One of the things that is pretty amazing about Wizards is their knack for keeping us going on the hype train. They have a dozen sets/releases/specials per year (Is it more? Less? I’m not sure anymore!) but we almost never have a chance to feel bored. Ready to take some time off and have the holidays? Here’s the mechanics from Ravnica Allegiance, just to wet your whistle and get you thinking.
Let me tell you, there’s some speculating to be done here.
I’m going to look at each of the guilds and their mechanics, and identify some picks that I think will have potential, given what we know. I’ve pulled some interesting targets out for Standard and for EDH as well.
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for five years now, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP (next up: Oakland in January!) and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
If you’re like me and you’re always looking for an excuse to reference Duran Duran tunes from the 80s, you’ll love the title to this article. If you’re like also me and love Magic cards that are new and are about to evolve their own brand new archetypes, or at least make people think they’re going to. I can delve more into the Simic later because I think it will matter but I think there’s a ton of hype surrounding a certain card that was spoiled today (Monday) and I think whether or not the deck amounts to anything, there is a ton of hype. The card, of course, not just because it’s the only commander spoiled so far this week but also because it’s the only Azorius card spoiled so far, is this bundle of joy.
Blue Gaddock Teeg, as she likes to be called, is about to make life pretty miserable. If you just leave her on the battlefield, she’s going to shut down Etali, Intet, Narset, Maelstrom Wanderer and a host of decks that use mana rocks to ramp. If you play with Armageddon and other white Land Destruction, you’ll make it so they can’t recover quickly enough to catch you. If you go even farther, well, you can make sure you’re the only one who plays a game of Magic and IO think that’s pretty nifty. Let’s take a look at all the ways we can do that.
Building This Weird Deck
People are brainstorming a ton right now, and none of what they’re discussing is at all kind. I don’t know how inclined everyone is to build such an antisocial deck and whether they’ll keep playing it for long, so let’s prepare to buy and sell into hype rather than hoping for long-term prospects.
As I said earlier, left to its own devices, Lavinia isn’t really an EDH card that much.
It’s a good point he’s making – a lot of the times, just Lavinia is like a tenth as effective as Gaddock Teeg. In order for Lavinia to be worth it, you’re going to need to really steer into building around her and you’re going to do some things that prevent other people from playing Magic. Add to that the fact that these sort of combos were already doable before Lavinia was printed, and I think the window on this stuff is pretty narrow, so let’s get in and get out. However, you never had a major combo piece in the command zone before and being able to play a combo piece without having to tutor for it, so that’s new. Also, the theorycrafting is all over reddit and twitter in a way it wasn’t before, so let’s look at what people would have to buy.
This is the most obvious card here and reddit is full of people saying “Well, just ordered a Well” which means someone made $0.35 on TCG Player (well, they made $2 because of the minimum, so that’s cool) but it will take quite a bit to move the needle on this. I think if a lot of people buy hard, people will have to pay a buck or two and the new price may stick. We’ve seen non-mythic rares from Mirrodin Besieged spike on less, but this is an expensive card that’s good in this one new deck and is also a horrible, antisocial card in similar combos in other decks and that made it $0.35, so bear all that in mind.
On a similar note, Omen Machine reduces their total playables to the cards that were in their hand when you cast Omen Machine. That can be a big problem for them but not for you, which is delightful. This is in the same boat as Knowledge Pool though maybe it’s 25% less obvious and that’s a problem for it since the supply is probably a little higher. These are both bulk rares and sometimes it takes more than the inkling of maybe making an EDH deck that people may or may not actually build to make it go anywhere, but I’m just giving you the information, you can decide what to do with it yourself.
Here is a card with a much better chance of doing something, in my opinion. It’s got a non-zero amount of play, is older and is just as dirty in the Lavinia deck because if they do play anything into the eye, they can’t play copies but you can. It’s not only a hoser, it makes all of your spells go crazy. It’s expensive, but your mana rocks work even if theirs don’t. I mean, their rocks work, but they can’t use them as ramp and if you start blowing their lands up, they won’t work anymore. You can add some cards like Null Rod or Stony Silence if you really want to hose them. Is hosing them with Eye of the Storm not enough? There are lots more asymmetrical effects.
