Monthly Archives: August 2020

Watchtower

The Watchtower 08/31/20 – Infallible Arbitrage

You won’t believe this one simple trick that’s guaranteed to make you money! Vendors hate it!

Clickbait aside, if you’ve been reading my articles for a reasonable length of time, you’ll know that there are always some excellent arbitrage opportunities in flipping cards from Europe to the USA. Sometimes it can be buying cards in bulk at release for longer holds into a buylist, sometimes it can be for quick flips, but either way it tends to work out pretty well. This week I wanted to have a look at a particular set of cards that have consistently been some of the best and safest cards to arbitrage, so read on to find out what I’m talking about…

I’m talking about Judge foils, and the last few years have proven that it’s honestly pretty hard to miss on them. Imperial Seals bought at €85 sold in the US for over $200 within 12 months, and are now closing in on $500. Rhystic Studys and Food Chains bought at €30-40 last year are now selling for $100 in the US, and so on. So what are the best opportunities at the moment?

Elesh Norn (Judge Foil)

Price on MKM: €150 ($180)
Price on TCG: $295

After Elesh Norn was first released as a Judge foil back in 2014, it wasn’t long before the card shot up and got over $700. It was the only card to ever be printed with Phyrexian text on it, meaning that it was hugely sought after, and being in pretty low supply the market drained quickly. It wasn’t until a reissue in 2017 that the price was brought back down to around $250, and then another reissue in the latter half of 2019 brought it right down under $170.

This was a slightly better pickup a month ago when there were still €110 copies on MKM, but even now at €150, I think it’s still a safe bet. The cheapest NM copy on TCGPlayer is $295, so still a very nice margin there, and there are only 9 NM copies total on TCG – not exactly a lot. By the time you get this from Europe to the US I wouldn’t be surprised to see prices well over $300, so don’t hang around if you want to get in on this one.

Demonic Tutor (Judge Foil)

Price on MKM: €90 ($107)
Price on TCG: $160

No matter how many times Demonic Tutor is printed, in whatever form, it always goes back up. Remember when the UMA printing brought it down to $20? And now it’s $32 again. 67k EDH decks is a LOT, and it doesn’t take many of them wanting the new Judge foil version to push the price up. $107 to $160 isn’t as big a gap as it might seem once you factor in fees and shipping, but I like holding onto this one a little while. I can see it pushing $200 and above within the year, which is much tastier.

The one caveat here is that we might see a reissue of Demonic Tutor in the next wave of Judge promos, so a good plan is either to flip this one relatively soon, or just buy more and dollar-cost-average when the next wave hits. It’s often the case that with a second wave, the price ends up lower than it was from the first wave, but then bounces right back up in 12 months or so. This is exactly what happened with Rhystic Study and Food Chain, but there was still plenty of room to make money on both cards, both before and after the second wave.

Sliver Legion (Judge Foil)

Price on MKM: €75 ($90)
Price on TCG: $325

Yep, you read that right. $235 difference here, but copies in Europe are draining hard and the €75 ones won’t be around for long. Only 5 listings on TCG ranging from $325 to $800 shows seriously low supply of this card, and major vendors are all out of stock. It’s not the most popular EDH card compared to some other Judge promos, but if you’re playing a Sliver deck then you’re playing this card, and your only options are this one or the Future Sight version, which I think has inferior art.

This is definitely a quick flip target if you can get it, and even if the US price retraces a bit once some more copies hit the market, I can’t see it sinking back down anywhere close to the $90 range. Again, we might see another wave of these promos sent out, but you should be able to flip this long before that happens.

Lastly, if you’re wondering how to go about getting a foothold in EU arbitrage, you can check out my article on it here, and if you’re a Protrader you can also hop into our Discord server and link up with members on the opposite side of the pond from you. Any questions, hit me up on Twitter or in the Discord!

David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern, EDH and Pioneer. Based in the UK and a new writer for MTGPrice in 2020, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.

Casual Fridays

Core 2020 at Rotation

Next week, we should start seeing official previews for Zendikar Rising. There have been some unofficial leaks, but I’ve never believed in those speculations and if I write something here, I want to be confident in it, not building a whole cart of cards based on one grainy image.

Rotation is upon us, and in recent weeks, I’ve gone over all the rotating sets and tried to help you pick what’s underpriced. The last one I’m getting to is Core 2020, the last set before Collector Boosters entered our awareness and the first set with an enhanced foil drop rate. Consequently, you’re not going to see any Extended Art/Showcase/Borderless picks here, just the last gasp of foil vs. nonfoil. Ah, those simpler times.

