Yearly Archives: 2019

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Why We Wait

Last week we got some preliminary data about Teysa which was good and we made some moves, which was good, but as the picture became clearer, it became obvious there was some stuff we missed. It happens. We’re not going to grab every card that goes up because we just can’t think every possible thought. I could have guessed a bunch but I don’t like to recommend moves to other people based on guesses when there is so much money to be made on moves that are backed by data. You know what wasn’t back by data last week but is this week?

Specifically, this bad boy.

Spiritkeeper didn’t differentiate itself as much last week when we had fewer decks in the database and now it’s the second-highest signature card. It’s very, very good in the deck. It’s also basically too late to buy any.

It looks like there are still cheap copies. The listed median is $1. There’s still time. But is there? Let’s dig a little deeper.

The only people still holding are the pain-in-the-ass sellers who have 1 copy and are charging like $3 for shipping meaning the card isn’t $1, it’s $4 or $5.

Then you have this jackwagon with 12 copies, charging $10 for each one. This is a $10 card, it just doesn’t know it yet. This is a bit of a reminder to really check what a card’s price realistically is because just glancing at TCG Player’s home page as a card is beginning to sell out can be deceiving. There are about 36 copies of this card, 24 of which are virtually a dollar but are actually $4 and 12 of which are $10. The real average price is $6. If you can get it cheaper elsewhere, try. I had to pay $0.25 a copy plus $3 shipping on a few of the sites I buy from that haven’t updated the price and still ended up paying about $2.50 a copy that way since I had to buy from lots of individual sellers.

All of this was not to gripe that we missed the boat on Spiritkeeper or Massacre Wurm. There are other opportunities. Those specs would have required us to guess and while people who make those “obvious” buys act like people who don’t call those shots for their readers are oblivious or stupid, they also don’t talk about all the times those “obvious” specs never panned out. I make a lot of calls like that for fun but I’m not exposing you to as much risk as I expose myself to. I’m giving you advice based on analysis of data and as much as FOMO makes it feel like we should have leapt at Spiritkeeper before the numbers were in, there’s a very good case to be made for waiting. When you wait, things you didn’t expect can happen.

What Didn’t We Expect?

It seemed obvious to #TeamObvious that Vannifar was THE money commander. Buy Intruder Alarm, Thornbite Staff. Buy Woodland Bellower, that’s in 72% of the Vannifar decks. Vannifar continues to move prices, but that was if not obvious, at least predictable. Want to know what I didn’t predict and why I’m glad I saved some speculation scrilla for when we had more data? #Teamobvious missed this, too – we all did.

Be honest. Did you see the “You can’t play non-creature spells” commander getting built 28% more than Vannifar? I sure didn’t. But we have the data and we can see what’s going to move on the basis of this deck seemingly being more popular, at least in the short term, than the “obvious” deck. If people are going to buy obvious cards, we have lots of time to buy the non-obvious ones, and we won’t have to pay $3 shipping on each and every copy we buy, either.

A lot of these are fairly standard, but it’s really interesting to see what happens with one of these little guys.

This is still a bulk rare. It’s in 50% of the iterations of a deck that’s more popular than Vannifar but is that enough to do anything to the price? It’s hard to tell. The issue with non-obvious stuff is it’s not obvious. Obvious stuff sells because it sells not only to players who play with the cards but to speculators who don’t even have to understand EDH to get that obvious cards are obvious pickups. I don’t know if a combination of not being obvious and only being in half of all Nikya decks on the site are enough to pop this bulk rare, but I DO like a graph shape I saw…

… and that’s the foil. While we can’t buy at $2 like we could have a few years ago, I don’t think EDH play alone explains this precipitous rise of late.

The decks jamming old Nully aren’t exactly new. If it’s just age and scarcity and modest demand butting up against reality, it sort of accounts for the slow climb that began to jump in recent years. I think foils are a buy, but I don’t know how much Nikya does it versus them just being a good buy in general and I only just noticed.

Exhibit B is a card that JUST got a reprinting. The demand is new but so is the supply. I think Fauana Shaman is at its price floor regardless of what future demand does and a card this powerful and reprintable is a bit of a craps shoot. I think EDH in general and Nikya specifically has enough time before a potential reprint to make you some money and while I don’t know if this doubles in that period, I think it goes up. Tell a guy with a stock portfoilio you’re not sure if you’re satisfied with a 60% return and tell me what he says. You know what DIDN’T just get reprinted?

