Yearly Archives: 2019

Watchtower

The Watchtower 11/18/19 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.

Well, how’s that for a changeup in Standard? Three green cards in one fell swoop is staggering, to be honest. Standard bans are almost always one or two cards at a time, and rarely within the same color. For green to show up to Standard with not just one, but three cards that so violate the rules, is unlike any other event in Magic’s history, really. Many of us remember Darksteel as the most uproarious Standard upset ever, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up wresting that throne away over the next few years. With such a major change it’s hard to even know where to turn for possible specs; we’ll need Magic Arena and the pros to give us an idea of how things shape up from here.

Blighted Woodland (Foil)

Price Today: $3.50
Possible Price: $9

Since the Pioneer B&R list isn’t out at the time of writing, I’m going to focus more on EDH this week. Over in that world, it turns out that the Throne of Eldraine commanders have been holding steady in the top deck slots, with Korvold, Fae-Cursed King clocking more than twice as many Atraxa decks. Alela, Artful Provocateur, Kenrith, the Returned King, and Chulane, Teller of Tales round out four of the top five, with Golos, Tireless Pilgrim sneaking in at third. Even Syr Gwin, Hero of Ashvale is holding steady in sixth. It’s impressive how long this new set of commanders has remained the most popular in the format.

I made a point of dipping into the lands today to see what we could find, and unsurprisingly, I didn’t come out empty handed. Blighted Woodland jumped out at me, with nearly 16,000 lists under its belt. Woodland ticks several boxes; it ramps your mana, it’s a land you can use right away, it fixes your colors, you get to sacrifice a permanent, and it’s recurrable with Loam and other effects, among other benefits. It may not be the sexiest EDH card, but there’s no denying that it does a lot of things players want in a land slot. 

As an uncommon from Battle for Zendikar, there’s been sufficient supply to keep prices suppressed for awhile. BFZ sold a lot of packs, after all. Now we’re at a point where there isn’t much more than 30 foil copies left on TCG, with prices starting around $3.50 to $4. Prices head into the $6 range quickly, and then simply run out. With one foil printing, expect this to continue draining, with low chances of a reprint on the horizon.

Rhythm of the Wild (Foil)

Price Today: $7
Possible Price: $15

There’s no question that Smothering Tithe is the best card out of Ravnica Allegiance, by a significant margin. That card has become as iconic as Doubling Season almost overnight. Quietly behind it in second place is Rhythm of the Wild, with almost 8,000 lists on record. That’s a surprisingly high number, especially considering the sets adjacent to RNA. Other than Tithe, there are like three Standard expansion cards with printed after the Amonkhet block with more play than Rhythm. This is more impressive when it’s noted that Rhythm is a two color card, having landed in, if I’m reading EDHREC properly, 30% of all RG(x) decks that have been created since the card was printed.

Rhythm does a lot for its caster. Disabling counterspells alone can be tremendous against certain decks, invalidating entire defensive strategies from some decks, and irking others. At the same time, Riot gives your creatures haste where they most need it — mana dorks, important activated abilities, opportune turns for attack — and power where haste isn’t necessary. And not just power either, but a +1/+1 counter, which can be further manipulated and improved. All of this isn’t restricted to EDH either. We’ve seen it in both Modern and Pioneer, and it’s not unbelievable to see this becoming a tier two or three card in the latter. I mean, it turns your Incubation Druids into reusable Black Lotus’. T1 dork, T2 Rhythm, T3 double Incubation Druid means you’ve got 11 mana on turn four — and whatever creature you cast will have riot.

There’s roughly 30 vendors of foil Rhythms on TCG as well, although one of the vendors has a 25 copy wall at $10. Given these prices, this stock, and how fresh Rhythm is, watch to see these get picked off fairly aggressively over the next several months. Those 25 $10 copies don’t need to be bought out fully before the lowest price ends up at $15.

Sram, Senior Edificer (Foil)

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $10

Ok, I can’t resist dipping my toe into Pioneer. I don’t know yet what’s getting banned and what isn’t, but given this Standard upset, I have some suspicions. Assuming something green gets banned Pioneer is going to get a good shakeup going, and everyone camping out on Nykthos decks may need to look elsewhere. As an old fan of Cheerios in Modern, seeing the deck pop up in Pioneer brought warmth to my cold steel heart. 

Pioneer Cheerios has a similar build to Modern, with a couple missing pieces. Puresteel Paladin and Mox Opal are gone, so the power level is certainly deflated. In their place you have Sram and Mox Amber, though Amber is leaned on less heavily than one might expect. Your other main vector of attack than Sram is Monastery Mentor, a tool that Modern cheerios used occasionally. Two Sai, Master Thopterists round out the build, providing a slightly less combo-y line of attack than the Modern build. Paradoxical Outcome and Reverse Engineer hold the shell together, providing some potent card draw in a deck full of 0s and 10s. I personally find myself wondering about moving up to the four full Ambers and adding Emry, but I’m writing finance articles, not strategy, so probably best not to listen to me on that. 