A real card with real other prospects about to get a bump from this dumb combo? Delightful! It’s down from its historic peak and could hit that amount again, this is honestly probably just a reminder to get Dream Halls because it’s on the Reserved List and isn’t coming off. You can cheat, they can’t cheat, it’s great. Keep Lavinia around and you can be the only one playing spells for cheap with Dream Halls, which could help you Enter the Infinite for the win while they can’t Force of Will, which happens sometimes in EDH. This is poised to do stuff and I think this is a good choice whether you’re looking at things to buy based on Lavinia or not.
It’s not just EDH
Other formats are getting in on the Lavinia fun, too, so why not at least look at what they’re saying?
The Spikes subreddit post was way less helpful than I had anticipated. It was mostly full of memes about how this hurts Tron, just like every card that comes out in every set that never really stops Tron.
Discouraged by not finding anything in the subreddit for serious players, I did my due diligence anyway and checked the general Magic sub, which is a lot like stumping your doctor with a health question and asking an actor who played a chiropractor in a commercial. Surprisingly, the tv bone crackers were onto something – a delightful synergy I missed.
Hey, if your Queller dies with Lavinia out, they don’t get their spell back. Fun. I am not sure which crazy hybrid of humans and spirits will run this doofy combo, but it’s a thing in EDH potentially but Modern-minded people cracked the code rather than EDH people and I read every dumb comment on that dumb thread in the EDH sub. It pays to read around – Magic players find combos in 6 minutes that playtesters couldn’t find in 6 months because of the sheer number of people all taking a whack at a problem.
They also found some synergy with other card I’m less impressed by.
Cute combo involving a very recent bulk rare? Meh. But if the deck is a deck, this is in that deck. I don’t think this can move the needle but I do think that it’s not worth keeping data from you. Make up your own mind.
Ultimately there will be some new archetypes based on new commanders, probably ones better than this card which seems optimized for 60 card formats. However, a non-zero number of people will at least buy a few cards intended to build this and we should be ready. They recorded it 4 months ago, but if someone played this on Game Knights, watch out. Based on Josh’s tweet, it probably wasn’t him, but you never know.
That’s all for me this week. I’ll write more when we know more. Until next time!
Don’t miss this week’s installment of theMTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.
A week on and last week’s massive Pro Tour changes are still on the community’s collective lips. How will future qualifications work? What will the ability to get and stay on the train look like? At the same time, the Arena competitive queues have been announced to be best-of-1, which means no sideboarding. Many players, especially those familiar with high level play, are displeased. A great deal of skill comes from clever sideboarding.
On our side of things, it’s all about UMA right now. Supply is high, probably the highest it will ever be, so it’s time to start thinking about what we should be looking at.
Frantic Search (Foil)
Price Today: $1.50 Possible Price: $10
For the first time in a whopping 19 years, Frantic Search has been reprinted. Long a combo staple, and possibly the most busted of the “untap” cycle from Urza’s Legacy, it has many admirers. In 60-card formats it’s used to generate storm, churn through cards for a minimal price, and possibly even untap a land that produces more than one mana. In EDH (where you’ll find it in over 10,000 decks), it’s primarily used for the latter; untapping a Gaea’s Cradle and Cabal Coffers is just about the dumbest ritual you’ll find in Magic.
At this point in Magic’s timeline I’d wager that it’s the use in EDH that most demand comes from. Untapping lands is powerful, and digging for a specific type of card at any given time is always useful. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have purpose elsewhere though, of course. While it’s banned in Legacy and Pauper, it’s useful in Vintage, cube, and perhaps moreso than both, kitchen table. I certainly recall finding allure in the spell back when we only played in our college apartment, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. That type of demand doesn’t tend to push on foils much, but anything helps.