To the cards!

First of all, we need to talk about how cheap the cards in this set are. They are definitely feeling a bit underpowered compared to the ban-fest that was Throne of Eldraine, but the #6 and #8 cards on the list of ‘what’s worth the price of a pack’ are both uncommons. 

Granted, Twinblade Paladin was from a Planeswalker deck, but you get the idea…and let’s start there. The Twinblade cannot be had in foil, but it is a $5 card. It comes down as a 3/3 double strike in Commander, given that it says 25 life and not the more recent templating of ‘five more life than your starting total.’ Then it grows with every bit of incidental lifegain you can throw at it, a pretty solid card but the distribution here is key: You’ve got to open a $15-$20 package to get one of these, and that sets a price ceiling. If you can find the deck for $10, it’s hard to lose money, given that you get a booster pack, but the potential is still there.

If you like to play lifegain decks, I’d get your copy now. The ramp to $10 is not a slow one on TCG, and specs like this absolutely depend on never getting reprinted. Most of the Planeswalker deck exclusives are not this good, and are tied to their specific (crappy) planeswalker, so I’d rate the reprint risk as medium to high. It’s been a while since we had a lifegain-focused Commander deck, and this would be a prime candidate for inclusion.

Veil of Summer ($7 nonfoil/$43 foil) – For a card that got banned from Standard in November, the graph looks remarkably healthy, even as the banhammer hit in Pioneer, Historic, and Modern:

I have to say, this is a Commander card with a healthy dose of Legacy love. More than 14,000 decks play this card, including a boatload of competitive EDH builds too. Wizards knows this card was a mistake, and there’s only 12 NM foils on TCG right now. And this is with the increased foil drop rate! As an extra kick, since it’s uncommon, there’s no prerelease foils out there!

I wouldn’t be shocked if one day we got Secret Lair: Banned and this was one of the cards. I also wouldn’t be shocked if this was a $60 foil in three months. Given that the reprint risk has never been higher, I feel like you should at least get foils for the decks you use. This is one of those ‘they can’t reprint everything’ specs because they really don’t want to reprint a card that’s been banned in so many formats.

Vivien, Arkbow Ranger ($5/$11) – Picking up this version of Vivien is basically placing a bet on the future of Pioneer in paper. There’s a mono-green planeswalker-focused deck that loves going big with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, and assorted delightful Karn, the Great Creator targets in the sideboard. If you think Pioneer is going to come back in a big way, this is a card you want to stock up on. Mythic, summer set, it’s a four-of…it checks all the boxes you’d hope for in a big spec. 

Has to be said, though, that we’re in an uncertain timeline. If the pandemic were not happening, this would be a lock. But if the pandemic wasn’t happening, this wouldn’t have gotten so cheap in paper. One of the indicators I look for in this regard is that online, she’s nearly 9 tickets. That’s a noticeable gap and it means something is happening online that isn’t happening in paper…yet. I do think Pioneer will be back in person eventually, but the uncertain timeframe has me leery on this.

Lotus Field ($6/$12) – There’s a few fun decks in Modern and Pioneer that will tap and untap this a whole bunch, play Omniscience, and then win with Enter the Infinite/Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. That’s awesome. It’s also in 6k Commander decks online, which is a high enough number that I want to have a few foils in reserve for when they hit $20.

Icon of Ancestry ($1.50/$3) – Go look around at what’s in stock on this and you’ll see that a surprising number of places don’t have this in stock. It’s a tribal enabler, which is good, but it’s also quite likely to be reprinted in a future Commander product. Foils are where you want to be here, and won’t take much to hit $10, given how quickly the ramp goes up into the $6 range for foils on TCGPlayer.

Gargos, Vicious Watcher ($1.50/$4) – Gargos caught a minor bump when Zaxara, the Exemplary came along in Commander 2020:

Yes, Hydras just got all the love with this new Commander but this has a clear place and it’s one of the first cards people will reach for on Hydra builds. I love tribal payoffs, and this is clearly one of them. Plus the buylists offer a pretty safe haven: foils are being bought around $2 in store credit, so time your purchases well and you’re insulated from things going wrong.

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: Crime in Partners

Readers!

INSIDER TRADING ALERT

The price of Thrasios went up recently, coinciding with dozens of other expensive cards played in Competitive EDH going up and for months, everyone thought the two events were related. Now, months later, we see that Thrasios was bought because there are new Partners in Commander Legends, something no one could have predicted. This is a clear case of Insider Trading, Conflict of Interest, and some other words I heard watching 10 minutes of MSNBC.

