Yearly Archives: 2019

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: The Ballad of Wormtongue

Readers,

You know by now that good advice can make you and bad advice can break you. I do my best to give the best advice possible and it is in the spirit of advice that I will be advising about advisors. The first advisor I want to discuss is me. I give good advice and you should listen to me. Now that I have established my bona fides as an advisor advisor, I’d like you to step into my office because there are a few more things to discuss and I want you along for the ride.

We’re talking advisors to day because a non-commander is making a splash and there is still time to get into a few of the cards that are headed up in price as a result. It’s too late on some, but on others, there is still time. If you’re wondering which non-Commander I could mean, buckle up because I haven’t even begun to advise on advisors.

Boom, there they are in all of their persistent glory. They would probably be good enough if it said “Tap four untapped Persistent Petitioners” because milling twelve is pretty spicy and if Blue does anything well, it’s untapping creatures. However, it says “Tap four untapped Advisors” which means it would behoove you to fill a few of the non-petitioner creature slots in your EDH deck with some other advisors, when relevant, to get a few additional effects.

I didn’t mention much about this before because I thought it was too late for the most obvious inclusion in the deck, Thrumming Stone.

This is a card I am proud to have called several times in the past and if you have been reading my articles for a while, you had a chance to get these for far below the $50 they’re flirting with today. 6 months ago we saw a nice bump from Rat Colony and even then wasn’t too late to buy in because Persistent Petitioners sent these into the stratosphere. Second bumps are always better. One card I will admit I didn’t see coming per se that went nuts this week, though, is probably the best commander for the deck and wasn’t reprinted as recently as I remembered.

Grand Arbiter Augustin IV

Nearly doubling in price the last few weeks, GAAIV, as he likes the be called, is the latest beneficiary of hype surrounding Persistent Petitioners decks. If you’re worried about the efficacy of milling a ton of opponents for hundreds of cards at a time, let me remind you that EDH need not work this way. The power of the phrase “target player” is very relevant with this deck for this reason.

The UMA reprinting basically destroyed this card’s price for life but I hope you made some decent money on this when I said it was nuts around $2. I have been high on this card for so long I probably wrote about it on Quiet Speculation or talked about it on a podcast that doesn’t even exist anymore. Maniac may be dead forever, but you won’t be dead when you mill yourself into Bolivian with petitioners and use lab man to win the game. This makes mill fairly viable in EDH and it makes me want to see which other advisors could be about to pop on the basis of inclusion in this deck.

While we’re talking about cards that it’s too late to buy cheaply, Intruder Alarm seems really good in this deck. Move the copy over from the Vannifar deck I’m sure you’re taking apart after playing it twice.

Let’s look at some other advisors that could be ready to pop on the basis of inclusion in the deck. Said advisors would ideally-

  • Be in Azorius colors because Grand Arbiter Augustin IV is an advisor and is likely the best commander for the deck, though this point is a bit flexible
  • Have a nice static ability that functions when it’s tapped allowing you to get a benefit from having it in play but being able to tap it with abandon

Let’s go to gatherer and look at advisors and see if we find anything worth talking about. Spoiler alert, I know of at least one and that was the whole point of writing the article, but I also think it’s possible I’ll find more so while I know some stuff you don’t know, I also don’t know some stuff we’ll find out together. This will be fun.

Ok, so this card was already pretty busted to begin with and the fact that Kamigawa cards are a little tougher than most to reprint coupled with the fact that this card is quite good lead to the shallow climb, punctuated by a steeper one lately. However, this card went somewhat unnoticed before because, with the exception of the graph shape, the underlying metrics weren’t that great.

This is basically a card I would only have found accidentally. You can see in this picture that Card Kingdom has already jacked the price up, but there are still copies to be found for a more reasonable amount elsewhere.

Time appears to be running out, but there are still sub-$12 copies floating around and while there is a lot of hype surrounding Petitioners that may or may not, well, persist, the graph shape of Michiko Konda tells you that the price is unlikely to go anywhere but up. Remember, sudden spikes settle and have a tendency to settle between the pre-spike price and the post-spike price, usually right in the middle. She flirted with $13 already, so if she goes to $20 she still ends up around $17 so there’s money to be made, especially if EDH players around you trade. More people are going to notice this card once it officially starts to sell out on various sites and you want to be ready to sell when it hits $20 and people are looking to buy.

