, but I’m almost finished with my last year of undergraduate college. I’m going to miss Oswego, mostly because my location is a big reason I’ve been able to become a little successful in this little niche of a community. I’ll still be able to visit the campus once a week for graduate classes, but it’s pretty clear that my strategies in making money through this little side hobby will have to adapt now that I can’t stop by the shop and buy collections, or restock the case on a whim.

So what’s changing?

Well, my locally famous 1k for $7 boxes  have died down a lot over the course of this past year. That’s partially to be expected, I suppose; there’s only so many thousands of bulk commons and uncommons you can force down a college town’s throat before they satiate themselves for a while.

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This is the photo I’ve used for my Craigslist advertisement for the past year or so…

While moving to a new location approximately an hour and a half away means that I’ll have a semi-new Craigslist stomping ground, I do need to adapt and have a more consistent outlet for bulk commons and uncommons. This week (and possibly in the next few weeks depending on how long this ends up being), I’m going to go a bit more in depth on a topic that I briefly tossed out a few weeks ago; specifically referring to “The Blueprint:” an extremely in-depth common/uncommon  buylist created by Thomas Dodd “@Amistod” and Zach “@ZachSellsMagic”. I got a couple of questions last time I casually mentioned it about whether it was a secret #MTGFINANCE cabal thing where only the elite scientologists could join, and it’s not that at all.

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I will put a disclaimer in advance though; the project I’m going to embark on in the next couple of months requires a significant time and decent monetary investment. I’m lucky to have a month and a half off before I start my graduate assistantship, and two close friends who are very eager to sort cards in exchange for trade credit. This article is less of a “how to make a couple dollars in trade at FNM” and more of “how to spend several days or weeks squeezing every last drop of lemonade out of 300,000 bulk commons and uncommons.”

Bulkland

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So these are a few pictures of what my room at my Dad’s house looks like right now. I know one of the boxes has “RARES1” scribbled across the top, but trust me; it’s all glorious bulk. Some of it’s picked, some of it probably has Swords to Plowshares and Unlimtited basic lands. Some of it is sorted out by set, and some of the cards are upside down or backwards. I paid anywhere between $3 and $5 per thousand on all of this, paying more when I knew that there were probably unsorted treasures and less when I knew it had been picked clean. At this point I’m pretty maxed out on bulk for the moment, so I’ll probably have to dial back any current bulk purchases to between $3-4 per thousand while I deal with this pile.

Blueprint

So what kind of magical buylist is going to make this all worth my (and more importantly, your) time?  Well, let’s show you an example page to demonstrate what kind of cards we’re talking about. While there will hopefully be some Swords to Plowshares and Blood Artists in that bulk, I’m actually going to be picking out and sorting these types of cards….

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Remember how people like me probably told you that Theros bulk wasn’t even worth picking cards out of post-rotation? Well, now you can get some sweet dollars for several of the individual cards in the set; three cents per card doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you think about it as $30 per thousand it gets a lot more enticing… we just have to put in the leg work of set sorting and alphabetizing everything, then shipping it all to our friends in Georgia. Now, what would be the best way to go about that…. Set sorting and alphabetizing has always been my mortal enemy because its’ so freaking tedious, but Netflix and Spotify should help with that to a degree.

Step 1: Sort by Set

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This little project is something I worked on for a good chunk of spring break, and I’d like to give a shout out to John from Card Advantage and my fiancee’ Emily to helping out. While my scissors and tape skills are not exactly the most renowned, it’s certainly functional for its intended purpose. Sorting your bulk by set will make the following step much easier when you’re working with a bunch of individual smaller card pools.

If you’ve been playing for a while and have empty 1K or 5K boxes lying around, it’s a great idea to label these for each set or block; depending on how many cards you’re working with. Sorting by set and alphabetically will scale with the size of your collection much better than sorting by something like color, where your piles will grow to an unwieldy size.