Since the nefarious actors who perpetuated this crime didn’t leave any copies for the rest of us, we’re forced to make do with the copies that… have gone down in price since the spike? That’s weird. This buyout was fairly sloppy and it wasn’t very thorough. That’s good news for us, actually, because it gives us a chance to look at what kind of cards we should be taking a look at given there are more chances for them to be relevant moving forward.

We don’t know what the new partners will be but I think we can at least evaluate the old ones in terms of how likely they are to pair well with something new. The ones that are already good and expensive won’t matter because they’ll be made into goodstuff decks regardless. Here are the current partners with the most upside, imo.

Effects that are good broadly are going to be good choices for future gains. Ikra was printed in Commander Anthology volume 2 so there are more copies of this than some of the partners that weren’t. Ikra is good with any new partner that lets you pay life to do things, grows creatures when you gain life, makes creatures bigger, etc. The price went up a bit but there are still lots of copies available even though people had all day Sunday and Monday to buy them. I think this is a fair low-risk spec and copies should be easy to track down.

This is the lowest-risk, highest-possible reward one and has the lowest buy-in price. If you’re looking for a bit more risk and a bit more potential reward, I have one.

I like to talk about second spikes a lot. What I mean when I say that is a situation where a card’s price goes up precipitously, equilibrates then goes up again. The first time a card spikes, a limited amount of available copies at retail sell out quickly. Dealers raise their buylist prices to get the card back in stock, people find mispriced copies at the LGS and people who had been sitting on them fish them out of boxes and binders to sell or trade into the hype. This concentrates the loose copies in the hands of dealers. When the card spikes again, no one has the option of the cheap LGS copies, or pulling it out of a box and they have to pay retail. The price goes up harder and higher that second time without loose copies in the wild to attenuate the blow. If Kydele is relevant in the new context of a bunch of new partner commanders, it has demonstrated it can go to $15 and can do again. I think Kydele is underrated as all heck and my first deck with partners was Kydele and Thrasios which was so good and consistent I took it apart. Kydele makes a lot of mana, it’s in the 2 best colors in EDH and something is bound to come along that draws lots of cards. If you can get these under $10, seems like you do it.

The ship has largely sailed here. If you can get these on Card Market, do it. If you find them under $10, do it. Reyhan was in Breed Lethality, which was in Commander Anthology 2, so there are a few more copies out there just like with Ikra Shadiqi, but this got a lot of attention given how good it is with Sengir, Dark Baron which is, and I can’t stress this enough, a garbage, terrible card that introduced a new thing you have to do in EDH where you have to remember what everyone’s life totals are at the beginning of every turn in case someone dies. Because there isn’t enough to keep track of already, right? I think the partners revealed later will be better than Baron Sengir and it’s likely one or more will be a better pairing for Reyhan.

Speaking of “The ship has sailed, get these on MKM” Bruse Tarl has been underrated for years. Bruse is in the Breya deck, which is about as difficult to find sealed for a reasonable price as the Atraxa deck (Breed Lethality). If you’re not sure which cards came in which deck, don’t worry, here’s a handy refresher. Attacking with creatures is stupid and hard in Commander and I think people may have forgotten that. This certainly wraps things up with infect or a huge creature, but that was a thing before and no one cared because this was $6 for a whole year.

The rest of the partners are either bad or they’re too good on their own for them not to already be identified. The price of Vial Smasher came away down after its fake-out spike a few months back, but Vial Smasher doesn’t pair with anything. It could, I don’t know what the unrevealed partners are. That said, I tried to come up with some text that would make Vial Smasher part of a winning duo and couldn’t. I would focus on underrated ones like Ikra, maybe a good but high-upside one like Kydele and try to swipe some Brusers from MKM. That said, there’s one more kind of card that matters.

