I don’t have to do another article where I talk about how great I am at this because we can learn a lot from our failures, sometimes moreso than from our successes and while I don’t care about missing stuff per se as long as there are plenty of hits out there to identify, we don’t want to miss anyone who would have wanted to buy those cards for themselves.
So while I didn’t really initially see cards I ignored as cards I was missing, I think it’s important to identify our blind spots and take a look at how we can avoid missing those cards in the future. I’m specifically talking about expensive foils that have spiked as a result of very competitive decks like Vannifar and how we can make sure we correctly identify future Vannifars and identify which classes of cards from those decks to buy specifically.
So what went wrong with Vannifar, first of all?
Who Was Into It?
At first, it seemed like Vannifar was a very exciting, if not obvious commander. My twitter feed is full of both EDH and finance people and every finance person was talking about Intruder Alarm and Thornbite Staff and every EDH person was talking about Teysa. EDHREC data back up my assertion that the EDH community as a whole just wasn’t that excited by Vannifar. I was pretty secure in my assessment that it was going to be really tough to sell non-obvious cards to non-speculators, and it was a very specific buyout that made me realize something different was going on here. So what went wrong? My assessment was that Vannifar was a boring, obvious, linear deck with a pretty unsatisfying pod chain, and the general EDH community’s apparent rejection of Vannifar in favor of Teysa (and even Nikya) seemed to bear that out. EDH players, in general, don’t want boring, linear obvious decks and you need to sell a lot of copies of recent cards to move prices. I forgot to consider one thing I knew, and by the time I saw the card that had spiked and realized what it meant, it was basically too late.
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MagicFest Toronto was a good time (although you wouldn’t know by looking at the website other than twitter dot com, since WotC has self-imposed media blackouts on gatherings of paper Magic). The floor was humming, there was plenty of action at vendor booths even late into Saturday, two Taking Turns decks lost their win-and-ins, and Toronto continued to impress as a city. Those vendor binders are no joke, with James and I finding plenty of deals on Saturday afternoon. I recall just as we started to poke through them that I didn’t really understand how there could be value left, since by now I’d expect players with a more active memory of card prices to have picked them over. That was not the case though, with multiple $5 foil Blood Artists to be found, under-priced Spire of Industries, and even a $15 foil Geth’s Grimoire. Add in the excellent donuts, the literal duck heart, and an impressively inexpensive barcade, and I was glad to be there.
Thing in the Ice (Foil)
Price Today: $22 Possible Price: $40
Without question the biggest story in Modern lately has been just how big of an impact Arclight Phoenix has made. Initially completely overlooked, it has now become a dominant force in both competitive formats. There were two in the top 8 of Toronto, and that same result can be found in basically every Modern event, whether it’s a Grand Prix or an MTGO daily.
A ubiquitous component of most Arclight builds is Thing in the Ice. Since the deck plans on casting so many instants and sorceries for Arclight, TiTI is a natural addition. Get rid of any blockers, hit their face hard, etc. etc. TiTI fills the role well. With the performance Arclight has been giving for the last month now, TiTI is fast becoming one of the most played creatures in the format – 10th right now, according to MTGGoldfish.
Foils start at $22, and they don’t last long. They climb into $26 and $28 after barely a playset. Looking at the full supply, regardless of price, there’s less than 40 copies. With how popular TiTI is in Modern right now, how unlikely that is to change (since when are cheap blue spells not going to be good), foil TiTIs are looking like a short to mid term guarantee.
Spirebluff Canal (Foil)
Price Today: $19 Possible Price: $40
How does one cast those TiTIs and Lightning Bolts? With Spirebluff Canal, of course. The enemy-paired yin to Scars of Mirrodin’s yang, it quickly found a home in the format, which had been eager to see it and Blooming Marsh. (In contrast, nobody was really eager for Concealed Courtyard.) Admittedly I began by looking into Marsh, as I expected that to foreshadow better returns, but there just isn’t a lot of usage of the card at the moment. While the two The Rock decks made good use of it on Saturday, it simply isn’t seeing a lot of reps. That may change in the future – and with it, Marsh’s prospects – but for now, Canal is where the action is.
Izzet Phoenix is certainly the driving force behind Canal today, though there’s lots of decks leveraging the powerful intersection of its colors and speed. UR Living End builds are certain to run it, and really, any Electrodominance decks. Storm and various flavors of Blue Moon tend to want copies as well. Moving forward, I doubt this will change. Why would it? Izzet is a well established color pair that has proven time and time again that it has the chops to hang in Modern, even before Canal. Now that they have access to a land that so perfectly supports the lightning-quick gameplay that both colors are wont to play, we’re almost guaranteed to find a Canal deck in the top meta on any given day, whether or not Arclight Phoenix is involved.