Up from a historic low, a period during which you could actually arbitrage copies of this monster, I think Vizier is poised to be a $7 card. It’s a rotated mytic with EDH chops, playability in a popular new deck, weird supply issues given people blew it out of their binder at rotation but dealers don’t appear saturated and 3 fairly powerful abilities, Vizier of Mul-Guya seems pretty healthy.

Speaking of “not reprinted” and “pretty healthy” check out the 2x foil multiplier on this card. 58% of the decks but with a 54% synergy which is fairly high indicating that, ironically, the price which leveled out 2 years ago is due for another bump. If the price climbed from $2 to $6 then without the heavy synergy with a popular new deck, this is a $10 card waiting to happen, and if the non-foil is $10, the foil will be at least $20, maybe more. Even if the prices don’t diverge, you make $8 a copy on the foils versus $4 a copy on the non-foils. You make the same rate if the prices don’t diverge (I can’t imagine a playable card will see convergence when the multiplier is at 2x, usually a soft minimum) so I guess buy whichever – I am more bearish on foils than the rest of my colleagues at this site.



With a half dozen ways to get Nikya out of the way from bouncing her with Temur Sabertooth to making her fight something bigger with Ulvenwald Tracker to saccing her to something, it’s possible to play a few non-creature spells in the deck and it’s pretty clear you want to be on Primal Surge. This is a slam-dunk inclusion, it’s on its way up, buylist price is approaching retail, it has no reprints, it’s an 8 year old mythic and I don’t actually need andy more reasons to buy this at $3 and watch it hit $10.

Check the rest of Nikya’s page for more spicy goodness you might want to run yourself and if you buy anything for your deck, buy extras because others are going to be thinking the same thing. Sure, some of the obvious stuff went up between articles, but there’s no reason we can’t make a ton of money just being patient, not gambling and waiting for the data to trickle in. Because we did, no one is fighting us for Nikya staples even though they should sell better to actual players than Vannifar cards. This is why we wait. Speaking of waiting, if you wait until next week, I’ll be back with another article with more tips. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 1/28/19 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.

Ravnica Allegiance’s first legal weekend is behind us, and I think it’s safe to say that the top 8 of the SCG Open (the GP was limited) is not what most of us would have expected. Four midrange decks and two control decks? Only a single Mono-Red Aggro deck in the top 16? Evolving Wilderness at like, 30th or something? It’s clear that Simic is bringing the tools these days, and whether you pair it with black or white, you’re going to have a lot of powerful tools. It appears that much of the strength of the deck leans on the trio of Jadelight Ranger, Merfolk Branchwalker, and Wildgrowth Walker. Who knows if this core of creatures will persist through the Pro Tour, but given that they were a common set of creatures even before RNA dropped, I expect this to be a common sight in the months to come.

Lyra Dawnbringer

Price Today: $12
Possible Price: $22

Looking beyond the piles of midrange decks that used virtually no Ravnica Allegiance cards, I noticed a fair bit of Lyra Dawnbringer sprinkled in the Bant, control, and otherwise various WX decks. Lyra Dawnbringer is of course Dominaria’s Baneslayer Angel (sort of). Lyra is a generically useful card: midrange cost that can slot in as the top end of an aggro strategy or as a finisher in bigger decks, solid stats-to-cmc ratio, evasive, and lifelink to get away from anyone attempting to race your life total.

Lyra appeals to me as a card well situated to grow in price relative to other, more frequently seen cards this weekend. Jadelight Ranger was everywhere, but that’s already a $9 rare. While it could still rise a few bucks, and may even top $15 if this level of midrange persists, it’s not the type of bet I want to be making. Same goes for most of the other rares that we saw a good deal of this weekend. Lyra, on the other hand, is from an older set (good), mythic (good), and showed up in a variety of strategies (good). Her mana cost is easy, which means she slots into plenty of color combinations (good), and with how flexible Standard mana is right now, it won’t be hard for decks to add white (good). I’d consider the biggest barrier to be that a player is unlikely to want four, and we saw a lot of sideboard action for Lyra this weekend. This is counterweighted by the fact that even if she’s “only” a sideboard card, if she’s a key sideboard card that’s important to the strategy, that’s still good demand. And not being needed in full playsets is tempered by the diversity of strategies making use of her.