Sorting by set is also much easier and faster when you hold the cards upside down. It’s not exactly intuitive, but it lets you see the set symbol first and foremost without looking at the rest of the card, put it into its correct section, and move on. As you may have noticed in my picture of all the sorting trays, I left the four deep pockets empty for each tray intentionally; I can save those for foils, foreign cards, rares, damaged cards, etc; we don’t want to accidentally sort a Flameblade Angel when we could actually sell it for 25 cents, do we?

You’ll notice that my sorting trays are chronologically ordered instead of alphabetically, but it will be much easier to add new sets along the way. When Eldritch Moon comes out, I can just print out the set name and symbol and tape it next to Shadows over Innistrad. Then we wait for the Blueprint to get updated, and start buying bulk once again.

In case you were about to scroll down into the comments section or hit me up on Twitter about where I got those dividers and sorting trays, I can recommend BCW supplies. While their shipping costs are absolutely ridiculous sometimes, it’s definitely worth buying from them if you plan on ordering enough materials to go above the free shipping threshold ($80).

dividers sorting trays

Step 2: Alphabetical Order

This is a method most of us are a bit more familiar with, so I can spend a bit less time talking about it. Alphabetize each set, so that you have your 40 Archetype of Aggressions first, followed by your 18 copies of Archetype of Courage (which is a 16 cent Magic card, by the way). Again, I prefer to use the BCW trays but there are a couple out there that work equally well. I know that CoolstuffInc sells a pretty high quality tray, but $31+shipping is a dealbreaker for me when this one works perfectly fine. I got the stickers from the video game store where I sell cards, but anything should work as long as its’ clear and distinct.

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So now we’ve got several thousand cards worth at least .03 a piece, all set sorted and alphabetized, with each set in alphabetical order as well. What’s the best way to ship these to Georgia? Well, first I recommend making sure that the cards are packaged safely so that none of the cards are able to move or become damaged in transit. It would be a real downer if you ship several hundred dollars worth of cards just to lose a significant percentage because they weren’t tied down safely. Packing 1K boxes full to the brim should prevent any movement, and boxes that only have a few hundred cards should be filled with some other sort of filler to prevent them from moving around.

A USPS large flat rate box costs around $19, and holds around six 1K boxes, meaning we’re paying around $3 per thousand just to ship. Again, that’s definitely an unreasonable number if we’re planning on selling these via Craigslist or mailing them to SCG at bulk prices, but we’re not. We’re spending a few days to drain every ounce of value out of the cards, and the dried husk of un-blueprintable stuff can be bulked off later to a vendor like CSI or SCG to cover parts of our shipping costs. You can head down to your local post office and grab several of the unfolded boxes, then package them up at home and bring them back when you’re ready to pay and ship. Just remember to email Thomas first with a confirmation of the list that you’re shipping!

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You may have noticed that there aren’t actually any cards in the process of being blueprinted right now. I have final exams until next Friday the 13th, and then the week after that will be buylisting season until July 1st. If you’re interested in this kind of mtg finance, I highly suggest tuning into my next few articles as I try this out first-hand and report my results. If you have any questions, hit me up on Twitter at or in the comments section.

If anyone is interesting in getting a copy of the Blueprint, please email send an email to thomas@cardadvantage.com. He’ll be more than happy to help you out.

Disclaimer: I was not paid or given any sort of incentive by Card Advantage to write this article about them. The only incentive is the ridiculously deep buylist and friendly people who created the Blueprint!

