Monthly Archives: April 2021

Watchtower

Godzilla vs Your Wallet

We’re almost a year out from the release of Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths, and although most of them started out pretty cheap, some of the Godzilla alternate art cards have been on the move in a serious way. Ghidorah, King of the Cosmos (also known as Illuna, Apex of Wishes) (yes these names are unnecessarily confusing) foils have popped to $300+ on TCGPlayer, with only six copies available, and others are heading that way too.

Try not to confuse these ones with the comic book style alternate arts, because there are multiple versions of some of these cards just to keep us on our toes. There are some Godzilla variants that have great potential but haven’t quite popped off yet, so strap in and let’s take a look!

Dorat, the Perfect Pet (Sprite Dragon) (Foil)

Price today: $7
Possible price: $20

Sprite Dragon has become a staple in Modern UR Blitz decks, as well as being adopted into a multitude of other formats including Standard, Legacy and Vintage. It’s at its most powerful when you’re stuffing your deck full of zero and one mana spells, something which is much easier in older formats, and can hit really hard pretty early if you get off to a good start. Combine it with a turn one Monastery Swiftspear and you’re going to be killing your opponent more quickly than they might like!

The foil Godzilla versions of these are starting to run pretty thin on the ground, down to 21 listings on TCGPlayer now. This is only an uncommon so don’t expect it to reach the dizzying heights of cards like Ghidorah, but I think that a triple-up from $7 should easily happen within the next few months, or sooner if the Godzilla hype train keeps rolling. There are cheaper copies in Europe too, starting around €2 and supply being a little deeper – so if you can pick some up there then I’d advise doing so.

Biollante, Plant Beast Form (Nethroi, Apex of Death) (Foil)

Price in Europe: €20 ($24)
Price in US: $70
Possible price: $100+

Moving away from competitive formats, Nethroi has remained the most popular commander built from Ikoria pretty much since the set was released, and it’s also one of the top EDH cards from the set for part of the 99 as well. Mutating it really isn’t too difficult in EDH, and if you start playing around with cards that can have negative power in the graveyard (like Death’s Shadow and Scourge of the Skyclaves), then you can really start doing silly things with it.

The vast price gap between Europe and the US here might indicate that this should be purely an arbitrage pick, but considering the prices we’ve seen Ghidorah post I could actually see Biollante hitting well over $100 at some point in the not-too-distant future as well, as another mythic from the set. There are only four of these on TCGPlayer but you might be able to find some cheaper elsewhere in the US – that being said, if you have access to Europe then these are a slam dunk at €20.

We’ll probably see Ghidorah retrace a bit from $300 but I wouldn’t be surprised to see these heading in that direction before long as well – after all, Ghidorah was a $60 foil just a couple of months ago.

Mothra, Supersonic Queen (Luminous Broodmoth) (Foil)

Price in Europe: €27 ($32)
Price in US: $78
Possible price: $100+

Finishing off today, Mothra has also proven to be powerful both in competitive and casual formats, popping up in combo decks using Solemnity as well as being the second most popular white card in the set for EDH (behind Drannith Magistrate, which is fair enough really). What we’re here for though is the Godzilla variant of the card, because just like Biollante it’s way cheaper in Europe than it is in the US…but the $78 US copies could easily still be a buy here.

This one’s another mythic from the set which means there aren’t many around, especially in the special version, and with only 13 listings on TCGPlayer they’re starting to be more difficult to get hold of. MKM is your best option here, but if you can’t get those then I’d advise hunting around some different sites or LGSs for better deals. Either way, I think that these are headed over $100 soon enough, and it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see a reprint of these versions any time soon, if ever.

If you’re after personal copies of any of the Godzilla cards then I’d advise picking them up as soon as you can, because the only way is up from here.

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

Enrolling at Strixhaven

All right, we have a release date, we have the full Commander lists, we know all of the Mystical Archive cards. We’re even got a few days of preorder prices to look at and think about as we get ready to make our purchases. The beginning of the set is always an exciting time, so let’s get into what’s a good price, what to wait for, and what is going to happen with the special versions.

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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: Hot Specs for Cool Decks

Readers!

There are 2 new preconstructed decks revealed so far and I want to talk about both of them. If there are actually 5, you could get access to this article on Tuesday by becoming a Pro Trader, just saying. Early access to the articles is just one of the many benefits. I mean, this isn’t even me trying to pitch Pro Trader, this is just me uncomfortable that I only have 2 decks to talk about and you have information that I don’t about what’s in the other 3. I’ll talk about the rest of them next week – Tuesday if you found this paragraph charming, Thursday if you didn’t.

