Hey, you know that article I write every week? I’m doing it about Kadena this week.
Why Kadena?
Because I think Kadena is good and the data almost bears out that it’s going to be an important deck.
I expect Kadena to overtake Kykar once the cards are out but I actually don’t know. I think my instincts are pretty good – I say K’rrik was way too far down on the list last week and look what happened. Kadena is more than just a bad Animar and I think people are going to want to build with it. Here are cards that matter.
Probably a little late to maximize our profit on this one (I didn’t see it going up quite yet) but this card is basically good in every format and it’s especially good in Kadena. You can play the top card of your deck as a Morph with Forge in play and you can do it for free once a turn. If you hit a whammy like a land, Forge can re-roll for you. This card is meant to go hand-in-hand with Kadena and with it unlikely to ever get cheaper, I think you snag these under $5. There is precedent for EDH staples with cross-format applicability hitting $10 while still in Standard and I think Forge is a strong candidate for joining that club. Don’t sleep on these.
As long as we’re talking about Forge, here’s another card equally good in Kadena.
Vizier is on its way up and Kadena decks peeling a Morph creature off of the top of the deck and being able to fix the rest of their mana to boot is upside. Kadena lets you Morph one creature a turn for free and this lets you bypass your hand for that sweet value. They get information, but so what? Let them know what’s coming. Vizier is the 10th-most-played card in Amonkhet after Anointed Procession and the bicycling lands and a few others and it’s demonstrating the price can go up. This isn’t quite its floor of $2.50 but with it being somewhat tricky to reprint, I think we have some climbing to do.
This is a card that is similar to Ugin, The Ineffable in that it’s being used to churn out Morph creatures. I think this has more upside than Ugin and it’s a card that flirts with high prices every few years. It’s only going to take one card that breaks this for this to be $15 dollars or something absurd and I get these as bulk rares sometimes. This has been above $5 twice and that means they’re getting more and more scarce in binders. I think this could pop at any moment and a Kadena deck on Game Knights or something like that could be all it takes. I am suspicious of cards with explosive combo potential and this has it.
Similarly, Anvil is a card that already demonstrated that a feeding frenzy based on new tech could spike it out of control. I think you HODL these on that basis and just know that a second spike basically makes these $8 forever because no one is going to find the copies in bulk rare boxes. People are racing to the bottom but this card is very good in Kadena decks because it makes your morph creatures a mere mana and that’s pretty useful. I think everything I said about Heartless Summoning applies here. With these around $2, you could treat these like lotto tickets and squirrel away $50 worth for the next time it hits $10.
This doesn’t have to hit $27 again for it to be a good idea to buy this at $4.50 on TCG Player. This has good underlying metrics, Core Set won’t be opened any longer than people have to open it and it’s good in Kadena among other decks. You get to play a free Morph with Kadena every turn, so if you can do it on their turns, you can get x free creatures a turn cycle. That’s pretty useful. Vedalken Orrery is expensive and this is not so seriously just buy a ton of these. Could they put it in a future core set? Possibly, but it won’t be Core 2021, that’s for sure.
That does it for me. I think Kadena is a bad Animar, personally, and there are more exciting decks to build but I don’t go by what I like, I go by what the EDHREC data tells me people are building. Also, I brewed a Kadena deck this week on Coolstuff and I don’t even hate it. Anyway, that does it for me. Until next time!