Monthly Archives: November 2016

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PROTRADER: PucaPicks for 11/17/16

Last week I left off after Magic 2015, and I’ve got some more to talk about! I’m diving for uncommons and commons that are in high demand and yet can be found languishing in old binders and bulk boxes. This week, we are going to make it all the way back to Return to Ravnica, being on the lookout for cards that people want a lot, not just the ones that are high value.

I want to reiterate: These are the cards that can be overlooked, or underestimated. You might think that these are too commonly printed to be worth the trouble, or no one wants these, but I’m here to help make picking through a binder or a bulk box that much more fun and profitable.

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James Chillcott, Jason Alt, Travis Allen, What We're Buying

MTGFinance: What We’re Buying & Selling This Week (Nov 16/16)

4 Comments


By James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)

One of the most common misconceptions about folks involved in MTGFinance is that we are constantly manipulating the market and feeding players misinformation to help fuel achievement of our personal goals.

Though we dole out a good deal of advice, most of you ultimately have very little insight into when and why our writing team actually puts our money where our collective mouths are pointing. To further illuminate our collective process, we’re running this occassional series breaking down what we’ve been buying and selling and why. These lists are meant to be both complete and transparent, leaving off only cards we bought for personal use and/or without hope of profit. We’ll also try to provide some insight into our thinking behind the specs, and whether we are aiming for a short (<1 month), mid (1-12 month), or long (1 year+) term flip. Here’s what we we’ve been up to this week:

Buying Period: Nov 1st – November 15th/2016

Note: All cards NM unless otherwise noted. All sell prices are net of fees unless noted.

James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)

BOUGHT

Leovold, Emissary of Trest

BOUGHT (Pucatrade)

SOLD

Leovold, Emissary of Trest is a popular EDH general that happened to get printed in a set (Conspracy: Take the Crown) that was sandwiched between other major releases and wasn’t opened much, despite the ongoing print run. Speculators took a run at the card about a month ago, and I managed to snag some local copies to go along for the ride. It’s already closing in on $25 so prospects for profit are solid.

Eternal Scourge won a Modern GP recently, as a two-of in the rogue Skred Red deck. The card is interesting as a recursive threat with some degree of open ended combo potential and the price was low enough for a foil rare that I was willing to throw it in my long shots box.

Eldrazi Displacer is a card that has found multiple homes in Standard and Modern, and has a bright future as a unique role player in casual, cube and EDH. There are still foils available around $10 but the inventory is VERY low for a recent rare and I think this easily tops $20 a bit down the road.  Spell Queller is a card with a similar profile that is powerful in both Standard and Modern, and it shouldn’t be too long until the sub-$15 foils dry up and the card sets up a new plateau over $25.

Kaladesh Masterpieces are not the most likely investments given how things have gone for the argubaly more popular BFZ Expeditions, but if a few of them are going to spike down the road, they are likely to be the ones that a) look great and b) are needed as 4-ofs in Modern. Mox Opal fits this profile well, and I can see these hitting $140-150 not too far down the road. If Affinity gets Arcbound Ravager in Aether Revolt Masterpieces, more of its players might get the idea in their heads to pimp out their decks.

The Puca acquisitions were more about outing points than chasing great deals, but all of them have a solid shot at some profit down the road.

On the sales side, I mostly moved out of specs that had tripped my profit targets and were liquid enough to support some of the buys I wanted to make.


Travis Allen

BOUGHT

Panharmonicon

Travis says:

“Panharmonicon is the EDHiest EDH card to ever EDH. Foils are still sitting right around the $10 mark, which they’ve been hanging out at since the Pro Tour excitement died down. This will slot into nearly every EDH deck from here until the end of time, and regardless of how many times Wizards prints it, it will rarely show up as foil. Pair this with the release of the Commander 2016 decks this week, which have done two things. They’ve invigorated excitement in a format that doesn’t really need help, which has been noticed anecdotally by players in my local group that don’t regularly play heading out to stores to pick up their sets. C16’s release also brings with it Deepglow Skate, the second-most EDH card to ever EDH, which conveniently works alongside Panharmonicon as well as one could possibly hope. Supply on foil Panharmonicons is higher now than it basically ever will be. Pick these up at $10 today and be glad when they’re $20 in a year or two.”