Lorehold and Prismari are revealed so far and I think despite RW usually being a pretty weak pairing, things seem different with this set. They used old, familiar color pairings but really did work to put a new twist on them – Lorehold is NOT Boros. This isn’t a combat-oriented precon, it’s leaning a bit into White’s “Archaeology” theme that hasn’t been explored much since like, Antiquities, and giving us some real value out of the graveyard in ways Boros never dreamed of. The precon also contains a very, very good reprint.

I don’t want to suck up to WotC too much (here; I ABSOLUTELY sucked up to them on Twitter and I’ll do it again) but this is a great reprint. What I won’t tweet is that they don’t deserve a ton of credit here because this was closer to $10 than $30 when they put the precon together to send off to the printer. It worked out for us, like it worked out in 2016 the first time this card was reprinted and sunk to below $5.

This won’t sink to $5 ever again and won’t ascend to $30, most likely, but there is still money to be made when this bottoms out. This should regain some value because it’s a bonkers card and it’s a Dargon and it steals ALL of their artifacts. Good God, this card is really good. Wherever this stops, buy it, it will go back up. This graph basically starts where it was reprinted and look at that curve.

There are some really solid reprints here beside Hellkite Tyrant, but I’m not sure too many of them have a chance to get back to their pre-reprint levels the way Tyrant will. There is one card I like, though.

This was also pretty reasonable when it was slated for the reprint but with the Elves shenanigans happening lately, this popped off in a big way. I think it’s likely this at least approaches the $20 it hit in 2019. This Lorehold deck could be the RW deck from Commander 2015 – it didn’t sell well but it was the surprise value winner a year later with Urza’s Incubator, Fiery Confluence, Blade of Selves and Gisela. We have seen $40 precon decks with one $50 card in them just this last year and it should be affordable to buy these decks and get your value back in basically 2 cards and have the rest of the deck be pure profit.

The new cards in the deck matter, too.

Tax is likely going to be a second Smothering Tithe rather than a new Smothering Tithe. With the other cards in the deck, it seems fairly likely that Monologue Tax’s price will be under $10.

Although it seems some people are eager not to make the same mistake they did when they underestimated Smothering Tithe. Where will Monologue Tax go if it’s half as good as Tithe?

And that’s with a reprint in the Brawl decks. Monologue Tax is no Smothering Tithe, but it’s close-ish and I think it’s not unreasonable to expect it in the $12-$15 range, but I bet it goes down before it goes up unless you find a presale price that’s cheaper than the ones that exist now. Be patient, let the feeding frenzy come and go and let everyone else test this in their decks.

The Prismari deck doesn’t have quite the same amount of bonkers reprint value, but it’s still pretty solid. OK, that’s misleading. This deck has like 0 value. Want to know the most expensive cards in the deck right now?

It could mean that the deck is bad and is always bad, but there is hope nestled among the new cards.

Everything in the deck costs a million mana, which is fine with Rousing Refrain being cast for free every once in a while. The real monster is the commander, though.

Preliminarily, take a look at Thousand-Year Storm which dodged a reprint in this deck, which is silly considering there are 2 $20+ cards in the Lorehold deck. I did get my Swarm Intelligence stonks spanked, though, but I deserve that, I guess. When the full deck is on EDHREC, I’ll have some cards to look at, but I have a few ideas based on looking around the net to see what people are building.

This is already on its way to the moon, or at least near-earth orbit with the parts of space shuttles and junked Soviet satellites. That’s pretty good, right? Buying in at $10 feels weird, but there are $8 or $9 copies available and I think this is $20 in a year barring intervention.

I bet you didn’t know this was going for this much. This is a beefier version of Young Pyromancer and EDH players are very aware of it even if some of the rest of us weren’t. This is on its way up and double triggering this seems cool.

Finally, a card that I need to show TCG Prices for because the graph on Card Kingdom is messed up.

This looks like a useless graph, but it’s actually not. Let me explain what is happening here. Mizzix was an $8 card that appeared to be going for $1 every few months. What happened there? Put simply, Card Kingdom doesn’t do a good job with their API that other sites scrape. When there are no copies of Mizzix listed, it doesn’t list the price it was going for when it sold out like it does for other cards because there is a $1 copy of the foil oversized card from the EDH decks in stock. We can see every time Mizzix sold out on Card Kingdom in the last few years. It happens quite a bit. That’s something worth knowing. This was selling out before it had a nuts deck like Veyran to go in.

