Readers!

New Capenna is close enough for Wizards to reveal that they’re giving everyone fake crank to pretend to do bumps of between rounds, so you know that that means! It’s time to play the baseless speculation game!

It looks like some of you are already playing it already.

Is this because it’s on the Reserved List (yes) or is there something else going on? People who speculate about speculators have speculated that speculators are speculating on Wandering Mage because it’s New Capenna shard colored and there will be mages in New Capenna? Because Wizards are known to hang out in cities? And one of Wandering Mage’s 3 absolutely abyssmal abilities references Wizards directly? I don’t know, I think this is one of the dumbest rationalizations I’ve seen anyone make for a Reserved List card going up a few bucks. Anyway, let’s do the same dumb things.

We already got the first set of Triomes in Ikoria, so we know that since they’re finishing the cycle (Gavin said so but I don’t remember where – it literally might have been a thing he said to me when he was playing EDH on our stream), we’ll have the Alara Shards colors in Streets of New Capicola.

We don’t have a ton of info beyond knowing some of the creature types represented in the tribunal of “brokers”

If I were a complete dumb@#$% I would probably be buying up every Bant Rhino card and making a mint but my brain doesn’t work that way. I don’t think that every time a creature is featured that a tribal deck will come of it, I don’t think random old rhinos will be played in the deck if it materializes and I don’t think I have enough time to get out of them or want to cast a wide enough net to hit everything. I’ve been left holding the bag a few times in my Mtg Finance career, and while that isn’t the end of the world, it’s still avoidable.

I don’t think I want to say to buy Rhino, Bird, Cat and… I want to say Flapper Elspeth (?) cards, but maybe you should – not because they’ll get played in a deck, but because we’re like 2 weeks away from people with more money than sense having the conversation we’re having now. Depala can make people dig through bulk bins at the LGS for Dwarven Thaumutergist, but can’t make people actually play the card.

What I WILL do is look at the 5 Shards’ most-played cards and comamanders to see if anything sticks out.

Esper

Esper doesn’t look super Artifacty – there’s no real guarantee they’re doing artifact stuff again.

I won’t lie and pretend I’m not jazzed to have Fritz Lang’s Bioshock as a Magic setting. That said, the top Esper cards are very much format staples.

The top Commanders tell us some things, though.

If I had to pick any card to speculate based on what Raffine’s gang likely uses in what I assume is a deck based on Raffine (there will be 35 Legendary creatures in this set but there will be a gang leader that will be popular for flavor reasons), besides Esper Sentinel, I’d say this.

This is starting to go, and since it’s a Brawl deck card, it might be a little tougher to reprint or at least mitigate the drain that demand will cause on the meager supply. This has demonstrated the ability to hit $10 before and I think it will again.

Grixis

This feels like a bit of waste of time. There’s nothing to glean from this art. I don’t know what I was hoping to see, but this isn’t it. Also, I hate these full-art Triomes, which sucks because the Ikoria Triomes are the best-looking Magic cards ever made and these are them squandering the entire concept of art deco aesthetics which are objectively incredibly pleasing and, I would have assumed, difficult to screw up.

Grixis before was “Undead” and I can’t imagine anyone built an Opulent Lounge to let the dead hang around in. Is that a stretch? Look, I am very aware of how hand-wavey this is, but at the same time, I feel like it makes sense and therefore I’m relying on it.

Grixis is bound to have a treasure theme, Ken and other Secret Lair cards might make use of this in 6 months when we get our Street Fighter secret lairs, and this has flirted with $4 before. It’s reprintable but if we didn’t want to live dangerously, we would have bought basketball cards 2 years ago and retired.

Jund

Jund seems like there will be fighting. Let’s check out the fight theme on EDHREC.

As you can see, it’s already a thing.

It’s cheating to pick Ignoble Hierarch, but buy those for sure.

EDH players LOVE Brash Taunter. This is a $15 card waiting to happen, and the extended art treatment mitigates a bit of reprint risk. I love this card, and I love paying basically buylist on them right now.

Before you ask, I always check.

Can’t beat it.

Naya is garden-themed? I won’t pretend I can figure out more than that, but I assume wild animals. Not that tame animals aren’t in the Bant mafia. This set would be weird even if they didn’t pass out fake mob planet meth at the prerelease.

I can’t think of a single deck that doesn’t want Mirari’s Wake in Naya since it helps you do both things Naya is good at better, and I can’t think of a better time to buy than when it’s at its historic low. I just hope they stop printing it.

Bant

I did Bant last because we have a card to speculate based on.

I don’t think that there will necessarily be a Superfriends Legendary creature, even with 59 legendary creatures in the set. However, Superfriends is primarily a Bant (well, Atraxa, which I like to call “dirty Bant”) thing, with Black and Red contributing nothing but Planeswalkers. However, there is no Bant commander that lends itself to Superfriends, and we don’t have a data set on EDHREC. We do have a general Superfriends page, though, and it’s not like Atraxa decks won’t just run Brokers Ascendeancy. I am going to put an apostrophe in Brokers that shouldn’t be there every single time I try to put this card in TCG Player, aren’t I? Why isn’t it Brokers’ if not Broker’s? Whatever, if I could change one thing, it wouldn’t be an apostrophe, it would be making the other 4 Triomes look as good as this one.

This is at a historic low and it is already starting to creep up. This has never been above $5, but if it spikes, it will not be doing so for the first time and it seems very likely we could see $5 minimum. I’m excited for what this does.

Are these 5 cards 100% justified by what few Streets of New Leave The Gun Take The Cannoli that we’ve seen? No, not really. Are these 5 cards I believe in and I’m grateful for the excuse to highlight them? Yes, and that’s a good article in my book. You’re welcome OK, maybe that’s too aggro. I should get out of here anyway. Until next time!