This gif is pretty tight, but all he says is “scraps” and it looks like he’s yawning, but super aggressively in that’s dude’s face. Incidentally, did you know that dude was Peter Billingsley? He should have warned Obadiah that he was going to shoot his eye out. AMIRITE?

Yes, of course I’m right. I don’t mean to brag, but lately I have been right more than usual, but always accidentally. I’ll take it. This week I was accidentally right when I mentioned a lot of 3 CMC artifacts that would be sweet in a world with Trophy Mage around and, sure enough, they went and made a bunch of them into Masterpieces. Ensnaring Bridge, Oblivion Stone, Vedalken Shackles, Sword of Body and Mind, Sword of War and Peace, Staff of Domination and Extraplanar Lens are all getting the Masterpiece treatment. Did you notice that Extraplanar Lens is looking into a different plane where you can clearly see something that looks like Nicol Bolas’ horn? Of course you didn’t notice that, you’re not a nerd. You like finance. So let’s talk about it.

The topic of 3 CMC artifacts was a good one and we will continue that spirit with a discussion about what people are going to use Scrap Trawler for.

Is it possible that I am wrong and no one will use Scrap Trawler for anything? It’s distinctly possible. I am sure even if I end up being super 100% right and Trawler ends up $25 and has to be emergency jammed in a precon or something, someone is still going to argue with me in the comments section of this article. However, I am learning to trust my gut a bit more than I used to.

I think Scrap Trawler could be the next Eldrazi Displacer, use in EDH as well as Standard and Modern as a possibility. I think it can effect as many prices due to how powerful it is and I think I am going to go with my gut rather than let a low price throw me like I did with Copter. They say the Wisdom of the Crowd is a thing, but this crowd made Pain Seer a $12 preorder (some guy on QS even said he was going to sell his Bobs when they spoiled Pain Seer) so I’m going to take whatever the crowd says with a grain of salt. NCIS is the #1 drama on Television – the crowd lost its “swaying my opinion” privileges. I think Trawler has a lot of potential for combotastic artifact stuff and I think there is real money to be made. Let’s start with a big one.

This is kind of a weird one. A lot of the online retailers are sold out but TCG Player has these NM for like $5. A lot of the Mirrodin ones are disappearing in better conditions. This is also a recent Masterpiece at around $30 and that is going to be pretty tempting when the $18 Mirrodin foils sell out because the non-foil is over $10 (The current price of 10th Edition foils, hint hint.) This is a card that Wizards is clearly hinting at with the Masterpiece printing given its current EDHREC analytics. However, as many appearances in Breya decks as in Sharuum decks where it’s an important combo piece means demand has doubled. This pairs with Sharuum for shenaningans in any artifact deck that has access to blue and black, really, and it’s a limited Metamorph in a pinch, which is fine when they have Sword of Feast and Famine or something nasty like that. The combo with Sharuum is of the greatest immediate import since I think Trawler makes that combo way less annoying and way more lethal. I am thinking sac Perilous Myr to KCI or Ashnod’s Altar to blast them, get Myr back with Trawler when your play Sculpting Steel as a copy of Sharuum, bin it due to the legend rule and use Sharuum’s ability to keep the combo going. Instead of infinitely replaying Steel with Sharuum’s ability, you get back a few different artifacts and use the mana from Altar or KCI to get a few smaller loops going. If you don’t have Bitter Ordeal, this helps you win another way. Also, more people will play the old combo regardless of Trawler because they are building the combo into a brand new Breya deck. Sculpting Steel seems like a killer target and I think all of the prices could move soon since supply is taking a hit.

While we’re on the subject, Metamorph is selling out and is pretty cheap for as ubiquitous as it is in EDH and how much play in Modern it sees on top of that. This is a card that is in the same Sharuum combo as Sculpting Steel but which has a little additional flexibility. I like this a lot at its current price, frankly. This has demonstrated that it can be a $20 card and while we’re not going to see the same demand we used to see, we can see a few years between printing and present. Interestingly enough, the promo has made the foil of this card less than 2x the non-foil. That is fine for now, but as the price of the non-foil increases, that will not be right anymore. Not just that, but as the card gets enough play to justify a higher price, it will justify more than a 2x multiplier. This gives foils that I think are pretty cheap right now a lot more upside than the non-foils. I like this card quite a bit, if only for future EDH use.

I warned about this card before and now it looks like it’s basically gone under $9. If you’re sleeping on this card, don’t. $9 is not the ceiling by any stretch. This is getting a lot of hype and demand lately and supply is low-ish. I don’t know that I like paying $9 for this to spec on, but if you want this to play with, it’s certainly a bad idea to wait. This could get a reprint in Commander 2017, but with that list probably already close to being finalized, it’s unclear whether that’s possible. What IS clear is that a way to sac artifacts and trigger Trawler is going to be important for combo decks going forward. Ashnod’s Altar is another card with upside, though I’m not sure how much due to the high supply of that card.