For the privilege of owning a foil Sram you’ll pay about $4. There’s only 16 people selling copies on TCG today, though you’ll find 45 at CFB. Beyond that lump it’s slim pickings, and while that represents 11 full decks worth of foils, that’s really not a significant amount of cards when you consider the scale of hunger for Pioneer cards across the world. We haven’t had a true combo deck in Pioneer emerge yet, especially now that Felidar is banned. Is Cheerios going to be the first to make its mark?[/hide] 

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 2013. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.

Uncategorized

One Way or another

There was a time that I used to take bets on cards getting banned. 

And then Hogaak happened, where Wizards first decided to ban an auxiliary card in a format’s new and overwhelming deck, and I lost money because I didn’t think that they would just let it go.

After that, they DID ban Hogaak, causing me to lose money again because I figured they’d made it clear that the old cards were the problem, not the new one that could still be opened.

Now I’m wiser. I don’t have any idea at all what’s going to happen on Monday. Will Oko, Thief of Crowns be dethroned? Will there be collateral damage?

What I do know is, there’s plans to be made in either scenario. 

First, let’s take a moment and appreciate something truly special about Oko’s price: the heavy weight of an expected banning.

Yes, dear reader, CoolStuff was selling Oko for a month at $90, while it was being opened. Then the oppressive nature of the card, and its compatriots in Standard, started dragging the price downwards. 

There’s some hay to be made about how the value of any set goes down over time, and I’m planning on exploring the effect that Collector Boosters are having on the finance of the game, but really, Oko ought to be much more expensive than it is. 

The saturation is quite real:

  • 69% of the Day 1 metagame at the Mythic Championship was some form of Oko deck. There’s a lot of variations, and I appreciate snappy deck names such as Cat Food, but the dominance of the deck in Standard got more profound in Day 2, where the percentage went up, despite the pros knowing it would be popular. Noxious Grasp and Aether Gust were in maindecks all over the place and it didn’t matter much.
  • Oko is showing up in a lot of Modern decks. Whirza likes a copy. Amulet Titan has a couple to play with. There’s some artifact-based decks that are trying to go off with Oko. 
  • Legacy has copies in winning Temur Delver lists.
  • Vintage is rocking Oath of Druids with Oko, powering down their artifacts and giving them creatures to let your Oath resolve. Nasty and powerful.

It’s Oko’s world, until Monday. Oko’s price has been dropping since the dominance started, in defiance of all expectations. When Wizards banned Field of the Dead on October 21, you’d think that Oko (and Oko-related cards) would spike as that deck took over, but it seems people bought in quite reluctantly.

So, we have two scenarios coming next week:

If Oko gets banned

I won’t be shocked if some other green cards get the hammer too, for the record. The only thing that will shock me is if Wizards just unbans Field of the Dead and tells the pros “You figure it out!”

Oko’s price will fall some. Not by much, due to demand in the other formats, and that includes Cube and Commander. Oko’s flexibility and power cannot be denied. I doubt the price will go much below $25, frankly. A lot of Oko’s current price point is tied up in the expectation of getting banned. 

Long-term, however, I think Oko has a lot of potential. Foils of Oko are very low price compared to the original. On TCGPlayer, you can get NM foils for $40, which seems like a very good price even if it’ll never get the heights that the borderless foil has gotten to. Oko is too good in too many formats to stay cheap. Around the time that we start opening Theros: Beyond Death boosters, I want to be picking up Oko for the long term.

What gets unlocked if Oko and some accomplices get banned? Aggro decks get a lot better, and the card I love most in those lists is Embercleave. 

Yes, it’s no longer $5 but it’s gettable at $7.50 and a total face-wrecker. Aggro decks are generally playing three, and if the format swivels to being super fast, this is going to hit $20 again.

I’m also a big big fan of picking up Murderous Rider at about the same price. We’ve seen what powerful, flexible removal spells do over time, and the trajectories of Vraska’s Contempt and Hero’s Downfall tell me to buy while it’s cheap: 

If Oko isn’t banned

It seems super implausible that Wizards would try something like banning Once Upon a Time, Gilded Goose, and Nissa, Who Shakes the World but not banning Oko directly…but it could happen. 

My impulse would be to snap-buy all the Oko copies currently languishing on eBay in the $25 range, hoping to resell at $45 or $50 to the people playing Standard or realizing how good the card is in other formats. 

Given that everyone already expects a banning, this might not work, though. Maybe the price doesn’t change because everyone will expect the next banning to finally take down the menace. Maybe people will expect that the card sucks, without all the good accessories to play with.