Jason Alt

BOUGHT

Umbral Mantle

Jason says:

“Kydele generates infinite mana with it, and it was already creeping up before that. Low supply, difficulty in reprinting it and a new impetus for using it should all culminate in a sharper increase in price.”


Cliff Daigle

BOUGHT

Cliff says:

“Planning to hold the TKS foils for 9-12 months, targeting a $30+ exit. Panharmonicon foils should top $20 in a year or two. Taigas went into my EDH decks.”

So there you have it. Now what were you guys buying and selling this week and why?

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.

Jason Alt

More Mistakes Were Made

3 Comments

Last week I cleverly hid the card I wanted to talk about from you so you would have to scroll down to see which card I thought was probably a mistake in the set. This week I promised to talk about the other card I think was a mistake. I could hide the pic and make you scroll, but that would be totally pointless. I already told you I think Kydele, Prophet of Kruphix on steroids was the other mistake last week. I can’t imagine telling you that information and then reminding you in this paragraph that I told you that information will leave any doubt in anyone’s mind that we’re going to talk about Kydele today. If I remember to do it, I’m going to make the thumbnail for the article a picture of Kydele, also. Why am I even doing any of this? Oh well, here goes.

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kydelechosenofkruphix

ARE YOU SURPRISED?!
ACT SURPRISED.

Yeah, we’re going to talk about this card because while this card may not have been a huge mistake, it certainly seems pushed in terms of power level just because the ability to tap for hella mana is a real thing and there is already an infrastructure set up to take advantage of this card that will only get better. Do you add one or two other colors? Do you pair Kydele with Thraisos? That would certainly be potent. Access to other colors would be cool but so would channeling that dirty colorless mana into vomiting all of your land onto the battlefield. I think Kydele has a lot to offer and we’ll be using EDHREC again to see what people are doing and what they will be doing. We’ll have a bit of time to pick these cards up so let’s dig in now to make sure we’re ahead of the curve, shall we? How do we win games with Kydele?

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This is the most obvious card. I’ve been bullish on gods for a minute, and this was in my top 5 (Purphoros, Xenagos, Heliod and Erebos were the others I liked, for the record). This serves as a mana battery for your mana generated by Kydele, it’s in your colors, it doesn’t die to basically any removal and it lets you draw with the same reckless abandon you generate mana with, which is good since you need to draw a lot of cards at once to make Kydele worth it and that means you’ll draw them faster than you can use them. This card and Kydele were designed to work hand-in-hand so there’s no reason why Kydele getting built won’t result in more Kruphixes being sold. This card has already doubled in price since its low point at rotation and is one of the most popular EDH commanders out of the cycle of gods, not to mention a popular addition in the 99 of other decks. You could build Kruphix as a deck and jam Kydele in it or vice versa. Any card that’s a good general as well as being a good addition to the 99 of other decks have additional upside that other cards don’t have. This card does literally everything you want to have done in a Kydele deck and you’re insane if you don’t play it. Is $6 a good entry point for this card? That depends – how likely is a reprint? I don’t think it’s all that likely, personally, and I’m pretty bullish. I’m less bullish at $6 than I was at $3, but that’s OK because this card has upside moving forward and upside means $6 is probably OK. Worst case scenario this doesn’t go beyond like $8 and you end up having to trade it for a pile of specs. Best case scenario, Kruphix goes to like $12 and you’re happy if you bought in at $6 or ecstatic that you bought in at $3. This is a must-have card for this deck.

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Oh, hai infinite manas. How are joo? I’m preddy gud, I’m jus builden deck. You go in deck? Gud, you do that.

Look at this graph. None of this very healthy-looking growth was predicated on the face that they were going to print another creature that could potentially tap for more than 3 mana. Bloom Tender did that already, but that was pretty difficult to put together. Compare that to the “Did you manage to play a Brainstorm this turn?” checklist you get with Kydele. Play a Brainstorm, get infinite mana with Umbral Mantle. You can’t beat that with a Thornbite Staff. No, seriously, you can’t. Umbral Mantle is way better with Kydele than Thornbite Staff is, unless you have infinite mana already, then I guess it’s an OK way to kill every creature and player at the table.