Veyran also ends up in the 99 of decks like Kalamax, but I don’t know if that makes anything move. Kalamax is pretty popular already and I don’t know if adding Veyran to the 99 juices it at all. You can certainly look at Mizzix and Kalamax decks, though, to see if anything sticks out to you. I can’t catch everything, but I can teach you to fish. Go fish.

Watchtower

Third Time’s the Charm

I’ve already done a couple of passes at Kaldheim, but I think that there are still a couple of cards in the set worth talking about that I haven’t mentioned yet. It’s proved a fairly deep set for both casual and competitive formats, and there are a lot of cards that I think will be played for years to come. This is my third article on Kaldheim cards and there are more pickups I like that I haven’t even talked about here, so let’s see what made the cut!

Valki, God of Lies (Borderless Foil)

Price today: $45
Possible price: $80

When Kaldheim was first released, there was a huge amount of hype around Valki, God of Lies due to its interaction with the Cascade ability, meaning that you could cascade into the Valki side of the card but then cast the seven mana Tibalt side of the card for free. This trick caused Modern to be rife with people cascading into Tibalt on turn two or three, making for a rather unfun time.

This uh, oversight? has since been rectified with a rules change to Cascade, meaning that the card you cast off the Cascade trigger has to have a mana value less than that of the card you used to cascade, and this has in turn led to a retrace in Valki’s price across the board after the initial spike. However, the card is still seeing play in Modern and Pioneer just as a good fair value engine on both sides, and so I think that its dip in price leaves it in a good spot to pick up now. Niv to Light is still one of the most popular decks in Pioneer and four/five colour Omnath decks remain a thing in Modern, and both archetypes have adopted a few copies of Valki here and there. On top of that, it’s a reasonably popular EDH card too – 166 decks listed using it as the commander and another 400 or so playing it in the 99.

Borderless foils have retraced from almost $100 down to around $45 now, but supply isn’t exactly on the high side. Only 28 listings on TCGPlayer with just four of those under $50, and a nice ramp heading over $60 makes me think that this card is due to head back upwards over the next few months or so, as competitive and EDH demand slowly drains out the remaining copies. Give it 12-18 months and I can easily see this as an $80+ card – the Showcase foils are already over $65, which is a good indication.

Alrund’s Epiphany (Borderless Foil)

Price today: $15
Possible price: $30

Extra turn spells always do well, and I don’t think that this one is going to be an exception. It’s already performed strongly in Standard and Historic in the Emergent Ultimatum decks, and is racking up decent EDH stats as well. At over 500 decks recorded on EDHREC, I’d put it at a tier 2 ish level compared to the rest of the set, but it has the added benefit of being a Mythic and being a Time Walk effect.

It’s a slightly more expensive extra turn than some other spells like Time Warp, but the fact that it has Foretell makes it pseudo-immune to Wheel effects or hand attack in EDH, and you do get a couple of tokens for your troubles as well. We do have quite a few Time Walk effects to choose from in EDH these days, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this one makes the cut over a few others that are slightly more vanilla.

The Borderless foils only have 27 listings on TCGPlayer, and most of those are single copies. MKM has a few cheaper copies around €10 if you can get them, but again supply is not very deep there either. I expect to see this double or more in the next 12 months, and it’s a gorgeous card to look at in the meantime!

Mystic Reflection (FEA)

Price today: $10
Possible price: $25

I think that Mystic Reflection has a lot of different applications that may not be apparent on a first glance at the card, and the EDHREC stats seem to back this up. It’s been built into over 1200 decks since Kaldheim was released, making it the second most popular blue card behind Ravenform (which is a common, so doesn’t really matter to us). Mystic Reflection can be used to turn an opponent’s threat into a tiny token, disrupt someone’s combo or even enable your own by copying yours or someone else’s creature.

It’s such a flexible card that a lot of blue decks are going to want it, and as such I think that the price will be heading on an upwards trajectory. TCGPlayer has FEA copies around $10 right now, and you won’t find any cheaper on MKM. These are purely EDH demand but I think that this will become enough of a relative staple that we could see these over $20 in 12-18 months, so grab your personal copies now and stash away some more to hold onto for a bit.

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.