Monthly Archives: March 2022

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Hello There

Readers!

The very second a new commander from Kamigawa: “I’m out of cyberpunk references because I am not that familiar with the genre except the stuff everyone has read like Neuromancer” was spoiled, everyone rushed to buy out a dumb rare from Apocalypse and while that’s cool and also a good thing and also I had a bunch of them but I also sold more as bulk rares 8 years ago.

Older rares are going to pop more, but what is really going on here is that a card will get latched onto by Twitter or reddit and it’s very easy to buy it out because it’s old. That life is stressful to me – you’re competing with a ton of people for a small number of cards and by the time your copies come in, there is no guarantee you didn’t miss the sell window. I’d much rather let people show me what they’re actually playing and decide that way. So what Apocalypse bulk rare am I talking about? Only this guy.

At first it was like

but then it was like

And who is the card that made this card do the thing? Why, General Obi Won Kenobi, of course.

Isshin triggers Fervent Charge twice when he attacks, giving your attacking creatures +4/+4 which sounds amazing if you have literally never played a game of EDH in your life. Seriously, imagine paying $30 for a bad version of Beastmaster Ascension that only works when your commander is out.

I think there are better specs for this deck. Why this deck? Surely it’s not because I’m bent out of shape about Fervent Charge (don’t check to see if I tweeted about it, I absolutely did, and while I should have been finishing this column). Rather, it’s because I decided to check which commander was the most built on EDHREC in the last week. Atraxa? Sythis? Marchea? Nay, it is none of these, it’s a most surprising result.

It would have bee surprising if I hadn’t told you what it was beforehand. You, if you’re like me, likely expected Go Shintai, Tatsunari, Hinata or not Isshin to be #1, but people can’t get enough of this nutty jedi. Let’s look at the not Fervent Charge cards people aren’t going nuts over but maybe should.

Fervent Charge is in the 4th highest percentage of decks, but I like a few of the cards that are in more. Etali will get reprinted again, but Brutal Hordechief? I’m not so sure.

The reprint hurt this badly, but it can absolutely flirt with $5 again. A ton of use in Isshin is important because Mardu cards are hard to slot into decks because they go in Mardu decks and Mardu sucks, or they go in 4 and 5 color decks and 4 and 5 color decks don’t attack with creatures. This isn’t exactly doing a ton in other decks, but this is a high synergy card not a top card.

If you want a high synergy card played elsewhere that’s already on the up-swing, look no further. Basically impossible to reprint because it has meld, this is useful in Legacy, a format that used to exist, as well as some fringe Modern decks. The foil doubled this month, owing to Isshin, so the non-foils will be slower but we have every reason to believe they’re going to go. The wall was just higher – no one building a durdly Mardu combat deck is foiling it out. Not with foil Fervent Charge going for $75.00.

The “not Isshin staples but in a lot of Isshin decks” cards are predictable but there is some food for thought here.

This has spent the last year slowly doubling. I’ve mentioned it in at least 2 articles since then, but if you missed it, I like this card a lot. It’s not fair. If someone cast this against me, I would key their car. Is this easy to reprint? Maybe, but with them printing 10,000 new cards a year, where is the pressure to reprint a $5 card even coming from?

This is the part of the article where I have to divorce my training as a builder from my training as a financier. If you asked me to pick 5 cards that would see a ton of play from Isshin, I would have said Lightmine Field, Crown of Doom, Ilharg the Rage Boar, Grave Titan and Adriana, Captain of the Guard. Those cards are seeing play (except Crown of Doom which isn’t played enough to show up on Isshin’s EDHREC page because no one held the community’s hand and played Crown of Doom on Game Knights). I THINK Lightmine Field is a great pickup, and I’d play it if I built Isshin (I won’t – my current project is using Helm of the Host and Double Major to make non-Legendary copies of Tatsunari’s Frog so I can make lots of copies and endanger everyone’s lives) but no one cares so I have to not care.

What people ARE actually playing is kind of boring compared with the stuff I like to do, but there is money in doing what people are doing. I’ll save reinventing the wheel for my coolstuff column and do boring old finance here, I guess.

Magic players love doggies and kitties, and being a kitty matters 1,000 times more than being good in Isshin matters, but that doesn’t mean being in Isshin doesn’t matter. I get these in bulk sometimes because no one thinks this is worth anything. It is.

Didn’t have this pegged as a massive gainer when it was spoiled but people love to draw cards. Every EDH artifact says “draw a card on it” now but people love this one. We used to play Mind’s Eye for the love of God, I’m grateful for the upgrade and part of why I never bought in was that I expected this to be obsolete by now.