Anyways, prices run similar to TiTI. $18 will buy you a copy, but for your second, it’s going to be $20 or more. There are eight foil playsets with copies less than $30, and then the market is gone. Prerelease copies aren’t any bountiful. Given what Blackcleave Cliffs managed, I’d be surprised if we don’t see $40+ Canals in the next several months.
As Foretold
Price Today: $8 Possible Price: $17
A card I’d love to see do well simply because it’s cool, and who doesn’t love cool cards. From the get go As Foretold, affectionately ‘AF’ from here on out, was noticed by anyone that could read. It’s three mana, casts free spells every single turn, including the one you play it. And has the nifty feature of playing “free” spells for actual free. Bingo! I’m still hoping it will break Restore Balance, but until then, it’s still doing work with Ancestral Vision and Living End.
Most recently someone ran UR Living End in what seem to be back-to-back MTGO Modern leagues, and earned 8th place and 1st place respectively. The list is straightforward, with 12 cycling creatures, Living End, Electrodominance, Ancestral Vision, and of course, AF. Between the 12 cyclers and a set of AV, plus some bonus Izzet charms, I have to imagine it’s not hard to plow through 10 or 15 cards pretty quickly. I especially love that with AF in play, you can chain AVs.
I was torn between looking at non-foils and foils of AF. The non-foil prices are what’s listed, with demand for this likely to come from people needing sets for competitive Modern play. Since demand would be “new,” rather than established as with TiTI or Canal, there will be a rush for non-foils first. If a strategy establishes itself, then foils will get eaten up shortly after.
Supply is deeper than TiTI or Canal, but not by all that much. There’s maybe 20 playsets on TCG, none on SCG, and no additional on CFB. Should one of these AF decks crack a paper Magic event – and that we hear about it, since apparently that’s a concern now – supply on these may drain rapidly.
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.
Yes, dear reader, the title isn’t an exaggeration: I’m thinking carefully about what I want to hold through Standard’s rotation in seven months or so. I never want to get caught with too much Standard as rotation approaches, and if I bought in on something that I haven’t yet moved, I definitely want to be ahead of the pack when it comes to selling out.
Before we go too deep, let’s take a moment and reflect on the timing involved.
Let’s face it: the summer before rotation, soon-to-be rotating cards get crushed in terms of their value. That often presents some awesome opportunities for buying cards that fell too far, but I loathe being caught with excess copies in July.
Some examples of why I want to sell out so early:
Glorybringer fell from $6 to under a buck. Ouch.
Hazoret the Fervent actually hit peak price at this point in its Standard life, but now it’s fallen from $20 to $4.
Torrential Gearhulk was above $15 and is now $3. Get the picture?
For us, this means that if we’re not playing with a card right now, it’s time to move on all singles except what we are playing with. There’s a lot of time left in Standard, from a Magic viewpoint. The Magic Finance viewpoint, though, points out that now is the time to get all the value you can for a long list of cards, but today we’re going to focus on Ixalan block.
Carnage Tyrant ($28): Sell
Yup, now is the time to move all but your last four, and I’d be okay if you kept two. There aren’t many decks running the full playset but it’ll still be a force in Standard these last few months. Occasionally, someone has 1-2 of these in a TitanShift deck in Modern, but that’s few and far between. The Tyrant, by Thanksgiving, will be under ten but above five bucks.
Search for Azcanta ($15): Hold
It’s too popular in Modern and Legacy to lose too much value. The decks that want this effect REALLY want it and it comes down so blessedly fast that you don’t lose much tempo. I like picking up the buy-a-box promos in the $50-$60 range, because when the spike comes on, we’re going to hit $100 or more on the Mapsterpieces.
The current graph actually makes me want to wait and buy some more, as it’s trending downwards:
Vraska’s Contempt ($10): Sell
It’s not played in other Constructed formats, and if you want to pick up foils cheap on hopes of future Commander spikes, I think you’re being too optimistic. I’ll give you that it might be the most flexible instant available, and exiling is relevant, but it’s too niche for me.
Star of Extinction ($9): Sell like there’s no tomorrow
This was a $1 card for quite a while and it’ll go back to being bulk in a few months, Keep the few you play and move the rest right the hell now while you still can.
Treasure Map ($8): Sell
I was really hoping that this was played in some Modern decks, or some Commander, but nope. Very very niche, not commonly played. You’ve got better choices in how to draw cards in artifact decks and this has no future after Standard. Time to move on, matey.
Legion’s Landing ($7): Sell, but hang onto foils
While the card is played in only 1400 EDH decks, and I’d play it after I had Kjeldoran Outpost, it’s a solid token card in decks that want the chance to rebuild after the endless board wipes. I think there’s a future here, so foils are what I’ll be getting as the price withers away.