So if none of this growth is predicated on Kydele, does that mean this card was going to grow steadily anyway? Pretty much. Untap symbol stuff is reprint-resistant and Shadowmoor has a ton of expensive uncommons because Wizards didn’t anticipate the player base would grow as much as it did when they introduced Planeswalkers. They printed a Future Sight amount of cards for a Lorwyn amount of demand and players at the cards up. Cursecatcher is $10 for crying out loud. Mantle is lowish supply relative to cards that came out even a year later, it was already growing because it did degenerate things and the supply is relatively low on TCG Player. $3 may feel like an awkward entry point for an uncommon, but I assure you, it’s a good buy. It almost has to be. Without Kydele, this card was headed to $6 or $7 so with Kydele, expect it to get there much earlier. Earlier means we can cash out earlier and use the profit for other specs. Or put the profit up your nose, I’m not the police. You want to know what’s even harder to reprint than this card?

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The foil is basically sold out everywhere. The cheapest I see them is like $8 and there are very few of them. You have a few good opportunities, here. This card makes infinite mana and is part of a two card combo, the other half of which starts the game in your command zone. There are myriad ways to use the mana and we don’t need to go into mana sinks too much since there are so many cheap ones that the expensive ones aren’t a necessity unless they’re very good and hard to deal with (more on that later) but the ways to generate a lot of mana are harder to come by and deserve a look. Mantle is a slam dunk, here. Kydele is giving us a lot of obvious cards, but that’s only because Kydele shouldn’t have been printed.

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For whatever reason, this card isn’t as popular as Umbral Mantle when you’re almost always using it the exact same way. Is Umbral Mantle that much better because we want to make it huge and attack with it? Probably not, meaning Sword here is another copy of Mantle. That’s good because this one is under a buck, and that’s not entirely because of its recent Commander set printing. This card just got overlooked. If it becomes less overlooked later, there is some upside. I’m obviously less encouraged by its price trend than I am by that of Umbral Mantle, but the buy-in is lower and the foils didn’t get reprinted.

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The spread has been relatively low here and maybe this was the minor boot in the ass the foil price needed to get moving. Supply is lowish on these and this could be just the impetus the card was waiting for. It plateaued because there was no real reason to play this but now I’d argue there is. Because, you know, infinite mana.

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A strategy I have developed for EDH players who aren’t really interested in finance but wish the format were more affordable is to buy double orders of everything. You want a Perolous Forays? Buy two so you don’t have to buy later when the price might be higher and you have to repay shipping. Like the idea of using Debtors’ Knell? Buy two and keep one to trade or sell later. If you double your order you make out like a bandit if the card goes up and you’re picking specs based on your own needs which means at least someone has confidence in the card. It’s a good way to realize instead of buying one copy of Helix Pinnacle for $3 and not wanting to take it out of the deck when it hits $8, you have a free Helix Pinnacle and $10 profit. I didn’t develop this strategy for my own use years ago when I bought my wife her Pinnacle for her Omnath deck. I don’t like having to pay $8 for these, now, but I also know it will be more later. Pinnacle is tricky to reprint and is a casual player’s wet dream. The foil has a 3x multiplier and that’s even tougher to reprint but since Pinnacle seems a little more casual, I feel like you’ll have a tough time selling a $24 foil to a guy with a $24 deck and no sleeves. Obviously there is demand, and a 3x multiplier means the price of the foil will diverge a little as time goes on, a lot if there is new demand for the card, and a lot a lot if the non-foil is in a Commander set and the foil is not. Buy at your own risk, obviously, but Pinnacle is dope and it’s a great way to win the game just by generating a ton of mana.

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This has so much combo potential that it’s going to grow eventually. This is far from an EDH staple. In fact, this is an interesting card to look at on EDHREC and see if there is a way we can see how people are using it.

Here is the link to click. Open it in a new tab so you don’t close this article. Look at me, telling you how to click links. There is a lot of information on this page and a lot more we can glean just by knowing a little bit about this format.

