Monthly Archives: April 2020

Casual Fridays

Godzilla is Here!

Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths has finally been previewed, and I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to Wizards for waiting until after April 1. If they had started on Mondays as usual, and then we’d seen Godzilla stuff, we might not have believed it.

I’m pretty over April Fools stuff, especially as most of the whole world is trying to stay safe from a worldwide pandemic, but that’s me shaking my fist at a cloud again. 

Let’s dive into what we’ve been given with Ikoria, and where things might be going.

First of all, if you haven’t looked at it, take a moment and read the preview article. Then you should go see the Mechanics article.

The main thing from Mechanics is at the end: There’s going to be ten different Companions, cards that can exist outside of the game and can be cast from the Command zone as long as a condition is satisfied. 

Those conditions are going to restrict deckbuilding, but also empower Commander decks to be 101 cards. Let’s all pause for the poor Elemental Otter, named Lutri, the Spellchaser, who has been preemptively banned from Commander games as it would be too universal and incur no cost, and always give a free card to those decks. Amazingly, this is the first time a card has been banned before its release. Not Griselbrand, not Worldfire, no other card has earned this distinction.

I do think these nine other cards are going to have a small amount of demand going forward. Having access to an additional Commander-type card is pretty great, and the ones that have been revealed are worthy effects. Lutri copied a spell, Keruga, the Macrosage makes you build with things that cost 3+ and then rewards you for exactly that. I can see a lot of UGx decks giving up on two-drops in order to have Keruga starting out ready to go alongside their commander.

We are getting one for each color pair, and the four revealed so far impose a lot of restriction on decks, but time will tell if that’s problematic. They are all capable of being Commanders on their own, or in the 99. 

The much bigger deal is the Showcase versions we’re getting this time around. There’s two categories: 19 cards get a Godzilla treatment, and the common/uncommon cards with Mutate get a comic-book-like treatment. The Godzilla variants go down to uncommon this time, and having two different Showcase styles, plus the Extended Art, means a whole lot to keep track of. 

For example, we’re getting three versions of the UB Companion, Gyruda, Doom of Depths:

I like that the Godzilla variants have a totally different name but then a reminder of the name there at the header, and even if this frame/art style isn’t your cup of tea, this is a crossover. Godzilla collectors are going to want this, as what happened with the My Little Pony set, which was offered for $50 but is now going for $75+. 

Magic collectors and Godzilla collectors are going to intersect here, and on top of that, we’re going to be looking at a severely restricted market due to the virus’s impact on local stores and major online retailers.

There are going to be less copies in circulation, and weigh that against the lower number of people who are able to play. I can’t predict what that ratio will be exactly, but I do feel confident that the most premium versions of cards will command even higher multipliers than the previous Showcase versions.

Additionally, the Theros: Beyond Death gods were a bit underpowered. These are not. The mythics are demanding on a manabase, but holy wow. There’s a 3/5 double strike for four mana. There’s more than one 6/6 for five mana, one of them has flying! All of them can mutate onto/with other creatures and give bonuses when that happens.

Will all of this unseat the dominance of Ramp or the Mono-Red menace? Likely not right away, but I’ll be a big fan of picking these up at the end of Ikoria season in preparation for October’s rotation.

What I really want to buy right now is Ikoria sealed product. I wrote about the appeal of the Prerelease packs, especially early on when no one else has cards in hand, but the Collector Boosters ought to be highly sought after. The low prices on Theros Collector Booster boxes compared to Throne of Eldraine is simply a reflection of Theros’s relatively low power level. Ikoria has a stronger theme (two art styles, actually) and more powerful creatures. Buying the boxes and selling the pieces should be profitable early on, but again, a lot depends on the timing. If you’re getting the boxes in mid-to-late May, when the set has gone on for a while, the premiums won’t be as high.

The ratio of cards made didn’t change much from Theros Collector Boosters, according to the article, and that means the extended-art nonfoils are going to offer some impressive gains when they get adopted into some Constructed formats. These are my new favorite targets, as they tend to be a bit more in price but much much lower in number compared to originals or foils.

One more collector target, and one more link. Wizards sent this set off to the printers months ago, before the current pandemic conditions, and one of the special Godzilla versions was named with a ‘Death Corona.’

They’ve announced that these copies are in circulation, but as reprints happen, they will switch over to the Void Invader naming.

Macabre as it may be, the Death Corona cards are going to fetch higher prices than most other cards with misprints. Too many people will want one of these, and I’d expect the foils to really break the bank. You don’t have to agree, or think it’s appropriate, but the provenance and the cultural significance will make these a lot more sought after, and while we’ll never know exactly how many are out there, it’ll be a reduced number as they switch over. My hunch is that the first few cards will be super overpriced, and then will settle down some. If you’re someone that craves to own a Death Corona card, be a little patient so you don’t pay top dollar.

