Last week I tried something radical and new and talked about cards I liked out of the new set and no one fired me. It turns out my guess is as good as yours when it comes to cards I’m not sure about and you’re not paying me to hear guesses that are as good as yours. Actually, you’re not paying me at all. This website is paying me. And it’s not like you’re directly paying the website because this is free to read. So you’re not even paying me indirectly. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not accountable to you in any way. I’m FREE! I can cast of these shackles and live totally uninhibited! Rules are for losers! Clothes are for slaves! ANARCHY!

You read this column because, hopefully, I think of things you don’t think of, either because I spent more time thinking about it and you used that time better by having a social life or working an actual job or because I have insight into a format you aren’t interested in but still want to profit from. Insight comes to us in a lot of different ways, including input from readers, input from people who have tested cards I haven’t had a chance to test and from my own testing. Accordingly, playing some cards has changed my opinion on some of the stuff in this set and my updated opinion comes just in time for the cards to be available for purchase after the prerelease and the prices to have been updated accordingly. I like some of what I like, don’t like some of what I liked, like some of what I didn’t like and don’t like some of what I didn’t like. Those are the only positions I can think of. I should be able to find a few examples of each of those.

Cards I used to like but now extra like

I thought I liked this card a lot and I was surprised to learn I like this a lot more after playing with it. This looks weak for Limited at first but it’s actually just nuts. This puts you behind curve, I guess, but if you can’t play behind curve to ensure you never run out of gas or draw too many land then I guess your deck is too good to ever lose. This overperformed in Limited but it’s also just stupid in EDH. You have to play it in decks with green which is fine because having the Scry in a green deck means you can improve your draws. Besides, green decks already have a ton of extra mana so you’re just going to draw a ton of cards with this. Green is already the best color in EDH and now it got a card that honestly white needed a lot more. The rich get richer with this card which is fine with me. At $1, this is going to be a cheap pickup in the short term but in the longer term, this is a $5ish card unless it’s reprinted. It could even grow from there. I realize it could take a minute because this is a non-mythic not only from the post-mythic era but in a new era of bulk rares I’m defining as the post-Masterpiece era. Masterpieces make boxes attractive and that means bulk rares are going to be crushed into powder and will take longer to materialize. If you’re still too impatient, consider the foils, which are currently about $7. This strikes me as a $20 foil if this card ends up in a lot of decks, which it might do. This might not end up a staple for the format, but there are plenty of decks that could use the draw-smoothing this gives you. You’re going to draw a lot more quality for your green mana with the scry, also. $7 foils seem pretty good to me, and the non-foil copies seem like they have upside. I’d trade any card that’s $5 because of Standard that will be $0.10 a week after rotation for a pile of these. I would use this to shore up trades off by $1. I would go after foils of this, but you might have some time (watch to see if this takes off; it shouldn’t but it could). Playing with this, I see this is better than I thought, and I liked this card quite a bit.

People are calling for this to be banned already, which is funny. What’s also funny was the EDH rules committee’s announcement concerning the ban list, specifically –

Some folks have talked about a preemptive banning of Paradox Engine, but we won’t do that. Every card – even Griselbrand – gets to be legal for at least a little while, as we prefer to look at actual play in casual settings over theory. I’ll note that the last time we saw this much speculation about a preemptive ban was Shaman of Forgotten Ways, and that card turned out just fine.

Paraphrased, that’s “A lot of you are very vocal which is great, but you’re also dipshits, which is not great, so why not leave the bannings to us because as much as you insist you know better than us because your little kitchen table group unbanned black Braids and banned Cultivate, we actually know what we’re doing and most of your suggestions are terrible.

I don’t think Paradox Engine is going to be banned. It has more upside than Prophet of Kruphix but takes a lot of work to get going and if you don’t do anything, it doesn’t do anything, unlike Prophet. It doesn’t give your spells flash or untap your lands, two things that Prophet did that made it so degenerate. Is Paradox Engine the best EDH card in the set? I think it might be. Is it bannable? Doubt it. Scoop these up with confidence, but with the price going down by $1 since the weekend, I would wait a minute. I don’t see Standard spiking this like it did with Panharmonicon, so this could get very affordable, even as a mythic, and I want to pick them up, then. I would say peak supply is when this will be the most affordable, so as long as someone doesn’t put up results with this in the mean time, I say we wait. At $7 and $24 for the foil, this has clearly been identified as an EDH card. Considering Panharmonicon is an $11 foil, I might wait on foil Engine, too. I know that Engine is a mythic, but I also know it used to be more than $11 so I’d say let’s wait on engine. Mythic or not, I think the price will get lower.

Cards I used to like but now don’t like so much

I used to like this card. Then I played with it.

I thought I would be OK with it only triggering once, only on your turn, and only if you made something happen. I was not OK with those things. I didn’t think this would be exactly Lurking Predators, but this isn’t Lurking Predators the same way Call of the Wild isn’t Survival of the Fittest. Oh, and one of my readers told me this is going to be jammed in one of the Planeswalker decks, further limiting its potential. I liked the look of this card, but similar to how Bestiary plays much better in practice, this so much worse. I said to trade for these and sit on them so hopefully no one bought in for cash, but I have really soured on this card. Whiffing on it happens, failing to trigger it happens and it doesn’t punish your opponents for playing a ton of spells. Free permanents off the top is great, but this underwhelmed me.