First and foremost, Narset and Mizzix and Niv-Mizzet are the main decks using this card. Jhoira and Kruphix use it, also. Those seem like two classifications of deck – Jhoira and Narset are cheating this card onto the stack and Mizzix is reducing the cost, meaning these decks aren’t trying to pay 11 mana for this spell. Niv-Mizzet is casting it for its mana cost as is Kruphix. Those decks don’t care about paying the full cost because it’s part of a combo – Niv-Mizzet shotgun blasts opponents in the face with each card drawn and Kruphix find the combo pieces it needs or wins with Lab Maniac. We figured out several ways to win with this card we might or might not have known before literally by looking at the list of which commanders run this card the most.

Scrolling down, we see that 49% of the decks that run Enter the Infinite also run Laboratory Maniac. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Enter the Infinite will increase in price just because Laboratory Maniac will, but we have established a correlation between the two cards and their prices likely will at least be correlated in increasing. Even if we don’t glean anything else from this page, we got a lot of information in under a minute. I’d recommend you check the page for a card if you see it start to increase in price and don’t know why from non-EDH formats. Chances are the answer will stare you in the face.

Enter the Infinite also has a 5x foil multiplier which means people are aware this card has potential. Being a mythic from a terrible set like Gatecrash also helps put upward pressure on the price. I would grab these in every trade I can. What I like to do is have a list of $1 cards to target when the trade is off by $1. Sometimes I grab the same one in every binder I see. If they have 4 copies of the card I will pull it out and try to get it in the trade but if they have 1 copy, I’ll try and grab it if the trade is off by $1. You can make a stack of these for basically nothing since people value this at “throw-in” and when this is $5 in a year and everyone is surprised, you have 20 or 30 of them that you got basically for free.

Anyway, the Kydele EDHREC page has a full accounting of the cards people are using most often alongside Kydele. Be advised – it skews heavily toward cards in the same precon deck, and that’s to be expected. Look for the unexpected cards. Anything that isn’t being played in a ton of decks but is very good is an opportunity to get it before anyone else notices.

I don’t know what we’ll talk about next week, but I’m pretty sure we’ll all make a ton of money. Until then!

City of Traders

The Watchtower: 11/14/16

6 Comments

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy. And watch this YouTube channel to keep up to date with Cartel Aristocrats, a fun and informative webcast with several other finance personalities!

Razorverge Thicket

Price Last Week: $8
Price Today: $8
Possible Price: $15

Tom Ross, fan favorite, gave viewers yet another deck to be excited about this weekend. In a departure from the typical GR build, he showed up to to the SCG Modern Open with GW Tron. It looks much like the GR build, with only a few small tweaks. He’s ditched the Pyroclasms for Path to Exiles, likely as a response to the more singular and/or recursive threats of Shadow Zoo, Infect, and Dredge. Two World Breakers snuck in alongside two Ugin, the Spirit Dragons, and other than that, most every other card in the main deck is familiar.

His largest departure from the standard Tron world is that, because of the color shift, he eschews Grove of the Burnwillows for Razorverge Thicket instead. Razorverge Thicket has quietly been climbing in price and popularity in Modern for quite some time, as Melira, white Tax builds, and various Collected Company decks all employ it, as well as a smattering of other strategies. Grove of the Burnwillows was an expensive and prohibitive card in Tron, and switching it for Razorverge Thicket is going to open the door for more players to get in. Not only will players looking to pick up this build of Tron need copies, it also validates selection of the land in other strategies when players wonder what GW land they should be using.

Razorverge is in the $7 to $8 range today. We shouldn’t expect too dramatic an upward shift in price just because of Tom’s success, but this certainly provides a boost to a card that’s got the exact same supply profile as Blackcleave Cliffs, which hangs around $20 today. Razorverge isn’t played quite that much yet, but will it be within the next six months?

 

Cryptic Command

Price Last Week: $20
Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $35

Another surprise deck to show up in the top 32 was Madcap Moon, placing 25th in the hands of Robert Graves. This is essentially a UR control deck that incorporates the Madcap Experiment/Platinum Emperion combo, which for the uninitiated, is a four mana sorcery which, if it resolves, “tutors” and puts a Platinum Emperion into play, handily protecting the controller’s life total. It’s far from a hard lock against the format, but strategies like Dredge are going to find it maddeningly difficult to beat in most situations.