This card is so hard to work in EDH, just like Luminarch Ascension. I used to run Luminarch Ascension in Standard in a control deck with a lot of Planeswalkers. It was fairly easy to go a turn cycle without taking damage with one opponent, but it’s nearly impossible to get it going in EDH. No one is going to let you go 5 turns without getting hit by anyone at all, even if you’re fogging a ton and proliferating. I don’t think you’re likely to win via Elecutors, but I think the foils are under $2, are showing signs of life, especially vis-a-vis the buylist (shown as a blue line) price moving and there’s little downside here with advisors being relevant.

I like to shy away from P3K stuff because there’s nothing saying they can’t reprint it and it would make this a $0.02 card overnight, but you can’t argue with that graph shape. Besides, they reprint one P3K card a year, on average. Sorry about your “Borrowing 100,000 Arrows” but 3 Visits continues to be an astounding amount and will be until they print it in a commander set or something.

It takes a lot to perk up a bulk mythic from a recent (ish) set, especially when the graph is trending in the wrong direction, but this is a penny stock you could scoop up by the armload and potentially offload for like $0.50 to $1 each to a buylist in a while. Either Advisors are so good that Arbiter Augustin’s price doubled in under a month and Michiko is ready to pop or it can’t move a bulk mythic at all. I think the answer could be in the middle depending how much the deck gets built, but attacking with creatures in EDH is dumb and frustrating so a whole new class of player who didn’t want to trifle with Ripple Rats suddenly has a combo deck to play and that’s exciting.

The graph of the foil is similarly-discouraging, although it’s under $2 and that’s attractive (if I were to buy any foil under $2, it would be Arcane Denial, but that’s just me – I’ll beat that drum until it’s $10). This card is good in the deck if the deck is a deck, and its abilities still work if you tap it to mill.

This card kind of doesn’t suck. It’s a bulk foil from a very long time ago and the graph is showing slight, slight, slight signs of life with respect to a convergence of retail and buylist price. This isn’t quite War Tax but it’s worth having in a deck and has a big butt, which is useful sometimes.

Lol wut?

Oh. Yeah, this basically means the buyout is underway, but if you can ferret out a cheaper copy from somewhere, just know that you can list a NM copy for under $500 and be the cheapest TCG Player listing. Most likely this goes to $50 or so and ends up at $35, so bear that in mind. Here’s a better look at the graph before Action Adventure got involved.

There are so few copies of this card that any seller can have a profound effect on data, so be careful when you see graphs and other scrapers reporting prices. The obscure corners of the internet might have some affordable copies of this so get sleuthing.

P3K is risky because a reprint pantses you, but Bad Archivist over here look like it has decent underlying metrics and is a probably a low reprint risk.

I liked how this card played already. It fits both of our criteria that I outlined before we looked at the list. The one strike against this is that it’s in 2 different Commander 2016 precons including the Atraxa deck and that means it’s twice as common as say, Deepglow Skate. That said, it’s ONLY twice as common as Deepglow Skate. This could be a thing and the price is already sloping toward money town.

I have to mill myself to avoid damage? Throw me in the briar patch!

Look, you likely can’t make money buying this but if you have Alliances bulk, you have these. Yank them and I bet someone buys them on TCG Player because it goes in the deck.

There are a few more Azorius-colored advisors like Sram that I didn’t mention and a few other bad P3K ones, but I think these cards go in the deck and have a chance at seeing play. That’s what I advise, anyway.

Thanks for reading. Join me next week where we potentially have the fallout of a major announcement affecting Modern and therefore maybe us, to parse. If not, EDH is the gift that keeps on giving and we’ll have plenty to discuss. Your homework for the week is go to EDHREC and figure out how to use the filters at the top to find decks of Augustin that are going to be specific to petitioners builds. Do you see anything juicy on that page you didn’t see before you filtered?

Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 2/25/19 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.

This weekend was, as they say, a “big get.” Autumn Burchett took down the first Mythic Championship (despite player stat screens with claims they had won several in the past). As Magic’s first non-binary champion, this win means a lot of things to a lot of people, which was evident when Autumn was nearly bowled over as their friends rushed the stage within seconds of Ikawa extending the hand. Rarely, even at the top level of the game, is such emotion evident at the moment of major victory. That it was is a testament to the cultural significance of the moment for a group historically underrepresented. Victories like these – where the narrative matters more than the trophy – are lasting successes for not just the individual, but for the greater Magic community.

It was still Standard though, and other than Kaya maybe gaining a few bucks, it was mostly irrelevant as far as we’re concerned.

