By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of MTG Fast Finance! An on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important Magic economy changes.

Hey everyone. It’s been about a month since I last wrote or appeared on a podcast, a month during which I took an extended vacation. I hesitate to use the clichéd compound adjective “much-needed” to describe it, because honestly, I didn’t really need the vacation. Others need a vacation much more than I did. My girlfriend and I both finished our graduate degrees and decided it was a good excuse to take a trip, so we went. Although I suppose can’t call her my girlfriend now, as she has since become my fiancée. It’s a great life choice overall, but man, getting engaged and subsequently married is probably the second-worst EV decision you’ll ever make, with procreation being the worst. After looking at wedding venues, there’s something to be said for lifelong bachelorhood.

Quite a bit happened in #mtgfinance while I was gone, something I hadn’t counted on. These months are typically the quietest for our little hobby, and instead of three sleepy weeks where the largest gain a card managed to pick up was 30%, half the reserve list was bought out and a burgeoning supervillain of the pharmacy industry waded into Magic. Thanks for saving the juicy stuff until I got back you guys.

A lot has been said, typed, and scrawled in blood on these topics so far, so I’m going to let them be for the time being. God knows they’ll all resurface in time, and I can piss into the squall right along with everyone else when that happens. In the meantime, I would encourage any of you that have been considering purchasing any cards on the reserve list with greater conviction than idle desire to act posthaste. With how few copies are out there of any given card, you could wake up one morning and find that the Polar Kraken you had your eye on for your “things that look like slugs but are actually monstrous sea creatures” EDH deck has risen in price by 2,000%.

Instead, today I’m going to focus on what promises to be an exciting event: Pro Tour: Eldritch Moon. EDM is set to cast its shadow over Standard shortly, and it enters a dense and high-powered format. Until October, Standard will consist of Dragons of Tarkir, Magic Origins, Battle for Zendikar, Oath of the Gatewatch, Shadows Over Innistrad, and Eldritch Moon. For the first time we will see six concurrent sets in Standard. While there won’t be considerably more cards in the format, the complexity is undoubtedly higher, with more themes and mechanics at play than we’re used to. This sets the stage for more breakout decks, especially when you remember that mechanics you’ve long forgotten about are still legal — like dash, which is especially intriguing in the presence of emerge. (Spoiler: there are no good dash cards.)

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