That does it for me this week. I feel very good about these pickups and I urge you to watch Game Knights to find out which terrible bulk rare is going to hit $30, or do what I do and stay out of it. Plenty of meat still on the bone. Until next time!

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Watchtower

Modern Playsets

When we’re looking at cards to spec on in Modern, it’s unlikely that single copies of a card here or there in different lists are going to move prices much. What really makes something a solid spec is when it’s seeing consistent play as a playset in one or multiple decks, potentially even being an archetype-defining card. Those are some of the cards I want to take a look at today, but they might not be the cards you immediately think of when it comes to this format.

Summoner’s Pact (Foil)

Price in Europe: $6
Price in US: $10
Possible price: $15

Summoner’s Pact has always been an integral part of any Primeval Titan decks in Modern, be it Amulet Titan or Titanshift variants, as well as being played in Neobrand decks. It’s also previously seen play in Devoted Druid combo decks, although they haven’t been a prominent force in Modern for a little while now, with too much cheap interaction and disruption running around for that deck to be able to find its feet.

Regardless, Pact will almost always be found as a playset in Titan decks and as such is always a relatively in-demand card. It’s also around the 10k mark on EDHREC, a good sign that EDH players like the card too and are likely willing to pay a premium for foil copies. We’ve had four printings of the card now, all in foil and non-foil, but the older foils are getting more and more expensive, especially if you’re after an original Future Sight foil – that’ll set you back a pretty penny ($65 to be precise) if you’re looking at NM prices.

The most recent foils from Time Spiral Remastered are yet to quite catch up to the older foils (in Europe at least), with $6-7 copies being in reasonable supply on CardMarket. TCGPlayer has all foil versions starting at $10 or more, so there is a decent arbitrage gap that I think will be amplified by both markets increasing in price over the coming months. We had a good three years between the A25 and TSR printings of Summoner’s Pact, and so I expect a similar timeframe before we see another foil version thrown at us.

Persist (Retro Foil)

Price today: $3
Possible price: $10

Persist has shown up here and there in Modern since its printing back in Modern Horizons 2 (nearly nine months ago now), and although I don’t think it’s likely to ever be a hugely dominant force in the meta, I think it’s still worth taking a look at. It was used to good effect in an Amulet Titan variant for a little while, and has since been played in other reanimator style decks as well as one of the current flavours of Yorion blink decks, which utilises a bunch of flicker and reanimation effects to abuse the enter-the-battlefield triggers of Stoneforge Mystic, Solitude and Grief. Persist is a great card for these combos, especially if you’re going to be blinking the card again to remove the -1/-1 counter anyway.

Persist is also in nearly 10,000 EDH decks listed on EDHREC, a pretty good number considering how many strong reanimation effects we have in the card pool now. You can’t use this on your commander or other legendaries, but any other creature is fair game and for two mana with very little downside it’s easy to see why people like the card. With retro foils still at $3 but supply slowly draining, I expect to see the price bump up before too long at all. I think the retro foils are far superior to the sketch foils here, and with no EA versions this is definitely your best bet.

Thought-Knot Seer (Foil)

Price in Europe: $13
Price in US: $17
Possible price: $30

Eldrazi Tron used to be an incredibly dominant force in the Modern format, even after the Eye of Ugin ban brought about the end of the ‘Eldrazi Winter’. It’s waned from popularity in the past year or so, with more interactive archetypes like Lurrus and Ragavan decks at the forefront of the meta, but with the recent strength of the Hammer Time decks it seems that the Eldrazi might be a good deck to counter those strategies.

Eldrazi Temple is still a very powerful card, and being able to land a turn two Thought-Knot Seer into a turn three Reality Smasher is something that a lot of Modern decks just can’t deal with fast enough. Thought-Knot has always been a four-of in this deck and always will be, and the fact that it contains a colourless mana cost makes it a very difficult card to reprint, especially in foil. We’ve seen a non-foil reprint in The List, but I don’t think that we’ll be seeing foils of this again for a little while, and there really aren’t many left on the market.

NM foils on TCGPlayer start at around $17, which I don’t think is a terrible buy and could still make you a bit of money (or save you money on personal copies) – but I prefer the $13 copies in Europe. TCGPlayer is down to 33 listings with almost all of those being single copies, and it doesn’t take more than a few players picking up playsets of these to push the price over $20. Give it a few more months or so and I can see this being a $30 card, especially if the deck continues to trend upwards in Modern.

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