Requiem Angel (Foil)

Price Today: $1
Possible Price: $5

I’m a bit shocked I’m writing about Requiem Angel this week, if only because I would have expected expected the price on her to have already moved. Angel is seemingly the most popular card in Teysa lists, the current hottest commander. In a deck packed as densely as possible with cards that give you a sacrifice outlet, and that pay you for sacrificing, cards that generate bodies that you’re actually happy to have die are few and far between. Angel does a lot of work here, giving you a stream of tokens that feed the engine.

Dark Ascension is the only foil printing of Angel, and there’s only one other printing anyways, Commander 2014. You’ll find roughly the supply you’d expect for a card from this era with a single printing and low-ish previous demand; about 30 vendors with maybe twice as many copies. That isn’t a glut of supply, but on the other hand, these aren’t going to be gone in 12 hours.

At under $1 each, it’s hard to feel like you can go wrong here. With a reprint in a Commander product, there’s precedent for using that as the reprint venue, should they choose to again. That doesn’t rule out other ancillary product, like the upcoming Modern set. We can be relatively confident in our foils though, especially if she makes it through the Modern product unscathed. After that, it’s just a matter of letting Teysa’s popularity continue to strain the supply. Forty people picking up a foil Angel pushes this price into the several dollar range easily, at which point you can buylist your $1 copies for $4 store credit and move on to something new.

Yahenni, Undying Partisan (Foil)

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $9

If I had to pick a card that was surprisingly popular, it would be Yahenni. Yahenni has found his way into just about 7,500 lists on EDHREC. That’s an awesomely impressive number for a card from Kaladesh. That’s roughly the 75th most popular black card in the format. For context, that’s right about where Rise of the Dark Realms and Puppeteer Clique land. If you’ve played much EDH, you know those two are across from you at the table regularly.

Yahenni, like Requiem Angel, has found new purpose in Teysa. As a sacrifice outlet, he gives you on-demand, free sacrifices. Just last week I talked about how useful that functionality is, so if you want to read it, take a gander at that article. Beyond that, he grows as your opponent’s threats die, which, depending on the board state, can be many triggers quickly. As far as cake icing goes, that sac outlet making him indestructible is certainly sweet. In the face of a typical sweeper, you can lift your entire board up, piece by piece, getting plenty of value along the way, and find yourself with a fat partisan on the other side of things.

Popularity has pulled Yahenni’s price up to about $4 already, and that’s ‘with Teysa demand still new. He’s far too new to see a reprint, and given the pace EDH players build decks, it will be some number of weeks or months before Teysa demand for singles wanes. That won’t hamper growth though, as he was clearly popular even before this commander. I’d be shocked if you couldn’t get $10 for a foil copy before the end of this year.

Sunbird’s Invocation

Price Today: $4.50
Possible Price: $9

I stumbled across Jodah, Archmage Eternal while doing some other research, and it turns out he’s been doing well lately. Over the last month he’s the seventh most popular commander, which is a strong position. It’s also just outside of the typical three or four spots we’re more likely to focus on. Anywhere in the top 10 or 15 of the month is still a lot of attention, as that extrapolates out to the entire EDH deck building community.

It’s easy to see why Invocation would be popular in Jodah. Jodah is all about casting massive spells for much cheaper than you should. Invocation pays you for the CMC of those spells, not what you paid, so playing ten mana spells means you’re likely to get a eight or nine mana spell for free right after. Getting 17 mana worth of spells for five total mana is awfully tempting. You can make up Sunbird’s entire mana cost in a single cast. Of course, it’s useful elsewhere too, but decks that let you cast big spells for less mana is where Invocation shines.

Browsing SCG, you’ll see Invocation is in roughly the same boat as Angel and Yahenni. Supply is in the same general range, and we’re not worried about a foil reprint anytime soon. Demand should be relatively consistent for awhile, given that Jodah isn’t a brand new commander, so attrition should pull a few copies out of the market a week. Again, like the other two, a few months should pull enough copies off the market that the last few cheap copies get snapped up, and we’re looking at a double digit foil price.

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 to MTGPrice in 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.

Brainstorm Brewery

Brainstorm Brewery #327 The Intern

http://traffic.libsyn.com/brainstormbrewery/Brainstorm_Brewery_327_The_Intern.mp3

DJ (@Rose0fThorns), Corbin (@CHosler88) and Jason (@jasonEalt) bring on their latest $40 patron Andy (@leclairAndy1231 ), the intern, to talk about the coming Purge, MSRP going away, and some picks with teeth.

