Readers!

I’m on a new “Keep it simple, stupid” kick and one benefit of that is you don’t miss something obvious. To me, it seems obvious that Slivers are coming. If not in Dominaria United, then soon. Ideally not in a precon because lately people aren’t adding too many cards to the precons. If we could get Slivers in a main set, that would be pretty ideal and it seems like they are signaling pretty hard.

Are Slivers NECESSARILY coming back in Dominaria United? The good news is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter for several reasons. The first is that, whether or not this is hinting at anything, Slivers will eventually get done again so these won’t be missed specs, they will be longer-term specs. You’ll get dinged with a reprint or two, you might start to calculate the opportunity cost of having money tied up in long-term specs, but the day will come when you cheer my name for pointing out the obvious. I guess perhaps the second reason it’s fine is that the worst case scenario is that you’re right too early. Also, consider that this is a strong signal that others are reading which means we could see all of the Slivers stuff tick up just on principle. I like when stuff becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because you get to strut around like Nostradamus with a pocket full of shrimp money from being good at guessing when I’m right.

If we are in some sort of quantum experiment where observation changes outcome, it makes sense that finance really can be that easy sometimes, where a few dozen people tweeting about getting a bunch of Slivers in their Secret Lairs that I still don’t have can make people think “Slivers.” Am I capitalizing on an effect of those Slivers being sent out or am I helping to originate a panic? Good question, but if you buy right now it won’t matter since anyone I convince to buy with this article will buy enough to drive the price up, so you actually can’t lose here.

So say Slivers do come and they come in the next year and other people want to build Slivers decks. You’d like me to tell you what I think you should buy and show my work. I’m into it, let’s knock this out before wherever you buy shrimp closes.

Did you know this was a thing on EDHREC? If you didn’t, yep, and if you click the word “tribes” it will take you to a page that ranks all of the tribes. If you’ve never navigated to this page, give yourself 10 minutes to really peruse it and try to digest it. It’s a new way to see the data represented and seeing how some tribes are played in real proportion to each other rather than what you assumed will make you better at this. Goofing around on EDHREC is just as valuable as goofing around with MTG Price’s tools. Anyway, clicking the thing I have highlighted brings up this page.

Slivers are the 9th-most-popular tribe after Vampires and before Dinosaurs, Cats and Rogues. Would you have guessed that? Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t. But seeing the real rankings has helped me immensely. I knew Slivers were popular, but I didn’t expect them to do better than Cats the last 2 years. I pay attention and I was still surprised. Clicking the Sliver takes you to the page we want.

I’m not surprised Sliver Overlord is the most-built. Being able to swipe Changelings, or make their creatures Slivers to steal them is very funny, Sliver Overlord is pricey but not expensive for a Magic card, especially a deck with a 5 color manabase. It’s also old border which is hot. Then they descend in order of how fun they are to play as your commander. I bet the number of Sliver Legion decks actually sleeved up in a world where you have to spend $300 real dollars on a Sliver Queen is greater than the number of people who spent an entire week at minimum wage buying a dorky old card from Stronghold to build their weird tribal deck. I think if they don’t print a new Sliver Commander, and I hope they don’t, Overlord is the winner here, and that’s good because Overlord has an Overlord-specific card that could use a nudge.

Unnatural Selection is a very cute card in a Sliver Overlord deck. You can make your mana dorks into Slivers if you play any mana dorks and you can make their creatures into Slivers and gain control of them with Sliver Overlord’s ability. I knew this was a card and it looks like it popped speculatively and Slivers might not be involved. Still, this could be a $8 card very easily and buying under $4 seems pretty safe to me. This is just vaguely good until something makes it absolutely broken. When they make a Commander whose ability is Dismiss Into Dream maybe? Point is, I like this under $4.

This was up but under $10 in 2021, so the soonest I expect to see this in a precon is 2023. I think this is a buy under $10 because it could easily go to $15 or $20 and it’s going to go up until it’s reprinted regardless because every deck is tribal these days.

I am including this card in this article because I trust EDHREC data. I really do think people are putting Legion Loyatly in decks like Slivers because while ordinarily copying a bunch of 1/1 Soldier tokens is sort of underwhelming, making 3 extra copies of Muscle Sliver and all of your other Lords, plus ETB triggers, plus LTB triggers, this card is absurd. The more it gets ignored in the obvious builds, the more the price tanks even more. A mythic of this caliber won’t be $3 for long. I think the other art is so much better that the full art version might not be the good one.

I’m no nerd, but that art rips. It’s so much better and the price is also tanking. Give these a bit to start to recover then pounce. This is 8 mana but that’s not a problem for EDH decks. People are playing this, the data says so and that’s good enough for me.

If they will stop reprinting this card, it would be helpful for its price for sure. I think they’re done reprinting it for a bit and this could really benefit from people wanting to play Slivers. For the record, the Conspiracy art is better.

The cycle from Legions, Magma, Synapse, Toxin, Brood and Essence are all pretty spicy. Of them, only Synapse and Magma have yet to be reprinted. I am betting that this goes up quickly if Slivers are officially announced because someone already took care of quite a bit of the supply late last year. What remains will be scarce and a sharper spike could see you enriched by selling at the top. I would rather be a seller than a buyer when something as mid as Magma Sliver flirts with $30.

That does it for me. If I’m totally wrong, no I’m not, I just wrote this article between 6 and 36 months too early and that’s not my fault. I am merely the muse’s mortal vessel and she dictated this whole article. Anyway, that’s what I think, gotta go, bye. Until next time!