Madcap Moon was running two Cryptic Commands, and it wasn’t the only deck in the room to do so. Kyle Boggemes’ Jeskai Flash was also packing a pair. Cryptic used to be a major component of Modern, falling by the wayside in recent years as Infect gained popularity, and has been further suppressed by other ultra-fast builds such as Shadow Zoo and Dredge. If Wizards ever pulls the handbrake on these strategies, say by removing Become Immense from the format, blue control strategies will be poised to come roaring back. Ancestral Visions has already started to crack into Modern, and slowing down some of the fastest decks in the format would make a lot of room for blue control strategies, of which Cryptic would be a key component. Add to this the printing of Torrential Gearhulk, who does a Snapcaster Mage impression in some cases better than the original, and you can see that the seeds are sown.

Prices on Cryptic have fallen hard over the last several years, with a second reprinting in Modern Masters 2015 dragging the card all the way to $20. This is a historical low for the card, and with any renewed interest in blue control in Modern, expect prices to climb convincingly towards $30 or more.

 

Collective Brutality


Price Last Week: $5
Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $12

Razorverge Thicket was the one standout card in a re-imagined familiar archetype. Cryptic Command is a once-powerful tool that is beginning to peek its head out in blue control strategies. Collective Brutality is neither of these. Instead, it’s a cog in any number of machines. Dredge. Grixis Delver. Jund. Lantern Control. Mardu. Kiki-Chord. And that’s just what showed up in the top 64 this weekend. Whether you’re aggro or combo or control or somewhere in between, chances are being brutal works for you.

Collective Brutality’s appeal comes from the fact that its escalate cost doesn’t cost mana, but rather, asks only that you discard cards. This is a harsh penalty for some strategies, but for others, it’s at least manageable, and in others, pure upside. I wonder how often Dredge gives their own creature -2/-2 just so that they can discard another Golgari Grave-Troll. Given how popular this is with so many disparate strategies, it’s unlikely this won’t be useful in Modern for a long time to come. People are always going to want to shovel cards into their graveyard, and Collective Brutality is always going to be happy to let them.

Brutality’s price jumped from sub-$2 back in late August to over $4, and has steadily ticked up to $5 or $6 today. It was printed in Eldritch Moon, a small set followed rapidly by both Conspiracy: Take the Crown and Eternal Masters that lacked the Masterpiece Series that was found in both neighboring blocks. These factors position EMN singles to reach higher prices than either Battle for Zendikar block or Kaladesh block. We saw Kolaghan’s Command hit $15 within a few months of release, primarily on the back of its Modern play, and it’s not unreasonable to think that Collective Brutality could manage the same thing. Make sure you collect your set before prices become brutal.

 

Ajani Vengeant


Price Last Week: $11
Price Today: $11
Possible Price: $20

We saw Ajani show up in exactly one top 32 list this weekend; Sun and Moon, which takes its name from playing Elspeth, Sun’s Champion and Blood Moon in the same deck. (Yes it’s a bad name, not because it doesn’t tell you what the deck does, but because it’s named after a card that isn’t in the deck.) It’s a RW control deck that also uses a full set of Chalice of the Void in the main to eventually lock the opponent out of playing much Magic, and Ajani plays a bridge role in stymieing mana, zapping threats, and gaining life while working towards a game-ending ultimate.  

He showed up last weekend too in Ari Lax’s Restore Balance list. We didn’t see any of that this weekend, but we know it’s on the radar, and we know it played several Ajani, much to the same effect as Sun and Moon. That particular strategy likes its planeswalkers, as they persist through balances.

Ajani Vengeant has three printings to his name; his original release in Shards of Alara, a Duel Deck release now over five years old, and the prerelease promo that was given to everyone that showed up to a Shards of Alara prerelease event. Relative to most popular Modern mythics, such as Liliana of the Veil, this is a small volume of product.

Prices on Ajani haven’t moved yet, and we shouldn’t expect that to happen rapidly. With Modern Masters 2017 on the horizon, it’s possible his price will freeze in place as people wait to see if he shows up in the “returning planeswalker that isn’t the one people are getting excited about” slot. Still, he’s seeing more play today than he was a few months ago, and with Nahiri, the Harbiner pulling hard for RW to appear as a color combo in the format in a way it didn’t before, Ajani may be poised to start sneaking north to $20. Keep an eye on the best planeswalker people forgot about.