Make sure to check us out on Youtube because everything is better with video. https://www.youtube.com/user/BrainstormBrewery

Need to contact us? Hit up BrainstormBrew@gmail.com

Casual Fridays

Buying up Dominaria

2 Comments

Dominaria was one of the best draft sets of all time. I don’t think I’ll ever have as good a time in Limited as I did when I could draft Dampen Thought in 3x Champions of Kamigawa, and Spider Spawning decks will make me happy no matter the format, but Dominaria was awesome.

It also gave us one of the most expensive cards we’ve had in Standard for a while: Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and icon of UW control’s ideals.

Teferi represents a test of something I’ve usually been good at: figuring out what price I want to buy at as the price comes down pre-rotation. He’s only one of a few cards from the set that I need to think about, though:

Teferi, Hero of Dominaria ($42 nonfoil, $84 foil, $220 Mythic Edition)

When I’m deciding what to buy in the summer, I start with the numbers. How much Commander play? How much Modern/Legacy use?

Teferi sees some play in the older formats, frequently seen as a 1-2 of in assorted control builds and often next to 2-3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I don’t think that’s enough to keep his price above $40, and I’m expecting a trickle downwards to $30. Am I getting in there? Maybe. The soon-to-be-previewed Challenger decks will make a big difference. EDHREC has him in 1300 decks, which is interesting considering that Oath of Teferi is in 1600 decks.

If he’s reprinted and he drips down to $25 or so I’ll grab a couple but five mana is a whole lot and he can’t close a game like JTMS does. I’m pretty sure I’m not a buyer.

Karn, Scion of Urza ($20/$50/$70)

I’d forgotten that Karn was once significantly more expensive than Teferi:

I mean, holy crap. $60+ for an in-print card? This version of Karn fits into a wide range of strategies, but the minus ability gets him into decks ranging from Death and Taxes in Legacy to Colorless Eldrazi or Hardened Scales in Modern. The caveat here is that he’s mostly a one-of and not a must-play-four sort of card.

That being said, I’m very intrigued, and I’m not going to mess around with the nonfoils unless they drop heavily as rotation approaches. The promo is something I want to buy, especially if I can work eBay/TCG promos for another 10-15% off. I grant you that the second edition of Mythic Edition didn’t sell out like the first did, and supply is still out there, but this is the headliner in terms of what sees play in Eternal formats.

I want to buy a couple of the promos in the $50-$60 range and I’m staying away from the nonfoils unless it gets to $10.

Mox Amber ($9/$25)

I have to say, this is one of the cards I’m highest on right now. The nonfoil is up a little recently, but the foil can still be had under $30 and that’s where I really want to be.

I thought it was a garbage card even in Commander, where EDHREC has it in at over 1800 decks, but I’ve come around and I’m especially convinced that eventually it’s going to get broken right in half in Modern or Legacy. We know how powerful Moxes can be, even with restrictions like Mox Opal has.

I’m a buyer this summer, and hopefully it’s down to the $7 range, but any foil under $30 is something I’m buying or trading for with glee.

Sulfur Falls ($9/$14, Innistrad $9/$18)

The enemy checklands are all tempting but Sulfur Falls is the most played by a healthy margin. Yes, there’s a supply from Innistrad already out there but that was released in late 2011, and time has soaked up a lot of copies.

Here’s the graph for the Innistrad foil version, and keep in mind that the Dominaria foils entered the market in April of 2018:

A modest blip, and we’ve got 17,000 EDH decks taking up copies, plus all the casual decks ever, and the toll that seven years took on the Innistrad copies…I think you should be buying foils at $14, and more so if it trickles down in price.

Especially with the nonfoils and foils being so close in price, don’t mess around. Buy the shiny versions.

Gilded Lotus ($3/$8, M13 $4/$10, FTV $9, Mirrodin $4/$27)

Yes, that’s a lot of printings but I’m going to have a hot take here: The Dominaria art is vastly superior in terms of art and foiling. I think the FTV’s base art is better, but that foiling process sucks and therefore it’s worth less.

These foils were all higher before Dominaria came out, being in the $15-$20 range except for the Mirrodin foil which will always have a bigger premium, since it’s the first and oldest. All the foils have come down in price, but this is in 43,000 Commander decks, the #18 artifact overall, above Top and Mind Stone.

This will correct upwards, slowly but surely, and this is your opportunity to get them at their cheapest. It’s not going to spike, there’s too many copies and versions, but I love buying staple, popular foils when they’re cheap, waiting a little while, and trading them away. I’m a buyer for the foil Dominaria versions at $8, or even less given the right auctions!

Cliff ( @WordOfCommander ) 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 and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.