End Step

  • I will be at GP New York City this weekend from Friday at noonish until Sunday, depending on if my friend day 2’s the event. I will be posting vendor hotlists on Twitter at @Rose0fthorns, so be sure to pay attention to that if you plan on going to the event or want to keep an eye on some cards that vendors are hot on.
  • It’s probably a little late to give this tip out for GPNYC, but it should come in handy for future Grands Prix that you plan on attending. I mentioned this a couple days ago on our podcast Cartel Aristocrats, but it bears repeating:If you plan on staying in a hotel and booking online through a website like booking.com or Expedia, I highly recommend doing your research into the price and fees of your stay, then calling the hotel directly to try and negotiate a price while avoiding those booking website fees. The hotel knows that they have to throw away a percentage of your money to those sites, so calling them directly and asking “What is the cheapest price you can give me if I book right now over the phone without hotels.com?” has a solid chance of cutting out the middle man and getting you a much better deal.

Hope to see some of you at GPNYC!
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City of Traders

PROTRADER: Returning to the Scene of the Crime

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of MTG Fast Finance! An on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important Magic economy changes.

We’re about a month away from Eternal Masters, though you wouldn’t know it by watching social media. With the packed timetable between Shadows Over Innistrad’s release, the Pro Tour, and Eternal Masters, Standard barely has a chance to breathe before Force of Wills and Wastelands are raining down upon us. (And don’t forget that it’s only two months later before Conspiracy Two: Electric Boogaloo shows up.) There’s been very little discussion of EMA so far, and I expect it will mostly remain that way until spoilers begin in two to three weeks. This means that prices could begin moving on Reserve List cards quietly, before players realize what’s going on. Really, EMA’s announcement was already too late to pick up your missing duals. At this stage, we’re past “too late” and into “would rather kill myself than pay those prices” territory.

Someone asked me a great question about Crop Rotation recently. The gentlemen wants to foil his Lands deck, and was curious about when to pick up the foils of this particular card. If you’re looking to foil anything that may or may not show up in EMA, this is the strategy I’d use.

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Jason Alt

Azorius Basterds

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I told you last week I was going to write about the cards likely to be in the Azorius deck so we could sell them if necessary or at least be thinking about cards likely to pair with them that have low reprint risks. The good thing about this is that it’s essentially a thought exercise to move the really obvious stuff. Anything subtle won’t matter as much because the prices won’t likely move that much and selling and rebuying usually isn’t all that worth it unless the price is going to move a lot. Basically what we’re doing is preparing for the decks to come out and recalibrating our expectations based on what we saw with Commander 2015 since I expect Commander 2016 to be a lot more similar to that than it will be to Commander 2014.

I was thinking “Why did I commit to write this stupid article in May when the set won’t be out until October? What was I thinking?” and I almost concocted some excuse to get out of writing it this week. Isn’t it way too early to be thinking about this stuff now? It took me about an hour of procrastinating coming up with a new topic to realize that there is no such thing as too early. We’re predicting based off of no information, remember? We don’t even have the spoiled Kalemne like we did last time to tell us that there were going to be things called “Experience Counters” and also that Boros was going to be hot garbage because Boros is always hot garbage.

Seriously, why does Boros always suck? It doesn’t even make sense flavor-wise. Gruul is the knuckle-dragging, cave-painting, feces-throwing throwback group and their slogan is “Not Gruul? Die!” but when you ask them “Hey, what do you as a clan do?” they have a good answer. “Me am so glad ask. Gruul smash monster with big club and make die. Gruul am also big mana rampy big monster time. Gruul am best clan landfall and burny face and Gruul monster am has best power and toughness to casting cost ratio for big smashy smashy. Mostest trample. Bestest haste. Most spell punish with Ruric Thar and Vexing Shusher. Not Gruul? Eat a $^%” If you ask Boros the same question, the answer is something like “We at Boros like to either attack with soldiers or put equipment on our soldiers before we attack with them. Either way, really. Sometimes we attack with angels and soldiers.” Boros sucks. “Am carry tree branch for use as wand. Am important to keep it touch with deep Gruul Shamanic tradition pass down 100 generations. Why Boros no have Shamans?”