To those folks, I’d point to Hogaak. The meta immediately settled on a Bridge from Below build that self-milled wonderfully and then really kicked into gear. Banning the Bridge merely made the deck change to a more Vengevine-focused one. Trying to ban around Oko is going to make some currently cheap cards into very expensive ones, and my best advice there is to make sure you’re primed and ready on our Discord channel.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that Oko was going to be $100 and going to be banned. Eventually, Wizards will see the light and ban the card, and from the ashes, a new Standard will rise.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, 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.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Revisitation

9 Comments

Readers,

When a commander from years back starts making moves, it’s important to look at why. Why do I bring this up?

Image result for are you serious? I just told you that zoolander

…A commander from years back started making moves. It’s not always clear whether the new decks registered are new decks or if they showed back up in the system because new cards made people update their lists, but it is worth it to look at what the new decks look like. New cards that make people update their lists could potentially illuminate new cards that weren’t in the deck before and help us predict two price increases for the price of one. A few new decks registered is a blip, but enough to make it to the front page? That’s significant, and we like to look at things that are significant.

The Deck

Can you tell from the picture? I could be talking about either Edgar Markov or Muldrotha, but today I want to talk about Edgar because it’s less of a “goodstuff” deck and more of a “these specific cards are clearly for this specific deck” and the effect of just that one commander will be more pronounced. Will it be enough to drive prices? Well, that’s what we’re here to determine.

The Impetus

These new cards from the Brawl decks and Throne of Eldraine were good enough to make people head to Archidekt or Deckstats and update their lists. It’s possible it also led to the creation of some new decks, but, either way, it’s worth discussing. Any of these cards alone probably warrant an update and considering Edgar is the 3rd most-built commander of the last 2 years, even a small percentage of people updating leads to a noticeable blip on the radar. So the real question becomes, is this merely an update or do any of these cards change the way the deck plays?

The Way The Deck Plays

Not all of you play or even fully understand EDH and that’s fine. It’s my job to pay attention to that stuff, after all. I have you covered for the most part, but EDHREC does some work for you, too.

You may have seen me mention the filters in the top left by the card portrait on that card’s page. Those filters have titles that are in and of themselves informative. Don’t know how Edgar is built? Let’s check the filters.

That’s a ton of info. Vampire Tribal, Lifegain, Aristocrats (provided you know what that means), sacrifice, +1/+1 counters and Madness are all very self-explanatory.

The cards that are in the “new cards” list all deserve an individual look, so let’s do that.

Duh. This card is basically the new Sol Ring, this is getting added to most decks. This isn’t going to tell us anything.

This isn’t just getting added to the madness builds, and it makes sense. Anje is a 3-drop Vampire that draws cards. You rummage but you still see new cards. Is it changing the way people build? It might. To see if there are cards paired with it that could impact the non-Madness lists, let’s look at Anje’s page as a non-Commander deck inclusion and see if anything pops up there that could also translate because if one cards gets added, the others are likely to as well.

The high synergy cards are cards that get played alongside Anje in non-Anje decks. The Doomed Necromancer is basically the only interesting card here and it’s likely played in non-Edgar decks that include Anje.

Look through this whole page if you want, there don’t appear to be any cards that are in a Vampire deck that get better when you can discard at will and there don’t appear to be any cards that get better when you can discard at will that would be good in a vampire deck. This is a dead end but it’s only our first card so let’s stay positive.

Idol just seems vaguely good. Edgar makes mad tokens and this can draw a card for you, which is actually pretty insane on a 2 mana artifact. Edgar may be the best deck for idol, and that’s something we can check.

Nooottttt even close. While it’s obvious Ghired is going to be number 1 because Idol was in the same precon and the “precon effect” stipulates that cards that are in a precon tend to stay in if they’re marginally good enough because people tend to subtract from precons and not build up from 0. They get the precon, take “bad” cards out and add cards based on the number of slots they have left. However, Idol is overperforming in Alela decks. Remember, this list is sorted by the percentage of decks that could use Idol and do and since Idol is an artifact, any deck could use it. Therefore decks that are built more are statistically going to be higher on the list unless the card is under-represented. A lower percentage of Edgar decks are running it than other, less-built commanders which means it’s underachieving slightly. It’s still very good in the deck but not all Edgar players like cards like this since Edgar is more of a casual commander and, say, Kykar and Sai aren’t.

I think, though, that the decks running Idol are worth looking at. In this list, you have Alela which is #3 this week, Edgar which is #7, Kykar which is #14, and Atla Palani which was top 5 for its first 3 weeks.

Idol is not really at its highest point right now, but it is in the top 10 cards in Commander 2019 in terms of value. How about in terms of adoption? Well, EDHREC has a page for that, too.

Idol is 43rd, in 3% of eligible decks, wedged between Sanctum of Eternity and Wall of Stolen Identity, 2 cards I’m positive you’re not familiar with.