It’s so funny to witness in real time as Card Kingdom gets something right away and competitive sites where competitive players buy competitive cards lag far behind. CFB isn’t selling out of Bastion Protector at $8 and CK can’t keep them in stock at $13. Exploit the insularity of EDH players’ buying habits for profit.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Join me next week for more ideas about this wacky format, and hopefully a few more preview cards. We could talk about the Green spellbook and how nuts it is. Or I could build my Omnath deck a month early. There’s no wrong answer! Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 08/24/20 – Jumping Back in Time

Double Masters? Haven’t heard of her. Over the weekend we had the kickoff of Commander Legends previews, along with the full set of the Commander Collection: Green released. It’s only been four months since Commander 2020 was released, but it certainly feels like an age ago – we’ve had M21, Jumpstart and Double Masters released on us since then, have now started Commander Legends previews and will be soon to start Zendikar Rising previews. It seems that Wizards are really testing the limits as to how much product they can shove down our throats before we stop buying everything – but it doesn’t look like we’ve hit the bar quite yet, as although there is definitely some product fatigue, people are still buying like crazy even during a pandemic.

So although it was only four months ago, let’s jump back in time and take a look at the winners and potential gainers from Commander 2020 (also known as Commander: Ikoria).

I remember when we first saw the free spells from C20 previewed, and thinking “hmm these seem quite good, maybe I should pick some up”, but before you could blink preorders for Fierce Guardianship had shot up to $30. Four of the five free spells are currently taking the top four spots from the set, with the green one trailing miserably miles behind. It’s pretty tragic – you would’ve thought they might have given green a small overrun effect, or token creation of some sort, but no, it got a fog. Great.

Anyway, with those cards taking up a good chunk of the EV from the set, I want to have a look at some of the other new cards and reprints that look set to do well from here on.

Verge Rangers

Price today: $1.60
Possible price: $5

White has a long and storied history of being the least powerful colour in Magic, never really getting to do anything broken and being notoriously poor at accruing card advantage. Wizards have very slowly started to give the colour some more card advantage and better tools, with Smothering Tithe proving to be a very popular EDH card, and now Verge Rangers looks set to be another boon for white.

I think that this is the first time white has been given the ability to play cards from the top of their library, whilst the other colours have all had this ability in some form or another for a while. Verge Rangers unfortunately doesn’t let you play extra lands, but it’s still a good catch-up mechanism to try and keep up with the green decks. It’s a decent body on top of that, so definitely a pretty good rate overall.

Discounting the free spells, EDHREC has Verge Rangers is the top mono-coloured card from C20, and if we’re looking at raw numbers (not percentages) then it’s the most included card full stop (a bunch of the 3 colours cards rank above it because their percentage includes are higher due to having fewer total decks they can go into). I think that this will become a long-term staple for white EDH decks, so I don’t think you can go very wrong picking bricks of these up at $1.60.

Species Specialist

Price today: $0.50
Possible price: $3

Another mono-coloured card (read: goes in a lot of different decks) to be doing well is Species Specialist. I have to imagine that this slots into pretty much any tribal-based deck that can run it, and the EDHREC data backs that up. The top commander for it are almost all tribal commanders, and I think that one of the best decks for the Specialist has to be Grismold, the Dreadsower, as it gives all your opponents plants too, and Species Specialist triggers off any creature of the chosen type dying, not just ones you control. Other good synergies are where your commander is a sacrifice outlet, like Endrek Sahr and Marrow-Gnawer, or in fact the Silvar / Trynn deck that the card comes in.

50 cents for this does seem pretty low to me, as I think it’ll be a popular tribal card for EDH and casual decks going forward, giving the ability to get some serious card advantage going. I’d be happy to sit on a bunch of these and buylist out for $2-3, possibly more, in a year or so.

Tidal Barracuda

Price today: $1
Possible price: $5

I actually really like this card and think it goes into a lot of decks, and a lot of different types of deck. Blue is the most popular colour in EDH, so we’re already winning there. Barracuda is the top mono-blue card from C20, so still looking good. Now let’s read the card.

Albeit strapped to a creature which is generally the most easy thing to kill in EDH, we’ve got quite a unique effect here: everyone can cast everything at instant speed, but not on your turn. Giving everyone else flash might sound scary, but if they’re not interacting with you on your turn then you have a lot less reason to care. I can see this leading to a lot of situations where your opponents interact with each other a lot and can’t do much about your stuff, meaning you can leave them to take each other out and then swoop in to win the game.

As well as that, it gives excellent combo protection; generally an effect we’ve only seen from white and the likes of Grand Abolisher and Silence prison-style cards. Giving that ability to mono-blue is some serious game, meaning that if you can untap with a Barracuda in play then you don’t need to worry about holding up extra counterspells whilst going off. This can also play well in group hug style decks, giving your opponents a helpful effect whilst actually helping you a lot more than them.

David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern, EDH and Pioneer. Based in the UK and a new writer for MTGPrice in 2020, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.