Barring any sweet spoilers (If someone else spoils it, it’s a spoiler. If you get it early and you’re asked to be the one to reveal it, it’s called a preview. Brainstorm Brewery got to preview Fevered Visions. It was a way better preview card than most of the other spoilers) we don’t know much about Commander 2016 except what we know that the last few weeks I’ve assumed we’re getting the ally-colored decks and we’re operating under that assumption. So yeah, Gruul are the stupid cavemen of the Magic world but they’re still richer and more interesting than Boros. But let’s spend the rest of our limited time together for the week talking about Azorius because I said we would do that last week and I made a really lazy pun for a title but if I change it I’ll have to come up with another lazy pun and just because it’s lazy doesn’t always mean it’s easy. I can’t be making up all kinds of pun titles all day willy nilly. I’m sticking with the pun which means I’m sticking with the title and that means sticking with the indicated subject matter.

Who’s Your Azorius and What Does He Do?

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That’s sort of legible, right? If not, here’s the wiki page I got it from. You may recognize it from being linked by me on a weekly basis.

Azorius has fliers, things with flash and like, birds and wizards and shit. It’s pretty cool, I guess.

Before I go into what I think is going to be in the decks, a brief aside. I’m up at like 6 AM EST, usually writing this article and that means it’s like noon or something in the Netherlands so Sander Van Der Zee is always tweeting at me while I’m writing. He mentioned that it was possible we’d see either a flicker theme or subtheme. I didn’t really think that was the case and I’ll get into why in the next paragraph. For now, though, let’s stick to what I was talking about.

You know what, no. Let’s start that next paragraph right now and address why I don’t think we’ll see too much flicker. First of all, they did it already. The Evasive Maneuvers precon featured Roon, Derevi and probably some terrible dragon (I don’t remember and I don’t care enough to google it. I spent over a minute trying to find the name “Evasive Maneuvers” because when I google “Derevi precon” the results that come up are other people calling it the Derevi precon because that’s how few shits anyone gives about the name of a precon) whose name I don’t remember because all I can remember is the name Arcades Sabboth but I know that’s not right. Arcades Sabboth was terrible. Nicol Bolas and four turds, that’s what that cycle was. Anyway, they already did a pretty heavy flicker theme there. There were great cards for it and Derevi has been terrorizing people since, although he got banned in French because he’s just that annoying and linear.

I think a subtheme is pretty unlikely because Azorius has unique attributes and it can stake a claim separate from what Bant was up to by emphasizing some of its core strengths like flying creatures and really stupid, clunky counterspells like Overrule. Some of the best creatures to flicker are green, although Brago is a fine commander in his own right. If there is a flicker theme or subtheme like Sander thinks, I expect Brago to be the third commander.

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I’m graphing the $14 foil here because the $1 non-foil is boned if it’s reprinted but the foil could have upside if people play it more. Brago is shown in the literature for Conspiracy 2 getting shanked in the neck, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in the set which means there is a slight reprint risk for the foils if you ask me. This is basically an all-downside scenario. If Brago isn’t in Conspiracy 2: foil hat boogaloo, the foil could have upside but only if Brago is in Commander 2016. I think that is an unlikely convergence of realities.

Sander could be right and there could be flicker in the deck, but I’m banking on Azorius doing something new which means we have to look at what it actually does.

Flash and Flying

Luckily I think there is a card in real need of a reprint which is decent in EDH, fits the theme of a deck like this and which would be a good candidate for the new price-point for reprints, which is quite a bit lower than the $47 or whatever Wurmcoil was at when it was reprinted in Commander 2014. They’re not doing one big, huge reprint like that, or at least they didn’t in Commander 2015, preferring a lot of $8ish cards. That being the case, there is still a card that needs more printings and is afforded the perfect opportunity by an Azorius deck in Commander 2016.