Settle the Wreckage ($5): Sell for now
I’m hard-pressed to find a card that shows up as a one-of in the 75.Control decks want to have access to one, and the first one is devastating. The threat of the second and third is effective, and in sideboarded games your opponent will be more careful. It’s a bad rate once they figure out you have it, though, so you don’t want too many.
I’m intrigued by the card long-term, but only when it drops to the $2 level. It’s only in 1000 Commander decks online, which makes sense. At five mana you get Hallowed Burial, my favorite wrath effect.
Field of Ruin ($3): Hold
Yes, I think you should hold the $3 uncommon, but the risk of a reprint is my biggest fear. Field is all over the place in Modern, and there are three-color control decks playing three copies. That’s quite a hit for decks to take, especially ones that play Cryptic Command! The plan appears to be to get the one or two basics from your opponent’s deck into play, at which point Field is a Strip Mine and Path to Exile is just a Dispatch with metalcraft active.
This is a very easy card to throw into a Commander reprint, but Field foils are already $20. Given the amount of Modern play it sees, that’s actually a very tempting price for me.
Vanquisher’s Banner ($4/$7 foil): Hold, and buy more
This is one of my top targets as the summer winds down. I want all of the foils I can possibly have. Tribal decks are all over the place, and this is a very potent enabler, making your team bigger and adding cantrips to each of the tribe’s members.
I don’t think this price will go down much, though, because none of the demand is from Standard players. This is already a popular Commander card, and that’s what has the price this high without a speck of Constructed play.
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 and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
I typically don’t like to advocate cards with very high buy-in price, low supply and other cards like that. There are a lot of reasons for this. Perhaps the biggest one is that basically everyone who writes about mtg finance does picks like this. It’s sexy and it you call a card that’s teetering as it teeters and 3 or 4 of your readers get the last few copies (and help push it over the edge) you look like a genius to those people. I think this creates a lot of bad feels for most people, though. I have developed a method that lets me find cards long before they pop, giving people a good long time to get their act together, potentially sell other specs to free up money to get in and buy cards that aren’t teetering which could result in the orders getting cancelled once the seller gets wise of the incoming (or incipient) spike.
This has the unfortunate side effect of me “missing” obvious cards, meaning that I don’t talk about them. I also tend to use my limited column space to talk about cards I do like rather than discussing picks I overlook for various reasons. If I am ignoring a card because the buy-in is too high or the supply is too low, I do just that – I ignore the card. That has the unintended side effect of not hipping the readers to the cards that are about to topple. While I think other authors do a good job of identifying those cards, it’s possible I’m not doing anyone any favors by ignoring cards like that. If someone else didn’t tell you to drop $20 on Athreos, you’re probably wishing you had the opportunity to do that, now. I have a bit of a bias against cards like that, possibly, so I think from now on, I’ll include some notes about cards I am not advocating because identifying them is something I know how to do and a non-zero number of you might find it useful. Speaking of Athreos…
Athreos doubled. A lot of cards are going up ten-fold and a “mere” doubling seems quaint in comparison but I want to make the case for there being a lot of value for players in the identification of cards that are already $15+ dollars but are about to get a nod from a new deck like Athreos. There are a few groups of people who would prefer to see these kinds of cards rather than me calling $0.99 cards like Hallowed Spiritkeeper even if that Spiritkeeper hits $10 like I’m hoping it will.
People who don’t have a TCG Player store or similar retail out.
Players who aren’t trying to buy their specs at retail and sell at retail may have some issues with buying cheaper cards that may top out at $5 or $6 even if they got them very cheap. If they are buying with the hope of outing to a buylist, they need to make a significant return because they are both buying and selling suboptimally. This is usually fine, especially if retail is $0.99 at the start and buylist is $6.50 at the end. If you can get dozens of copies from one person and only pay shipping once, that’s great. If you can only pay shipping to send to a buylist once, also great. But if the card goes from $1 to $5 and buylist goes to $2.50, the fees eat all of your profit. A card quintupling is nice, but Travis Allen basically abandoned the cheap spec life and wrote this article about how hard it is to get out of specs.
2. People who DO have a TCG Player store or similar retail out.
You need to be very sure that the demand is real because if you buy 100 copies of a bulk rare, you need to sell 100 copies of a bulk rare. Buylists are attractive because you can make one “sale” and be done with everything, but if you are trying to sell on TCG Player, you need to deal with those cards as “inventory” which means shipping them 1-4 copies at a time. Fees pinch you here, too, especially if you offer free shipping like most “I’ll be the cheapest listing on TCG Player to make sure it moves” sellers. A $1 card going to 3 and a $100 card going to $200 card is theoretically the same amount of growth if you bought 50 copies of the $1 card, but you’re looking at between 15 and 50 stamps, envelopes, TCG Player fees, etc. Your worst case scenario if you’re wrong on the $100 card is you sell it for like $90 and lick your wounds. If you miss on 50 copies of a $1 card, you put them in a fail box forever.