If Lyra’s play pattern moves up from here, which it may as people decide it’s a strong tool to combat various midrange and creature based strategies, her price will too. $11 is relatively low for a playable mythic angel, and if she becomes solidified in Standard as a go-to tool for anyone with white mana, we could easily see her cresting $20.

Whir of Invention (Foil)

Price Today: $8
Possible Price: $20

This is going to be a curious card, and you’ll see why shortly. Whir of Invention showed up in third place at the Modern classic this weekend, in the Whir Prison deck. It’s an Ensnaring Bridge deck, and it uses four of the blue Chord of Calling to find whichever component is necessary at the moment. It’s an obnoxious deck that works by looping Ipnu Rivulet with Crucible of Worlds to mill you out. Whir isn’t exactly new to the format, having been introduced during Aether Revolt, and it seems to have become the main version of the Lantern deck, now appropriately titled ‘Lanternless’ on mtgtop8.com.

Whir is seemingly going to be a standard in the Ensaring Bridge prison decks for the forseeable future, and possibly any other artifact-based combo deck that arises. After all, Chord of Calling has found itself in a variety of creature strategies over the years, and I expect Whir will do the same. All of this points to foils setting themselves up to look great over the next several months to two years, as a key engine piece in at least one major Modern strategy, as well as a fairly popular EDH deck – it’s in over 6,500 lists on EDHREC.com, an impressive stat for such a new card.

Where Whir is odd is in the inventory. Look up Whir foils on TCG and there’s only 12 vendors, half of which want $10 or more. That’s great, right? Except one of the vendors selling copies for $7 is ChannelFireball. And they’ve got 50 listed copies. Huh? 50? What the heck happened here? Do other vendors have that many and they simply haven’t listed them? One wonders. Regardless, Whir foils at $7 are tempting. I’m currently staring at my CFB credit and wondering how many I should buy, 0 or 50.

Thousand-Year Elixir

Price Today: $8
Possible Price: $20

Meanwhile in EDH, we’re starting to get more RNA commander lists in, and to nobodies surprise Vannifar is showing up in the top lists this week. (Although, perhaps surprisingly, both Tesya and Nikya are more popular. Nikya?) It’s not hard to figure out what the most common cards in Vannifar are; every Pestermite effect and Intruder Alarm is the first 10 or 15 cards into the list.

Looking just past that, you’ll find Thousand-Year Elixir. This is an old Lorwyn favorite that has a nifty effect. It grants pseudo haste, in that your creatures can tap for their abilities immediately, but can’t attack yet. One could argue in EDH that ‘attack haste’ is worse than ‘ability haste,’ making Elixir a powerful effect. Tack on that Elixir can also untap a creature once, and you can see why Vannifar players are going to want to make sure this ends up in their 99.

Elixir has been printed three times; Lorwyn, Commander 2013, and Commander Anthologies. Lorwyn is older than 5% of the room at a GP, Commander 2013 is about 25% of Magic’s lifetime ago, and Commander Anthologies was a limited run. All of this is to say supply on non-foils is actually quite low. I count something like 40 total across the three printings on TCG. You’ll find roughly that many elsewhere across the major vendors, with SCG holding most of the additional inventory.

100 copies of Elixir isn’t much when you consider that EDHREC is showing 40 submitted lists for Vannifar in the last few days. How many Vannifar lists do you think will have been built by spring? A couple in each state would rapidly outpace the available Elixir supply. Commander reprints aren’t until November either. Looking pretty good for Elixirs in the next few months, I’ve got to say.

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 #323 I Am Ironman

http://traffic.libsyn.com/brainstormbrewery/Brainstorm_Brewery_323_I_am_Ironman.mp3

Corbin (@CHosler88), Jason (@jasonEalt), and DJ (@Rose0fThorns) welcome longtime patron of the cast Steve (@SteveMKestner) to discuss all the hype surrounding the new Ravnica Allegiance set, Commander and even the latest Modern Ban.

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

Time to buy GRN!

This is my favorite time of a set. The first weekend we can draft it in person, Standard is shaken up, new prices are flying left and right…and the old set is at its highest supply/lowest price.