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Bliggedy BLAM. This seems like a slam dunk reprint. The price isn’t quite out  of control like it was during its $15 days, but then you need to try and remind yourself that this is a freaking uncommon. Are there even loose boxes of this set laying around anymore or is everyone playing the foil ‘Goyf lottery? I remember being upset I had to pay $4 for one of these at a GP. It’s an uncommon. But “It’s an uncommon” isn’t a good defense for Modern cards anymore. Inquisition of Kozilek is uncommon, too. Uncommon is the new chase mythic. Or something. Look, this is an $11 card and it would be a good inclusion in the precon if there is a flash/flying theme or subtheme. Azorius likes making them not able to do stuff and this stops stuff. The only issue I worry about is that it may seem slightly dead in a precon-on-precon matchup since they likely don’t have a ton of ways to search the deck so that may disqualify this. It feels a little “off” in that respect, but diminishing demand coupled with any amount of reprint risk makes me think you might want to look at offloading these if you have any, no matter how slight you think the reprint risk may be.

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This guy has mostly recovered from the Modern Masters reprinting and is at or around the right price point for inclusion in the deck. This is a staple in Brago decks if you believe that subtheme is possible, but this is also a decent flier that rounds up other fliers in its own right. This is a possibility whether or not flicker is a factor.

If they go deep on fliers and put a ton of birds and Kangee, Aerie Keeper in, we don’t have to look at lists very hard to see it won’t matter much. The new cards will matter financially, but there is basically nothing in the current Kangee builds of consequence. Like, the most expensive card outside the mana base is Battle Screech from Judgment which got popular during Legacy Masters drafts online and people wedged it in the cube (I guess?). Like, Adaptive Automaton is expensive and that’s basically it. I am not even graphing anything from this contingency, that’s how little it matters. I mean…

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This, maybe. Did you ever in a hundred years imagine this was more than like a buck? I get these in bulk rares all the time. If there is a flying theme or subtheme, this seems likely to be in there. It’s slow but it scales nicely with you slowly amassing a ton of flying dudes and just smish smashing their face with a flyin’ lion. Seriously, they’re the pride of the clouds because they’re a pride of lions. In the clouds. They’re elementals. Some elemental zephyr wanted to manifest itself as something fierce so it chose something that doesn’t even fly because that’s how lame most sky creatures are. There are more geese featured on Magic cards than Tarmogoyfs. Let that sink in.

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I don’t know at what point this stops being speculation and starts being a wishlist, but this is a great inclusion in a deck with fliers. It’s a little harsh, but it’s also pretty easy to deal with, even by precon deck standards. Not only that, there is precedent for reprinting Magi in the Commander decks with Magus of the Wheel, Arena, Vineyard and Coffers already seeing print in Commander precon sets. I’d like Magus of the Tabernacle but this will do fine. It’s cheaper than a real Moat although not as good. Oh well, this has a shot at being in the precon and at $6ish currently, players won’t mind the price relief. Solid inclusion, should they actually include it.

There are some fringe possibilities like a heavy artifact/enchantment theme but recent Daretti and Daxos decks sort of lean toward ruling that out. This deck likely carves out a unique niche and gives us some new toys that play well with old toys. There isn’t much money to be made an lost if it’s a deck where they reprint Hanna, Ship’s Navigator (which isn’t on the reserved list though Orim and Eladamri are) and there is some sort of theme there since they can’t reprint Replenish, etc. All the cards we really want to see like Venser the Soujourner are too clunky to print. Most likely, we’re getting a sweet deck with lots of flying creatures and some new cards that will be very good commanders to build around and include that theme. It’s not the only possible outcome but it seems like the most likely. We’ll know more when cards are spoiled but for now, consider getting out of the riskier stuff and think about what pairs with it. Once it’s ruled out as a reprint, you’ll be ready to buy while others are still discovering the synergy.

Next week we’ll talk about some other color combination. Probably Dimir, I guess. Do you think it won’t be a ninjas/unblockable thing? Do you think it will be mill? Got any other wacky ideas? Bounce them off of me and we’ll see what we come up with next week. Until then!