Readers!

I work for EDHREC as you probably know and you would think that things on EDHREC wouldn’t surprise me considering I am on the site daily plus I access it in my capacity as finance writer. You would think so, rightfully, and yet there are things that escaped my attention that seem like they’re of consequence. Let’s take a look at some of them and see if there is anything we should have noticed before. I’m goin to be looking at the Top 100 commanders built the last two weeks to see if anything snuck in. Ideally, you’d expect the Top 100 of the last two weeks to be mostly the top 10 of the last 10 sets which were all released roughly in the last two weeks, but you’ll see what it actually looks like, and… well, there are a few surprises.

You miss a lot if you just look at the top 10. Sure, Dragons being hot is no surprise to anyone, and Proper and Yuriko, boring decks that are 95% assembled in the box they came in chart highly, but once you start checking deeper, you’ll see a lot you missed. Here are some of the hits among the misses.

26th place is a long way to scroll down the page and despite seeming very weak and very narrow both, Sefris is nonetheless getting built quite a bit. The ability to trigger this 4 times a turn cycle fairly trivially and recycle creatures has caught the eye of Value Mavens everywhere.

Acererak seems like it’s in a great place. It’s got some functional utility with cards like Aluren, and future decks that do something similar to Aluren could make a 2 card combo with Acererak that draws your whole deck or pings them to death. Couple that with its obvious utility with completing the dungeon and its price currently seeing signs of life and you have yourselves a card to throw in a box for 2 years.

You’d have to really be asleep at the wheel not to notice Liesa was THIRTIETH OVERALL but I done did that. Let’s redeem myself if I can.

This card, which has flirted with $15 twice now, is the kind of casual favorite that will always be worth something because of 60 card casual players. They are the solid majority of players, and while they tend not to use our markets a ton, TCG and CK have good enough SEO that if they’re buying those cards online, they’re buying from one of those sites. This is currently gettable for $10 less than the price it peaked at, it’s on its way up and I don’t need a third thing.

It’s a little surprising for an uncommon to be ranked this highly, but this card does see some play, and it also held a very tasty secret that a lot of people missed – there was a card in there that was arbable as recently as March. Everything changed when Jinnie Fay Nation attacked.

I wish I’d noticed this when it hit its floor but the price seemed flat for so long, I stopped checking. I revisted both Aura Mutation and Artifact Mutation in the wake of Jinnie Fay but I forget about the more recent InPestation. If you can get these for the old price, do. This isn’t as much as spec opportunity as a “woopsie daisy” – I don’t always notice everything. This likely tops out at $10 but $15 isn’t unreasonable. I think expecting to spec at $8 and get out at $15 maybe is, though.

Ranked #218 overall, this is a recent (I mean, obviously) inclusion in the Rick Dees Biweekly 2.5 times Top 40. However, Value hunters found a lot to like here, and they unearthed an older card that seems more fun than ever.

The regular-border version of this is $1.50 or so making the meteoric rise of the EA version kind of surprising. Cards with large gaps between the EA version and regular version are hard for me to identify using my current routine and I’ll really need to address that or I’ll miss more than just this. Regular version can’t be terribly far behind, but in terms of sheer availability, I’m not sure what the ceiling is. EA versions are the new foils, and the foils are the new rules or token insert. What a world to rear children up in.

I don’t have a spec based on this pretty old but very, very, very linear and boring commander which I gave up on building because the process of it being on rails literally bored me, but this is as good a time as any to point out that Kindred Discovery got a reprint.

Reprinted cards have a tendency to settle between their spike price and their reprint price. I won’t bore you with the average of $55 and $5, but that number is more than $5 and it’s more than $10 and it’s more than $20, so maybe you want these at $5.

That does it for me, readers. I have to get better about identifying cards that have a very juicy EA version but a really boring regular version and foil, and I have to start tracking commanders we all know are good but which will be like 7th in a set and 50th for the month and like 63rd overall. Not being in the Top 5 can make me miss it with my current routine, and I need to tighten up. That said, missing stuff doesn’t feel nearly as bad as false positives, something my current method has been good about. All I know is that I’ve been at this more than a decade, I’m still learning and I couldn’t have done it without your support. Until next time!