Readers!
Ever have one of those days in school where you’re pretty sure the teacher was either hung over or just at the end of their rope? Instead of doing an actual lesson, they put a movie on the little TV on the wheeled cart and you got to do homework for another class or blow the day off? For me, the movie was always the 1988 biography Stand and Deliver starring Edward James Olmos and Lou Diamond Phillips. It worked for every class. Math class? Great, they’re studying for the calculus AP test. Spanish class? You get to learn new words like pendejo. English class? Keep your voice down, my head hurts.
I’m not going to put a movie on the TV and fall asleep here, but I will admit that I lack the sort of mental energy it would take to thematically link these picks. I’m literally just going to give you 5 picks with various justifications for them and call it a day. Is that lazy? I mean, only from a presentation standpoint. I get the distinct feeling that a lot of you would be perfectly happy being passed a bar napkin with the names of 5 cards scrawled on them in eyeliner pencil or whatever my wife had in her purse and you regard the article portion of my article the way I regard someone in a food recipe article telling me long, meandering tale about their Meemaw growing up in a log cabin when I just want to know what temperature to preheat my oven to for lamb. If that’s you, enjoy, it’s blowoff day. Kick you feet up, turn down your screen britghtness so your teacher can’t see you browse twitter (follow me @jasonealt) and enjoy the dulcet tones of Edward James Olmos trying to reach these kids. We’re going to take a negative (my lack of ideas) and multiply it by another negative (my lack of effort for thematics or structure) and turn it into something positive, something I know Jaime Escalante would love. You better stand up, because I’m about to deliver.
Suppression Field basically shuts off treasure tokens and infinite loops that require some sort of activated ability making this card actually just very good against degenerate plays but barely noticeable by people playing EDH as it’s intended to be played – slow and clunky. Shutting off the Food Chain deck and letting the guy just play a Dinosaur every turn and dome people is a very good way to play Magic the Gathering and I think this card should get played more.
Good news, its price has been going up as treasure tokens become evergreen. Suppression Field has one printing and a small number of copies because Ravnica was a long time ago. This is a low-risk pickup and this also costs about a buck less than Perilous Forays, currently.
Hey Jason, what’s the red dot by the TCG Player price? Glad I pretended you asked! When TCG Player has a sale, there will be a dot by the price to indicate cards are on sale on the TCG Player website, or there’s a kickback. You can even hover over the dot to see what the sale is about.
It’s a small change but it’s the kind of thing that can happen because I’m dedicated to making the EDHREC user experience a good one, so if you have suggestions, I’m a great person to run them by. Hit me up in the Pro Trader Discord or on Twitter.
The prices for very good, obvious EA cards are a lot more than their less-good counterparts. That means as the prices diverge, having bought in when the prices were very close is better and better. If the EA was already 2x the regular version, it would be too late, imo, and I wouldn’t say anything, but the EA and regular versions are pretty close and this is already a $5+ card on Card Kingdom and like half that on TCG Player with a slight premium for EA. Look, this mills people and a lot of decks are coming out that want to take cards out of their yards so you don’t need a mill focus. This card is good, it’s not a $3 card and this has already demonstrated it can flirt with $6 on Card Kingdom. I am bullish on these in a big way, and the EA will have an easier time shrugging off an EDH deck reprint, something I’m not even sure this could get given how bad getting domed for half of your deck feels to a new player.
Jon Irenicus gives them your creatures. That’s funny.
Reaper has been going up for a bit, but you see what the printing of a card like this can contribute to. If there are any other cards you’d like to gift, they’re worth taking a look at. I think this is a best case scenario, but there aren’t a ton of pre-modern cards like Reaper to choose from.
Jon Irenicus is not unplayed, being the 7th-most-built commander in the set out of
nice, 69 commanders. That said, I don’t love a card that’s a quarter hoping for a deck built a third as much as the most popular commander will spike it. Master of the Feast was getting there on its own, and with CSI and TCG asking a full buck less than CK and CK showing it growing 5 fold over the last 15 months, I think this could hit $5 organically, and inclusion in a deck that wants to give it away doesn’t hurt at all. I have a Blim deck I love, but Blim isn’t the deck I want to use to give away creatures, so this card being created makes me think they know giving away stuff is cool and it should happen more. If there is another deck that likes to give away cooked grenades (and goads them, which is super cool), then I expect that to use a lot of the same cards as Jon. Notably, Beamtown Bullies, a deck people haven’t even sleeved yet but which is already obsolete, uses Master but also other creatures like Eater of Days which you don’t want in a Jon Irenicus deck. Any card that goes in both decks is doubly blessed, and future iterations of this ability are less likely to play nice with something like Eater of Days which is bad in decks that force you to cast the creature before you can give it away. Stick with cards that are in both Beamtown and Jon, imo, and you’ll be ready for the inevitable future deck that makes Lord of the Pit go up 50 cents.
Guildgates McFadden over here is a Gates deck that needn’t be 5 colors, which is cool and also maybe not cool? What I like is that a bunch of lands-matters cards are sorting themselves by how well they get non-basics and that bodes well for future very competitive decks as well as super casual ones.
This is 30% cheaper on TCG Player and is basically at an all-time low on CK. As the buylist price starts to recover, pay attention. I like the EA version for reasons I discussed earlier, but there’s no reason not to like the regular border.
Even if you don’t like this card or its price, I really like the graph indicating this card has basically bottomed out and is beginning to climb.
This card is kind of boring because every High Synergy card untaps him and they’re all cheap and always will be (none of the stuff that people were using with Vannifar works that well here, which would have been nice data for someone who use Vannifar as a cautionary tale), but there is a card I think has a good corollary.
The ceiling for these seems to be $4 and while it didn’t maintain that for long, it did hit it. The reason I bring it up?
It untaps, making it the perfect card for this deck. I think the deck looks like a fun way to cheat big stuff into play, but in a way more fun way than Vannifar. In a lot of ways, though, it’s the same deck, so however you feel about that should be how you feel about specs for this one.
That does it for me. Lights on, wake up from your nap, put away your phones and head to your next class. I hope you learned something and I hope you like it better when I do a good job constructing the article around the specs because I know I do. Until next time!