Readers!

Stranger Things cards are announced as contents of New Capenna. This is great news not necessarily from a finance perspective as it sort of reduces the value ceiling for the Stranger Things secret lair cards in the short term and otherwise doesn’t matter a ton to us. I think if the creatures in New Capenna (not the set? But just in the packs? I think?) are popular, it means that there is long-term value in the “ideal” versions of the cards, which means the Secret Lair Stranger Things version in most cases. The cards are getting a chance to make a case for themselves in the context of a set, they got the Godzilla treatment rather than the Walking Dead treatment and people seem less ideologically opposed this time around. I think WotC miscalculated how popular Stranger Things is, or maybe this was a nice thing for Magic players rather than a cynical attempt to get money from fans of not Magic like the did with Walking Dead. Regardless, the decks are here, we have a lot of data before the cards are even really spoiled and there is money to be made. There are a lot of cards so I’m picking one spec per commander.

I tried to fit more in above the fold, but I’m honestly just sort of champing (it’s not chomping, look it up, if I have to know that, so do you) at the bit here, so let’s just do some mtg finance and worry about the paywall break later, shall we? Let’s get strange.

The order doesn’t matter a ton here. This is Sophina AKA Jim Hopper.

It’s tough to isolate just Sophina decks because it’s usually paired with something like Elmar (Max (the redhead)) but every deck I have seen has Gisela and, if the deck builder can afford it or is willing to lie about being able to afford it, Aurelia. Gisela is much more affordable – it’s currently $1 for every mana it costs. That’s a bargain considering it was never 25 mana.

Elmar aka Max aka Riley Escobar aka Left-handed handshake is a good pairing for some of the other friends forever commanders but also with shenanigans. Here’s a card not to leave home without.

Coolstuff definitely has $7 copies of this card, I checked. This is on its way to $12 on Card Kingdom, that’s enough for me to pull the trigger at $7, but I’ll let you scoop copies first.

Mike, the Dungeon Master is one of the more exciting Commanders from this set.

Sevinne’s Reclamation was in the same precon as Dockside Extortionist, which means a lot of these got buylisted. Walls will be high on retail sites, but when the dam bursts, and it will, they will be slow to restock. This has the potential to double and I’m into it. It’s a VERY good card in a lot of decks and with them committed to making White suck less, more decks will be built that can use this.

Eleven is the sort of obvious Grixis combo deck that runs like 90% of the same cards as Kess, but there is one card I think bears mentioning.

This will be actual money in 18 months and everyone will be shocked. This doesn’t go in EVERY spellslinger deck, but it should go in every deck where the commander is a Wizard OR Shaman, which will almost always contain Red and will keep getting printed. This card is very good but so is every card in the set it’s in and that still matters while the set is in print.

So we clearly need more data.

I don’t think you can go wrong snagging these under $5. They go in just about every deck – it’s always good. Deck makes only food? Well now it makes value. Clue deck? Have some mana. Treasure? You’re going to win anyway because every Treasure deck is stupid and busted. This card rules and like $3 for the extended art version is robbery.

This card is my shit – this is everything I want to do in EDH. It’s bad on webcam, but luckily America decided they were bored letting the truckers and Flesh and Blood players have all the fun and soon we’ll all be giving each other Covid at the LGS playing a long, tedious game of EDH with people we barely know like before Covid when we pretended that was something worth missing.

Unique effect, EDH-specific given mana cost, high degree of relevance in a new deck, previous big spike, low supply, hard to reprint. This seems like a slam dunk to me, but this is also a pet card of mine so I’m biased. That said, I was biased toward Helm of Possession and Ben Bleiweiss just wrote about it so you could be in a position for that to pay off, too.

This is barely Lucas-related, but the price on Thousand-Dollar Elixir has come down quite a bit and I’d say it’s at its bottom. Good time to scoop some.

Uhhhhh. Why would anyone want a worse Dalakos? Now we have 3 versions of this card and they all suck.

Anyway, this card is bad but the specs might not be.

This hurts because I got in at bulk and got out at $3. I must have read “leave the last 10% for the next guy” and added an extra 0 by mistake. No matter, this card is on its way to the moon so buy in at $5 and feel my pain when you sell too early, too.

That does it for me, readers. I think these decks will get built, especially with the cards being in New Capenna packs. Be on the lookout for EDHREC data for every commander soon and the new EDH deck previews start Thursday. Yes, I’m serious. Even in hell the damned get no rest. Until next time!