Readers!

It’s clear that Urza is the favorite deck to emerge from the new EDH Masters set called “Modern Horizons” and it’s not hard to see why. Him plus Paradox Engine plus a few other artifacts means you cast your whole deck pretty reliably and that’s pretty good. Artifacts are good, blue is good, both together is good. Urza is the Vannifar of the set but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Teysa of the set, and I think I’ve found it.

EDHREC is on top of their game this go-around and since all of the cards are in Scryfall and people are building decks already, EDHREC is scraping data already. The integration with sites like Archidekt which let people make decks almost as soon as card are spoiled means we have data earlier, which is apparently something we need because people are jumping on EDH stuff way earlier than they used to. That’s fine, once we get over the feeling of missing out, it turns out those people miss a lot of stuff because they don’t know what they’re doing. Still plenty of money to be made by listening to people telling us what they’re actually doing. Let’s listen.

Behold! 26 decks – hardly a huge sample size but since we’re getting ideas and nothing else, it’s enough. We want to see if any tech is emerging and these early decks also have the benefit of informing later deckbuilders so actually these cards that may be erroneously over-represented now may actually make people more likely to play them and therefore fulfill their own prophecy. Archidekt integration with EDHREC means people can now build their deck with the suggestions from other decks right in front of them more easily than ever. It’s not that these suggestions are bad, but it does have a snowball effect as the first to get their ideas down on paper have an influence over every subsequent builder.

That said, enough editorializing about problems I personally helped create. Let’s make some money.

Not on the Reserved List but not exactly easy to reprint, either, this card is one the move and $3 is not where it’s going to stop, either. If you can still get these around the $1 they were for basically ever, you should be able to get out above $4 soon. The tipping point on these are coming and being an uncommon from Saga means there are fewer copies than there are copies of uncommons from recent sets with similar trajectories.

Ogre is more explosive, true, but Skirge Familiar is the only card like this in Black and with Yawgmoth’s ability to keep your hand full, you should have no shortage of garbage to pitch to turn into a spell, perhaps a big Exsanguinate. I think if a small number of people discovered Skirge Familiar, it’s going to go. In at $2, out at $5 seems reasonable to me.

Foils of this are falling but considering a foil is currently cheaper than a non-foil Masques copy, we could see some movement back up. This can go off constantly given your ability to proliferate a ton, and unlike a lot of Time Walk artifacts, you don’t have to “bank” a turn to make it work, so if there are 9 counters on it, just take 4 turns in a row and laugh. If you can’t manage to put 3 counters on it during those extra turns with Yawgmoth as your commander, you don’t deserve to win, anyway. I think Masques copies and m19 foils are both pretty good bets, especially since it spiked already on the basis of different cards and copies are more scarce in the wild.

You like this graph shape? I know that you do. I like it, also. This is the “reverse-J” shape that precedes the “U-shaped” graph that is a card recovering from a reprinting. This is obviously a battlebond reprinting based on the time the card’s price plummeted. Why no recovery yet? Was it rarity-shifted? Does it see less play? Was the set overprinted? No, no and no. This seems like an opportunity to me!

Here’s the culprit. I think Revenant is due for a slow climb back to maybe 2/3 of its pre-reprinting price if it’s not reprinted again given how powerful it is. Although people are latching on to the budget version, Crypt Ghast, Ghast is making a case for a higher price tag itself and anyone who is serious about building like redundancy more than they like budget alternatives to non-RL cards. They will buy both and so should you.

Ready for another guess?

Here is a card I have raised the alarum about on several occasions but never really bought into myself, which was foolish because I was right, this card is the truth and it’s only going to get better now that Yawgmoth is a sac outlet for the ages. You’ll like this reveal a lot.

This card is honestly probably not done growing despite having grown quite a bit. I feel like it should have gotten a commander deck reprint by now and it’s strange that it hasn’t, but when they finalized last year’s decks, like 18-24 months ago, this card was steady at $8 for a while. Can it grow more? Is it getting reprinted this year (I doubt it)? Time will tell. I like this card, though.

One last thing – Ultimate Masters didn’t really inject as many copies into the market as anyone expected and prices are really holding up. I wouldn’t wait to buy anything that got reprinted in that set, and this deck has quite a few.

Tower and Urborg are staples in any deck like this so grab them now. They’ll shrug off another reprint and they’re not going to get cheaper so it’s a real low risk buy.

That does it for me. Next week we will have more data so be sure to tune in. Until next time!