This week, I want to look at Guilds of Ravnica and figure out what I’m buying and what my timeframe is. Remember, GRN rotates out of Standard in roughly 21 months, so we’ve got some delightful targets that have a good while to hit it big.

Before we get too deep, let’s look at my favorite recent example: Vraska’s Contempt.

Forgive my MS Paint skillz.

Yep, there was a time, right at Rivals of Ixalan being released, when you could buy this for about $6. Pretty soon after, people realized the card is super awesome and they should play a bunch. Teferi showed up not long after, and that shot the card up to $20 briefly.

That brief window is right now. So what’s got Standard legs, and what am I buying for the long term?

Foil Divine Visitation ($13)

The nonfoils perked up a little when Afterlife was previewed, and it’s true that they play nicely together. What I really love is the long-term Commander implications for this card, and $13 is low for a card that is going to be soaked up by players and not be allowed to circulate.

Look at it this way: at the time of this writing, there’s 38 foils on TCG. For comparison’s sake, there’s 70 foils of March of the Multitudes, 96 of Aurelia, but only 28 of Niv-Mizzet, Parun. Hmmmmm… yes, I’d pick that up too, though I’m less enthused. Visitation is a must-have for any white token commander, and Niv is difficult to cast even if he’s the general.

Expansion / Explosion ($1.50)

Ionize ($2)

There’s going to be a mostly-Izzet control deck at some point, and it’ll likely splash for Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. Maybe it’ll be Temur, splashing green for Wilderness Reclamation, but both these spells are at their low (EE has come back down from its brief time at $5) and they are going to get popular again before they rotate out.

Experimental Frenzy ($2.50 nonfoil/$9 foil)

Thousand-Year Storm ($2.50/$8)

Both of these cards have a high casting cost, it’s true, but they are a class of card that will get better with every set of spells printed. Birthing Pod was the same way; every creature printed gave that card a chance to be better, to be broken in new ways. These are two keystones, engines, whatever term you like to use. These aren’t going to light up Standard, but the time will come when they are going to be part of some disgusting turn in Modern and the foils zoom past $20.

Knight of Autumn ($3)

It’s too versatile, and I’m not just talking about the best-of-one craze sweeping Arena. Your worst case is that the card is a 4/3 for three mana. Lots and lots of people are going to try and break Wilderness Reclamation, and the GW decks are already running answers to that card at the same time they are running a 2/1 gain four life against the burn decks.

There’s going to be a point where this card is everywhere. I don’t know when it’ll be, but I know it’ll be before September 2020 and you’ll want to have your copies ready to sell into the hype.

Foil Chromatic Lantern ($9)

The Return to Ravnica foil is $15, but let’s look at where that price has been:

A must-play in decks that are 3+ colors.

Three times since 2012 it’s hit $25, and let’s not overlook the Kaladesh Invention version that landed in September of 2016 and didn’t budge this price much. You should definitely be picking up all the personal copies you’ll need right now, before this rises to meet the RTR version. The Masterpiece means that it’ll never go too crazy, and we’ll get this in a Commander reprint before long, but get all you need and an extra few to trade away when it’s back at $20 in a year.

If you like data, it’s the #15 artifact on EDHREC, with 56,000+ decks running it. There’s 150 foil copies between RTR and GRN on TCGPlayer right now. Make your move.

Risk Factor ($5/$10)

I’m a huge fan of this card. No one is combining it with Browbeat in Modern, but it’s showing up in a range of Modern strategies, my favorite being the ‘Phoenix Deck Wins’ archetype that has put up some MTGO results and won a SCG Classic in December. I’m higher on the foils, but I’m also in for a couple playsets of nonfoils. I underestimated how good this card is, because it can be cast twice. I won’t underestimate what it can do for my wallet.

Foil Beast Whisperer ($5)

This effect exists in a couple of forms, but they tend to cost more (Soul of the Harvest) or be conditional in some way (Beck/Call being two colors, Garruk’s Packleader & Elemental Bond for power 3+, and so on…) and this is even an Elf! The tribe most capable of having a long run of creatures off the top and finishing us all off!

The other giveaway is that this card, unassuming and not really played anywhere yet, has only 50 copies in foil on TCG, between the pack foil and the prerelease foils. I hope you’re able to get some before they are gone.

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.