Perhaps most appealing here is that pack foils are $25 to $30, and the current UMA foils are a whole $1.50. I’m certainly not expecting a recently printed uncommon to hit the same price point as a 19-year-old original foil, there’s certainly room for growth. Supply is on the high side, but remember, we’re in the deepest it’s going to get.
Dark Depths (Box Topper)
Price Today: $125 Possible Price: $200
Now that we have the small ball out of the way, let’s talk about something with some heft.
Dark Depths is a cool card. We can all accept that. “Unfathomably large creature hidden in the mists” is just cool. It’s also popular. While not legal in Modern, it’s a core component of at least two Legacy strategies, shows up in Vintage, cube, and over 3,500 EDH decks. It’s also typically a four-of when played, since if you’re going through the effort of pulling it off, you need to make sure it’s happening.
There are several foil copies of Dark Depths with the release of UMA. We’ve got the pack foils, currently clocking in at around $260. We’ve got the FTV Lore copies, which cost a whopping $20, which everyone hates because the foiling on those sucks and they feel bad. Now we’ve got the two UMA copies too; the pack foil and the box topper. UMA packs will run you $55 or so. That’s not bad for a foil Dark Depths, but let’s be real, it’s just not as cool as the box topper. The box toppers have the same great new art, but borderless, it really explodes off the card. Realistically they’re going to be the most popular, and anyone that takes their Dark Depths seriously, which is exactly the type of person to make use of this card, is going to be looking to pick them up.
$120 is no small buy-in, but given the relative scarcity and overall distribution process, I’m expecting these to behave something like Inventions. Supply is relatively full right now, with seemingly high prices, but a few months from now it may be a bit shocking to see how many fewer there are and how much more they cost. I’d be surprised if Dark Depths doesn’t cruise upwards of $180, $190, or $200, and possibly more. It could be slow with the holidays just a week away, but come February things may start changing.
Demonic Tutor (Foil)
Price Today: $160 Possible Price: $250
Wizards has been surprisingly reluctant to roll out Demonic Tutor. Not counting the early Revised-era pritings (FBB, IE, CE, etc.), they put it in a very early Duel Deck. Then the reprint of that Duel Deck in the anthology series. And…that’s it. For a spell as popular as it is, you’d expect them to make it much more available. They haven’t, though. The release in UMA is the first “new” printing of it since 2009.
With the UMA release, we were also given the box topper. This is a big get. Up until now, the options for Demonic Tutor have been uninspiring. You can have the judge promo, which is dark and not particularly intriguing, for $260. Or the Beta version for well over $500. That’s really it. There’s a reason most copies you see cast are “Revised copy from a shoebox” quality.
UMA adds some much needed depth to the pool of options. Not only do you have the UMA pack foils at an approachable $60, you’ve got the topper at a current price of $160. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s a steep buy-in. It’s going to be tough for most people to make a move that big. But it’s absolutely the coolest version of this card aside from possibly Beta, which is going to run you at least three times as much for anything that’s sleeve playable. If you want a cool Demonic Tutor, and don’t want to spend over $500, this is your best bet.
For arguably the second-most popular card in EDH, that Wizards has been absurdly stingy with reprinting, in the coolest version that has existed since 1993, $160 is probably going to look like a good price in three to nine months. Seeing this climb to the current judge levels, or even higher, is certainly possible.
Travis Allen has been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective toMTGPricein 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcastMTG Fast Finance.
I have to admit, every time I hear about the MTG Finance ‘cabal’, those ‘shadow manipulators,’ I’ve got to laugh.
I don’t know of another group (granted there might be others, but they charge more, like a bookie’s sports line or a stockbroker’s private group) who does more to be transparent. I’ve been part of this site for more than five years, and I admire the way that we all make it super damn obvious what we’re doing and why.
