Oil-Slick for Fun and Profit

You may or may not have noticed that a certain subset of Phyrexia: All Will Be One cards has been lighting it up lately: the Oil-Slick foils, available only in the special boosters found in the Compleat Edition Bundle.

That bundle came with one special pack, along with 12 Set Boosters. That special pack is what I’m focused on right now, and let me explain why I’m starting to buy cards much earlier in the ONE cycle than I would have otherwise.

Let’s start out with some math. There’s one booster, which has ten foil lands and two foils mythics. Twenty mythics are possible, so there’s a ten percent chance of getting a specific mythic in your pack, and a 1 in 400 chance of getting a double-up. In terms of collation errors if someone landed a god pack of all mythics but no lands, that image would have been all over Twitter.

With ten percent odds, you’d think these oil-slick cards would be crazy common. After all, looking at the C2R2, no mythic with special treatment is at even one percent odds to come out of a Collector Booster. These special Bundles are, well, special. Special expensive and special rare. Vendors report that they haven’t been able to get all they wanted, and the bundles are reselling nicely on all the platforms. Oil-Slick foils are rarer than the special variants, and rarer than the step-and-compleat foils as well, just due to the lack of bundles out there. 

Getting 12 Set Boosters is good, but a pack of 10 lands that are going for at least $4 each is a great bit of value, on top of the two mythics. 

Oil-Slick has a big advantage over the variants from the CBs: the Collector Boosters are going to be available for quite a while yet. Months, perhaps years, at a very reasonable price. The Compleat bundles are getting a big markup and lots of these cards are disappearing into collections, which will eventually lead to prices going up.

I don’t think we’ll ever see any of the big cracking operations pop up with a couple hundred copies of any Oil-Slick mythic, and once the current wave of bundles is gone, that’s probably most of the inventory that will ever be available. So right now, I think prices are at their lowest, and it’s time to get some copies. Definitely personal-use copies for any of your decks, plus a couple of extras for later growth.

There’s only 20 to choose from, so this isn’t a comprehensive list, but here’s the stars I see:

Sword of Forge and Frontier ($45 right now on TCGPlayer) – If you haven’t played with this card yet, it’s pretty bonkers. It’s hard to argue with the simplicity of just ‘draw a card’ but this is potentially better in Commander. I’m a huge fan of Sword of the Animist, and the 9th entry in the Sword cycle is a very elegant design. It’ll be rare in a pod for there to be no one you can hit, and once the hits start, they will keep coming. 

My biggest concern is that there will inevitably be a retro foil version of this at some point, but that’s probably a ways off. For now, you’re going to see copies soaked up relatively fast, and this version will be $60 before the end of April.

Ichormoon Gauntlet ($35) – You will be hard-pressed to find a more auto-include card for planeswalker superfriends decks. This is the best version of a very good card, before the ‘add a counter’ ability is overlooked. It doesn’t take much for this to get out of hand quickly. I fully expect to see the supply on these dwindle fast, and the price to go up accordingly.

All Will Be One ($19) – I’ve said before that this is a card I want to have when the combos pop up. There’s a LOT of amazing things you can do with this card, and no wrong way to play it. Sure there’s instant win combos, such as Quest for Pure Flame, but there’s also fun with planeswalkers, proliferate, or cards that put counters everywhere.

AWBO will be a cheaper pickup in nonfoil, if you want to wait, but since supply is near maximum right now I strongly advocate grabbing a few copies for the inevitable rise. When this hits, it’ll hit big, easily doubling in price.

Solphim, Mayhem Dominus ($20) – Finally, while all of the Dominus cards are good in their respective decks, the red one begs to be built around, and is in the best color to do it. There will be combos with this card, my favorite being Heartless Hidetsugu and my second favorite is Toralf, God of Fury. (Honorable mention: Manabarbs. stings) Wonderfully, though, you don’t need to work too hard at this. Anything that deals damage is going to be a winner, with the added bonus that every new set will give new ways to abuse the card. I’m looking forward to watching this grow over time.

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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.