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: Embrace The Tank

Readers!

“Embrace the tank” is a phrase I see a lot on social media because I am from Michigan and the Detroit Red Wings are terrible this year. Had the season not ended, they may have ended up one of the worst teams of all time. Just truly, truly abominable. I’m of course happy because the same friends who want to “tank” the season (not even try so they get last place and have the best odds of drafting 1st overall) were bragging about a 25 year streak of making the playoffs a few years ago and I’m petty. If fans of a team that made the playoffs 25 years in a row can embrace the tank, why can’t we?

You’ve Got Red On You

Card prices are tanking fairly hard. If we’re going to be greedy when others are fearful, we still need to be smart about it. It’s for this reason that I think EDH cards are the way to go. Since EDH is a casual format, people are able to play it on webcam with their friends whereas people can’t really play competitive formats in paper, which insulates EDH card prices. These months of extended social distancing will help a lot of people transition out of paper into digital but with EDH on Arena still impossible, paper EDH is further insulated. Finally, non-rotating formats will benefit as cards lose months of their limited Standard-playable window to a lack of tournament play. All of this bodes well for EDH and we’re seeing that borne out – EDH buylist prices recovered from the initial hit all buylist prices took better than any other format because of course they did.

I’m not going to waste either of our time belaboring this point as you’d much rather talk about cards I think will be good pickups longer term and which have tanked recently. Let’s highlight 5 cards I think are good “Be greedy when others are fearful” buys.

Call is down pretty significantly in the wake of the reprinting in both Masters 25 and Modern Horizons, but more importantly, it’s down about 33% in the last two weeks, which is above average for cards in EDH. This is is the 48th-most-played card in the last 2 years per EDHREC and reprintings have made it more accessible and therefore more popular, which only grows its demand. No one wanted to pay $15 for this, but at $3 or below, you scoop these. It’s likely done getting printed for a while and I think the Corona divot will even out as soon as everything starts to get bought again.

This price tanked so much I opened up a new tab just to double check it wasn’t in Mystery Boosters. Nope. Just one printing, and this week Strike Zone is selling it for literally half of what Card Kingdom was charging two weeks ago. If you can get these for anywhere near $10, I think you do it. I would wait until we get the full decklists from the Ikoira commander products spoiled and THEN do it. The leaked Symbiotic Swarm list didn’t have this, it had Heliod’s Intervention, but I’m not 100% convinced that list is real and there could be another Green deck. Buy smart, we have lots of time.

This went from $40 to $30 solely on the basis of… well the entirely world being on fire and everything being terrible, but my point is that this will be $40 flirting with $50 unless people realize they have to pay back the $1,200 checks they’re getting. a 25% hit to a very popular card in multiple formats can’t be sustained unless the entire Magic economy doesn’t recover and if it doesn’t, what are we even doing here?

Without support from other sets, this is a card whose fate is solely tied to EDH, which I think is a good thing. The EDH economy will continue to be strong for the reasons I enumerated above. Also, I’m running out of things to say about cards all experiencing the same circumstances. Here’s a card that was on its way to $20 and now it’s $10 some places. Can you find these for $8? Buy them off people locally for $5? This is a Top 100 card on EDHREC and it says Tutor in its name.

For comparison’s sake, I included one card that I think has a strong chance at a rebound and was included in Mystery Boosters and I’ll talk about a few things regarding the difference.

Verdict does get play in multiple formats, which is good, but the EDH demand is very robust and enough to move the price if it needs to. This was flirting with $20 before the Mystery Boosters hit shelves and I think the supply from those is a bit overstated. The introduction of copies is going to be much flatter than most sets because big stores are closed, people aren’t super keen to head to the LGS if it’s even open and money is tight right now. Copies will hit the market slowly and I think that will buoy recovery because supply will seem less than it is.

Verdict lost 50% of its value between Mystery Boosters and COVID and that’s about twice what we’ve seen for non-Mystery-Booster EDH staples. Troll and Toad has these under $5, which is closer to a 75% price reduction. If that happens across the board for Mystery Boosters cards, there might be more buying opportunities in that set than we think. In fact, I think I’ll address that more in depth next week. If prices rebound the way they typically do, it will end up halfway between the pre- and post-spike price, which will be a reduction of about 38%, which is the worst we’ve seen for just COVID reductions. If that’s the case, you stand to recover even more value if we’re seeing two different factors reducing the price, one of which works itself out naturally and the other of which is temporary. I think there is more demand for this card at $5 than at $20 and if I wasn’t going to include any Mystery Booster cards to avoid having to type this paragraph and risk being wrong about all of this later but included this card anyway, that should tell you how I feel about scooping these at $5, which is absurdly cheap.

That does it for me. Who knows what will happen in a week? If I am able and allowed, I’ll be back next week with more ideas and I hope you’ll join me. Thanks for reading. Until next time!