You’re allowed to be annoyed when a card becomes unaffordable for you, but it’s not our fault if you don’t want to listen. We (James, Jason, Travis, me, plus the long and impressive list of others who’ve written for this site) want you to gain value and avoid losing value in your collection. That’s all we do, and we’re very open about our thought processes.
So this week, I want to go over my information sources, some of these are super obvious and some might not be. None of these are going to cost you much, either.
First of all, the obvious: Be a ProTrader! You get these articles before others, including the indomitable MTG Fast Finance podcast. MTGFF is a lot of fun for me when I fill in, and it feels good to be able to pontificate about the cards I like without worrying about my word count.
MTGFF also combines the ‘what has happened’ with the ‘what will happen’ without throwing too much other data at you, and rarely goes over an hour. I know some of you listen to podcasts all the time, but for those of us who do so sparingly, brevity is a gift.
Also, in all modesty, our track record is pretty impressive.
You should also be following all of us on Twitter. We all have our Twitter names in our articles, and if you don’t want to pollute your main feed with a ton of Magic, use the list function. I like keeping my feeds separate for Magic, and sports, and politics, and faces in things.
We lead the way. Come along, and make some money.
Twitter is an amazing resource, really. It’s an instant source of news, with rapid feedback, and for a lot of us, a fun way to interact with fans and readers. There’s a lot of the site that’s annoying, yes, but use that block and that unfollow liberally.
My personal tip: mute ‘RL’ and ‘Reserved List’ tweets. Saves me such a headache every time someone wants to revisit settled history.
There are several non-Wizards websites that I often consult (aside from this one, naturally). I refer to mtgtop8’s ‘staples’ section when I want to gauge the playability of a spec. It’s super helpful to know how many Modern decks are playing Engineered Explosives (21%!!) and how many copies each. (1.6, so 1-2 in the sideboard of a ton of decks)
If I’d thought about it, I would have known that Noble Hierarch was the most-played creature in Modern, but finding that tidbit just makes pulling the trigger on a playset so much easier.
Another great function here is the lists of what’s won tournaments, including the sideboards. This is useful for a number of reasons, including being able to quickly see that two Arclight Phoenix decks made the top 8 of GP Portland last week. I know I wrote about the Phoenix as part of Standard+ last week, but all signs point to it being a staple that only gets better with each cheap spell printed.
You’ve seen me refer to EDHREC, or heard us mention it on the podcast, but really, spend the time and go explore the site. It’s got a limitation in that you have to want to upload your deck online, but people who do that are more likely to be the ones who buy cards online. My kind of people, frankly.
Being able to see what the hive mind is thinking in Commander is super-useful. Lots of people approach the format as experiential, as some way to be incredibly unique. For instance, a friend of mine had a Stonebrow, Krosan Hero deck that he called ‘The Juicer’ due to every card featuring mega-buff male chests. Think The Brute and you’re there.
Most folks, though, want to optimize a deck or at least find the sweet combos. You’ll see a lot of repeats (Eternal Witness everywhere, lots of decks with Mirari’s Wake, etc.) but you’ll also be able to see what might spike next.
Chilcott with his Atraxa deck (artists’ rendition)
Finally, I want to give some love to a site that I use more than any other, and I have for years: whatsinstandard.com is a godsend for people like me who know things but have trouble with the specific details of what is known.
I want to give credit to the creator by name. I think it’s Ben Carlsson, but if I’m wrong and misread GitHub, forgive me, and correct me so I can correct this.
I found this site back when we were going to have 18 months and rolling rotation in Standard, and I could never keep track of anything. That’s a real liability for me, and messes with my ability to plan. Finding this simple, easy, and clear list of what people could play and for how long…I refer to this site weekly, if not more often. It’s bookmarked on my phone, too, because I can’t always remember which year what sets are rotating.
Everything that’s Standard-legal right now, for instance, rotates out in about 10 months, except for Guilds of Ravnica, which has 22 months to go. Enormously useful and easy to grok. Thank you, What’s In Standard?
Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for five years now, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP (next up: Oakland in January!) and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
