I’m pretty sure this wasn’t me. I’m pretty sure this spiked during Eldrazi Winter when every other card that was ever mentioned in the same card as Eldrazi spiked all gangbusters and people bought everything they could without waiting for decks to put up results. I’ll gladly take credit for this if you made a bunch of money, I guess. OK hang on. Did you buy these at $2 like I suggested when I said these could be like $5 in a few years based on slow, incremental demand from casual and EDH players? Did you sell these at $10? Did you stack mad scrilla and then go to a strip club and make it rain? Did you foil out your Vintage deck based on how much money you made from this card? If so, this was totally me. My articles make cards go from $2 to $10. You should read all of my articles and donate 10% of what you made to the Brainstorm Brewery Patreon.

Did you lose money on Path because you didn’t take my advice when these were $2, pay attention when people played these in Eldrazi decks on MODO and only notice it went up when it was $10 and you bought then not thinking they could go back down to like $4? Are you mad at me? Well, in that case, my articles can’t spike cards out of nowhere, don’t be ridiculous. What? You don’t believe me? OK, let’s get rich.

This is played in decks like Trostani and it’s seen Modern play. Also, some dude burned a big stack of these and then later offered someone like $10 grand in bitcoins to play 4 Seance at a Pro Tour (“It’s pretty obvious it’s you, Jason” – some dipshit on reddit) before disappearing back into the aether. With some unhinged pyromaniac torching copies to reduce overall supply and trying to make this card a thing (it’s stupid with cards like Mulldrifter, yo) this will be $10 in no time. After all, it was in one of my articles. When this hits $10 a copy, I’m selling all of mine, taking my thousands of dollars and quitting writing to focus on manipulating the real stock market.

I’m pretty sure I can warn people about cards that are going to go up on their own, but I’m also pretty sure I can’t make stuff go up for no reason. I’m not Travis Woo.

What was I even talking about last week? Oh yeah, wedges.

Let’s talk about the other three Nephilim, or two if I don’t get to all three, or one if I decide to write like 1,500 words about Dune Brood Nephilim. Whatever. They have spoiled like 2 cards from Eldritch Moon, it’s not like spoiler season for Commander 2016 is breathing down our necks. I mean, maybe. Maybe they’ll just dump all the cards in one day. That would suck. Look, I’m going to tackle the remaining Nephilim and by extension their wedges the same as I did last week and I’m going to just write until I feel like I’m done writing. Deal? Excellent. Did you read my piece from last week? My Descendants’ Path remarks might make more sense if you did. If not, here it is in all of its resplendent glory.  Feast your eyeholes on that, you lucky so-and-so.

Let’s hit it.

Dune-Brood

This one is pretty good but no one seems to be all that interested in doing thangs with this guy. If you look up decks posted by people who lunatic playgroups allow them to run Nephilim as commanders, no one is really jamming Dune-Brood. You know why they should? It’s missing a color and that color isn’t green. This has green in it. That means you can just double all of the tokens all of the time. Speaking of which-

Brief Aside

This card makes Sand creature tokens. Hazezon Tamar makes Sand Warrior tokens. I’m willing to be that if Dune-Brood is in the… Jund deck running Lingering Souls-colored deck, there will be a Sand creature token in it. Hazezon Tamar makes Sand Warriors which are slightly different, but I’d be willing to bet that since they’re both 1/1 creatures, if the one from the Commander 2016 precon looks  cool, Hazezon Tamar players might want them and the small amount of them means a lot are needed to satisfy just one player. I could be wrong, but I am led to believe this could be the case.

I’m not hoarding 50 of these to go in my Prossh deck.

I AM sitting on 50 of these to use in my Prossh deck. Hey, these spiked in late 2013. I wonder if that’s significant.

End Aside

Dune-Brood makes tokens, wants you to have lands in play and wants to deal combat damage to a player to make it all happen. Blue is really useful for that last one, but we have cards like Rogues’ Passage and Whispersilk Cloak. Making the most of our token army is the important part.

If the rest of the deck is concerned with making tokens the way Dune-Brood Nephilim is, there is a non-zero chance this gets a reprint. This is approaching $10 and that’s pretty crazy. I scooped these when they were near bulk and I’m pretty proud of my foresight. I don’t think I even played EDH back then. People thought these might be buoyed by Selesnya in Standard and when that didn’t really happen, I had no trouble snagging these from people. These will get additional upside from a token deck if they’re not reprinted. I mean, Doubling Season, too, but that’s so expensive you won’t make much money and the buy-in is pretty high.

This is pretty reprintable, but I could see this card shrugging off a reprint in a Commander product and approaching $10 again within a year or three. I feel like this could hit $20 in a world where Doubling Season is approaching $50 despite a Modern Masters printing. I used to think I liked this card at $4 but not really at $10 and now I’m starting to think I don’t hate it at $10. It’s very fair compared with Doubling Season and doesn’t scale with Planeswalkers the same, but it’s also in a format where you can run both in most of the decks so the comparison almost doesn’t matter.