I think the facts that Idol is a token card that keeps your hand full, Alela just got printed and the Naya deck wasn’t very interesting and was likely underbought all point to Idol having some long-term upside. At its current price of under $3, this seems like a good pickup. There are a lot of copies but any future deck that makes tokens will want this and it’s very unlikely it’s ever reprinted. One thing to remember – we’re sorting by percentage, here, and Idol is eligible for basically every deck ever built but it only works in decks that produce tokens and even then it has a higher deck inclusion percentage than Anje Falkenrath does. If you go by sheer number of inclusions, a metric that also matters, only 5 cards in the set are played more – Dockside Extortionist (duh), Ohran Frostfang, K’rrik, Sanctum of Eternity and Bone Miser. I think Idol is a $5 card fairly easily. I don’t know if a mere double-up is good enough finance-wise, but if you trade with people, this is solid. $5 may not even be the ceiling – this draws cards in non-Green decks.

Similarly, this draws cards and in aggressive decks that can dump their hand, this is basically an Underworld Connections that you can tap for mana. I don’t see a lot of reasons not to play any of the castles in basically any EDH deck and the Green one can get pretty absurd. Not much to say here- this doesn’t activate any other cards.

This is an interesting inclusion. Not a lot of people seem to be aware of this card or how it works in go-wide strategies and if people are already adding a mana rock in the form of Arcane Signet, it may be hard to find room for this. The fact that people are doing it in enough numbers to show up is telling. It may be difficult to figure out if this is overachieving in Edgar decks. However, in the set in general, Arcane Signet is in 10 times as many decks as Banner but it’s only in 3 times as many Edgar decks, which seems to imply Banner is overincluded in Edgar decks about 3 times the average. With Edgar being the third-most-built deck of the past 2 years, that’s a lot of copies relative to other cards.

Do I like the foils at $0.50? Not per se. There are a lot of copies out there.

So besides Idol, which I am very bullish on, what else from Edgar decks could go up?

Captivamp is basically at its floor from when it was first reprinted in the precon. The thing about this card is that 60 card casual players love it and they buy 4 at a time. I don’t think this is ever $12 again but I also don’t think $4.50 is correct or that it gets reprinted again.

If you don’t like the shape of that graph, take a look at the price of the foil with Channel Fireball prices in orange instead of Card Kingdom in Pink.

The foil is barely more than the non-foil because it was in a dirt-cheap precon from that era to give players the vampires they needed to play with the ones from Zendikar. I don’t typically like casual foils, but Channel Fireball has the price at basically its historical peak. However slightly, the buy price is also increasing.

This graph only tells half of the story. ABU is sold out at $9. CFB is sold out at $6.50. Troll has one at $11. Miniature Market has one at $7. I don’t know if it’s Modern or Pioneer or what doing this, but this card is disappearing online.

Take a look at Elenda the Dusk Rose while you’re at it – no one has that under $8 and Card Kingdom is currently charging $12.

That does it for me this week. I think even though people updating old lists doesn’t always translate to new copies of everything selling, we used the method to find cards we might not have found otherwise. Most people didn’t even know what Idol did but I think that was a gem and I wouldn’t have noticed Drana starting to dry up if we hadn’t drilled down here. You can develop your own methodology for checking EDHREC as long as you check it often. It updates daily and since the answers aren’t spoon-fed to you, you’re operating with knowledge not everyone has because you figured it out. Thanks for reading – until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 11/11/19 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.

Wizards has unveiled a lot of products and tried many different gambits over the years. Many, even most, have been successful. Some of the duel deck-esque products were met with lukewarm reception, like the Signature Spellbook series, and other product lines that I’m sure I don’t remember. One or two have been overall unpopular — Avacyn’s Helvault comes to mind. Where did Mystery Boosters land? They were more popular than web services crashing while attempting to sell mythic editions, so there’s that. But overall, the Magic community seems to be decidedly unimpressed. As is often the case with a hyped unknown, people’s imaginations designed much more exciting products that the Mystery Boosters couldn’t hope to rival. When it became apparent that this seemed to be “cards Wizards owns” in boosters, without foils or a Masterpiece-style treatment as the odd payoff, public opinion soured quickly. To boot, while the gimmick of the playtest cards is absolutely amusing, they’re effectively silver-bordered cards, which while fun in their natural environment, have ultra-short shelf lives beyond their draft environment. (Check out prices on foil Conspiracies and draft-matter creatures from the same set.) We found out today that the LGS versions of the boosters drop 121 foils that didn’t appear in the convention packs, and we don’t know what those cards are, since they’re not the same cards as the 1,694 we’ve already seen. Will those be something special, or just normal foils of a handful of cool cards? We’ll find out in March, it seems.

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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 2013. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.