I was in Walmart looking for Atraxa decks (This used to be more of a thing – I found plenty of Mind Seize decks in Walmart weeks after the sets came out) and noticed that the promo in those store repacks that have a draft set plus a foil rare was Thalia’s Lancers. I don’t know if this is going to impact the set foil, prerelease foil or non-foil the most, but I do know that a very good card that can fetch things like Paradox Engine has been dealt another blow. Sometimes Wizards likes the same cards I do and makes them promos. I expect a promo Leovold, just in time for that price to go down anyway, but I didn’t expect this. It makes me like it a lot less as a spec moving forward, unless you snag the promos for cheap. They’re like $10 a playset on eBay right now, though, so I’m not sure how much cheaper we expect them to get or how high they can go after such a low vote of confidence from the market. This feels bad considering how hyped I was for this card, but let’s not pretend circumstances don’t change later. This kind of thing happens, and if you hadn’t noticed we’re getting additional supply we didn’t anticipate, I’m glad I pointed it out.

Cards I didn’t like but now maybe not like less so

I feel like I may have underestimated this card. Last week, I feel like I made a good case for even the foil versions of the unexciting, mono-colored commanders from Kaladesh still not moving much and me not being excited a ton. This isn’t quite Rashmi, but it’s also not quite whatever that mono green thing that makes tokens that’s so durdly I keep having to look its name up but don’t even care enough to do that this time, you know the one I mean. The old broad. Anyway, I don’t know why I glossed over this card because this is basically a Kressh, the Bloodbraided that can go in Golgari decks and in Golgari decks, this is dumb. You can trigger this a ton with Grave Pact effects and your kill spells. You can play my favorite C16 card, Curtain’s Call, and get two counters on this. This card is dumb and it’s $1. Yahenni still isn’t my favorite Aetherborn (Gonti 4 LYFE) but this is still a fine card and I liked it a lot less initially than I do now. I think this being a $12 foil that I whiffed on tells me I probably misjudged it by evaluating it in the context of what the Kaladesh mono-colored commanders did. I don’t think this will be a $12 foil when it’s been enough time since the prerelease weekend as it has been now since Kaladesh (does that sentence make sense to you? It does to me) but people are clearly somewhat interested. This isn’t Baral or Sram but I liked those and was wrong about this one. I’d keep an eye on it, and $12 for the foil might look appealing in a year or two when this is $20 in foil. That’s a maybe, not a definitely, but I think these can go down then go back up and probably higher than they are now, so try to snag foils near the floor.

I don’t know what this will do financially, but there are a ton of ways to untap artifacts, especially artifact creatures, and I think this is super. Is this Archivist or Azami? It’s hard to tell, but I think being able to draw a ton of cards when you have Clock of Omens, Unwinding Clock, Paradox Engine, etc. and still draw when you have Intruder Alarm and Mind Over Matter if you pick the right artifact is underrated and while this might end up a bulk rare, this did a lot of work at the prerelease. I expected it to do work at the prerelease, but I didn’t expect to look at it for EDH. I’m not saying buy these, but I am saying this overperformed and it’s worth looking at. Only 8 decks are running this on EDHREC, 5 of them Breya, but considering 130 decks are running Quicksmith Genius (although looting for no mana without tapping the creature is pretty good in Daretti), this could get some love, soon.

Cards I no liked and now I still no like

I agree with everything people who like this card are saying about this card. It’s fetchable with Trinket Mage, it’s stupid in Vintage, it was great at the prerelease with Scrap Trawler. I get it. I just don’t know if the limited amount of play it’s liable to get in EDH due to it not interacting with Mikaeus, the Unhallowed the way Triskelion does. This does have other interactions, though. I’m agnostic to what Vintage could do to the price of foils. I could speculate on that but I have no confidence in the conclusion I’d come to. I don’t know whether Modern wants this, I’m suspecting not. I feel the same way about Standard. A lot of people are pumped about this card and I am not among them. I understand everything people are saying in support of this card, but I don’t find any of it super compelling, with respect to non-foil copies, anyway. I’m prepared to be wrong, here and if you think I am, the foils are like $2 more than the non-foils. I think $6 is really high for this unless Standard does something with it.

There you have it. I think there are some actionables here, especially if you like Walking Ballista and think that a 1.2x multiplier is probably not correct, meaning either the non-foil or the foil price will correct soon. I recommend playing with cards before you pay cash on anything, or talk to people who have played with them. Sometimes cards work out much differently in practice than they do in theory and your opinion on cards my change quite a bit. I’m disappointed not to like Aid From the Cowl anymore, but I’d be more disappointed if I spent $200 on a bunch of copies. I’m building a few decks out of new cards from Conspiracy, C16 and Kaladesh block and the more testing I do, the more I’ll discover that might not be obvious at first glance over the set. Remember, this is EDH finance and we have a LONG time to get ahead of price increases. Until next time!