3. People who want to play Magic with the cards.
If you want to play Magic with Athreos, me having gained you $100 in value by convincing you to buy Black Market at $4 doesn’t help you because you still have to pay $35 for Athreos when you get around to building the deck. If you are buying 1 copy of a card because you’re building the deck, saving you $2 on a Skullclamp pales next to costing you $16 on an Athreos.
I don’t want to exclude those groups of people and while other writers on MTG Price do a good job of identifying when to buy Masterpiece Sol Ring and when to sell it and my niche is other cards, I would be remiss if I didn’t occasionally mention some cards I notice for the groups listed above. What’s the point of developing a solid, data-based methodology for EDH finance if you don’t show all your work and people think you’re a savant at finding dimes and missing Hamiltons? I don’t know how I want to structure the high buy-in cards I do notice from now on, but I’ll talk exclusively about a few there’s still time to buy today and we’ll worry about that next time. Or I’ll keep doing what I always do, Travis, Cliff and James will find your Intruder Alarms and you’ll try to buy them before they sell out and I’ll advocate Saproling Infestation and you may or may not make money.
Room To Grow
Since I can actually find these cards, let’s talk about buy-ins around $10 or $15 that have room to go up.
I called this card at bulk and have basically never stopped making money off of it. I sold enough copies at that $4 plateau to pay for my whole order so I am just profiting at this point. (Or, since it’s Theros block, Propheting. Because I foresaw the price increase. And I made money. Look, they can’t all be gems). There is one lunatic with like 40 copies of this for $8 on TCG Player and the next person with more than one copy is charging close to $10. We are at a tipping point and Dictate’s $8 is still cheaper than the $12 for Grave Pact. Grave Pact, by the way, has a ton of printings. It’s also harder to cast than Dictate. I have never once cast this with Flash but that’s still a factor. Add that up, and Dictate shouldn’t ever be cheaper than Grave Pact which is admittedly down a bit from its peak but I think that’s only because Dictate was a credible budget alternative for a while. No longer! Dictate is going up up up and I never mentioned it before because I have “called” this card like 4 times and even though it always went up after, I wanted to find more Flesh Carvers. Don’t congratulate me for calling this again, just make some money and thank me by buying a year of Pro Trader so I don’t feel bad about calling cards I find copies of on Tuesday that I don’t think will make it to Thursday.
What’s Black and White and selling out all over?
Ravos is not that easy to reprint and I think Tymna, Thrasios, Vial-Smasher and a few other of the “ubiquitous” pairs are about to get very dear. Ravos is especially good in Teysa because he does 2 things you need a card to do and that’s very useful. It was going to go up anyway, but Teysa is making this disappear. I hope it’s not too late to grab a copy. Again, this is a card I reasoned would top out at around $18ish where Thrasios, Triton Hero or Tymna, the Weaver is, but they could all go to $30 and then all of us look stupid. At the very least, this was $12ish with a different demand profile and if this “merely” jumps 50%, I saved you $6 and you’re welcome. This is math I did in my head and didn’t include in all of the articles where I didn’t suggest you buy Ravos and now you know why.
It’s not just Teysa cards, either.
Both Vannifar and Nikya are putting in work here and Craterboi is flirting with its historic high. The graph already pegs the fair trade value at above what it was when it didn’t get reprinted in Modern Masters 2017. Do I love a $25 buy-in? Sure don’t. I liked this a lot more at $15. I also like a card that can dectuple and this isn’t hitting $150 bucks, ever, but this is a lot easier to sell, trade or buylist and you don’t ever want to pay $40 for a card that was once $5 so buy these now if you think you’ll use them before they’re reprinted again. Again, I think this card can grow by $7-$10 under likely conditions and there would have to be a serious run on it for it to get to $40 on TCG Player anytime soon, but this is also a card that is basically guaranteed to go up. Some people like the uncertainty in their specs to be “how much” and not “if” and this is a spec for you if that’s you.
This is a high buy-in for a card that was reprinted in a commander deck that had other valuable cards in it, but here we are. This has already doubled. Do I like its current price? No, but other people seem to and of all of the post-popped stuff this seems, to me, the most likely to retain value given its usage in decks outside of Vannifar a deck that, again, I don’t see people building.
In the future, I think I can do a wrap-up paragraph and mention a few of these cards briefly so it doesn’t look like I missed them and so you have the opportunity to save yourself money picking up a copy to play with. I’m not telling you how to use our website. I mean, I guess I used to be, but I won’t anymore. People want finance advice for different reasons and I have acknowledged that on the podcast for 300 episodes so it’s time to do that here, too. Thanks for reading.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