This is a card that I feel like is a potential Standard all-star once we get the cards from Aether Revolt incorporated into Standard. This will always be a card that casual players like and it’s a real sac engine that gives you a big body. If it dies, you can get just about anything back with Trawler out. Colossal cards are good growth cards long-term and this is pretty good with Trawler in a lot of different potential decks in several formats. This is a bulk spec and I rarely do those and with the card being super new, it will take an awful lot (more than EDH can muster, surely) to make the price move. However, whenever a card has cross-format applicability and is guaranteed to do something eventually, it’s worth pointing out.

I kind of figured this and Panharmonicon would both be bulk rares by now but Panharmonicon had different plans. It’s hard to know when Standard players will look at an obvious EDH card and decide to jam it in Standard. What isn’t hard to know is that Panharmonicon has the potential to go one of two ways in the future while Aetherflux Reservoir is going nowhere but up. This is basically bulk at this point and I like bulk rares that I know will be real money in a while. This is this set’s Dictate of Erebos. A Dictate of Erebos doesn’t come along every single set, but when they do, it’s great. You know that EDH will primarily be responsible for driving its price which gives us time to fill a box of them. Fill a box full of these. Get a bulk rare from Kaladesh or a recent set? Trade it for an Aetherflux Reservoir. Tell people at your LGS that you’ll pay $0.50 for every copy they bring you. Screw it, pay $1 if you can’t get them for $0.50. It’s bulk so the foil at $5 means there is upside there, also. a 5x multiplier indicates EDH players are very aware of this card. Oloro decks run this as well as Ayli decks because the life you gain can be from other sources – all Reservoir cares about is whether you have enough life to pay to dome some fool. You have time to get to a few hundred copies of this before it goes up in price, so start now. For reference, here is what Dictate of Erebos did.

I never paid $1 on this which is good because the highest buylist price right now is $1.50, but even if we use buylist as an out, we turned bulk rares that we can buylist for a dime into a card worth 15 times that. I got a lot of dictates by trading another bulk rare straight up which means I got 15x on the trade. Not bad at all. I paid cash on a lot of the rest of them and the card isn’t done going up. I sold enough copies to buylists for between $1.50 and $2 that all of the copies I have left were free and I’m just watching the price go up. I feel like it’s fairly obvious that Aetherflux will do the same thing and we have a chance to pick these up for nothing right now. We’d be crazy not to.

While we’re on the subject of cards that remind me of Dictate of Erebos without caring if they interact with Trawler, which was ostensibly the card we were writing about this week, I offer this. This might not be this set’s Dictate of Erebos, but that just makes it this set’s Thespian’s Stage. I like this as a bulk rare in trades, too. There are so many cards that are worth like $3 because of standard that will be a dime in a year. Trading off a Scrapheap Scrounger for a pile of Reservoirs and Fairs seems like they should rename the card Inventor’s Unfair. Get it? Because the trade is lopsided.

It’s possible we entirely missed the boat on this card. I hope not because it quietly doubled this year and no one seemed to notice. I think with the focus on artifacts we’ll get from Breya and this card getting farther from the time it was printed, there is still money to be made on this. $2 is certainly not too high of a buy-in price for a card with a lot of upside. Trawler is going to get us a ton of cards to play which lets us keep getting Mirrorworks triggers. We can sac the tokens to KCI to pay for the Mirrorworks trigger when we replay something which lets us go off with Bitter Ordeal or Blasting Station or Aetherflux Reservoir or whatever. Mirrorworks is a card someone on Twitter (I don’t remember who, sorry, nerd.) and I had run across on EDHREC and sort of dismissed. I think dismissing it was a mistake. Even though it has recently doubled, I think this could interact well with Trawler and other artifact cards and I think this is worth a look, especially since Mirrodin Besieged was a weird set that no one is super excited to bust boxes of now.

Speaking of “We may have missed the boat” I feel like if you mention a card two different times in an article, you should at least show the graph of its price. I wish I had cared about EDH finance 3 years ago. I bought one of these for a few bucks to go in my Sharuum deck. One. Oh well, I bought a playset of Goyf for $3 each years ago and hindsight is 20/20. We all have made the mistake of buying exactly as many copies of a card as we need. Hopefully we’ve learned a thing or two since then. That does it for me this week. I like Trawler and people who think about these things will continue to come up with combos that involve Scrap Trawler. It’s probably too durdly for Modern, but EDH and Standard could use it and I think we have the potential to see some cards go up. Until next week! Year. Until next year.