This will never be $20 again, but maybe it could be more than it is now. The Duel Deck printing hurts its upside, but this is a stupid finisher in an aggro token deck, and this deck most certainly is that since you trigger the Nephilim by hitting them.

Barring a reprint, this is a $10 card someday and right now I get these as throw-ins on trades. The graph indicates both that player demand is up and that dealer confidence is low. I expect the buylist in 6 months to a year to be what retail is now.

This is such sicko tech. Maybe a little too sicko since this is pretty obscure. Still, how easy will it be to hit them with your Nephilim and all your tokens when you can give them all protection from four colors? I think this is the most perfect card for these new decks and meanwhile, last summer dealers thought paying an entire dime on a bulk rare was too generous. This has upside, but maybe not enough unless a lot more people start reading my articles on Gathering Magic.

I feel like all of my picks are either too obvious or too obscure. I’m not sure how much there is for me to help you with that you couldn’t find on your own/ would matter for this card. Let’s move on to the next Nephilim. The Nextilim if you will.

Ink-Treader

This is the most fun one, for suresies. Sure, the reanimator one is cool, but this is the one that lets you do all kind of nasty stuff like Lightning Helix every creature on the board, draw your deck with Crimson Wisps or just kick a Rite of Replication until everyone decides they want to shuffle up and play another game and just let you win. There are so many stupid interactions with this card that I imagine the real commander will be Riku-esque but with white so that’s awesome. I bet you’re going to just cast all of the spells and sometimes benefit from targeting Ink-Trader and probably Zada when you’re not just doubling, reflecting or boosting spells. This deck will be insane if it’s anything like this nephilim. If we’re going to benefit from this nephilim and creatures like it, there are a lot of cards with upside. Like, a lot.

This is obscure, but in a world where a spell that targets one creature targets all creatures, this gains control of all creatures. That seems fairly strong. At $2 as a Weatherlight rare, this has upside for sure.

You choose targets when you cast which means this will copy for every creature on the board, even if you lose the first flip. This is already moving in the right direction, and a nudge is all this will take to double or triple in a shorter term that it’s already slated to. This is a solid pick provided it interacts with a few creatures in the deck and kills people spectacularly with Nephilim out.

Of all of the threaten effects, this one scales the best with the Nephilim trigger and is a $0.70 foil. I’m not excited about any of the rest, really. This is a better Insurrection, a card you should run on top of this. All red decks should run it, frankly.

I would google Ink-Treader Nephilim decks to see if anything pops out at you. I looked at a lot of lists and it’s more cheap cards like Cerulean Wisps than it is good gems like Debt of Loyalty, but the deck looks like fun and if the commander in the Commander 2016 deck functions at all like the Nephilim does, it will be the most fun deck of the five and you’ll make some money on cards that are auto-includes.

Because I have to, not because I want to –

Witch-Maw

Pros 

• One more way for Primal Vigor to hit
• Encourages you to build Voltron, which can be fun
• Makes cantrips more useful
• The new commander they design could have a prowess-like ability or prowess itself

Cons

• Prowess without red feels lame
• This is boring and removal undoes a lot of work
• We might not get a Legendary Voltron card in the deck
• This is boring

Other than those reservations, if the deck ends up being a sort of prowess-type deck, there are cards with upside for sure.

Despite multiple printings, this card is still a $3 foil with upside. Conspiracy 2 could give us another printing, but I think this card gets played in an all-in deck like this one and you should consider it.

This price is trending in the right direction. How much of a case do you want me to try and make for this card? It says on it what we all want cards in a deck where were place +1/+1 counters to say – “If one or more +1/+1 counters would be placed on a creature you control, twice that many +1/+1 counters are placed on it instead.”  That’s another Doubling Season, bruh. Put this in your deckhole.

I talk a lot about how second spikes tend to spike harder and faster than the first time around. This only needs a little nudge, Modern could give us that nudge which we’d be fine with so we’re in a position to benefit from additional upside exposure and this does work in this deck. Voidslime will, too, but this seems juicier to me for some reason.

This is never going to be cheaper. It will be more expensive in the future but it will never be cheaper than it is right now. This seems fairly obvious. Dealers have a lot of these after the spike, but these should still be in binders. Grab these. This isn’t predicated on Witch-Maw as much as it is reality in general.

I don’t think there is a ton more to say, here.

Obviously when we know more, we can make some more targeted calls, but I think a lot of these picks were cards that had upside already and a little nudge is all they’ll need to get there. Cards predicated specifically on the Nephilim should wait until we see what they do with the new commanders. As always, we’re just speculating somewhat baselessly, but if we use a logical approach and identify some cards early, we can buy while everyone else is scrambling to figure out what to play with the new cards. It’s about being proactive, not reactive, and that’s why we’re talking about these interactions before the set comes out, not after.

That’s all for this week. Buy Seance.