Well, here we go, the endless preview summer is underway. Between Core 2021, Double Masters, Zendikar 3, Commander Masters, and assorted supplementary sets, plus surprises like Secret Lair, we are going to have a whole lot of new product coming out. Not all of it is available immediately, and there’s a very good chance that some places go back under a shelter-in-place order, further complicating things. 

As a result of the complex situation we’re in, some people are near a store that will happily run a prerelease, and others won’t have a store within 200 miles. The pandemic is proving that prices can still go crazy and people can still overbuy cards during a frenzy/spike.

For now, though, let’s look at where the Core Set mythics are at, and where they might go from here. I’ve looked for some prices and I’m listing what I find. Given that these are presales, moving fast and operating off of predictions for supply, some of these things can change quickly.

Rin and Seri, Inseparable (no prices yet)

Buy-A-Box cards generally aren’t too expensive, but much will depend on the amount of Constructed play that the CatDog sees. Nexus of Fate was the worst-case scenario, and even if Rin and Seri see some play, there will be extra copies in the Collector Boosters. I don’t think this will stay above $10, and will dip as low as $5.

Teferi, Master of Time ($25)

The play pattern here is exceedingly predictable: Play Teferi, loot, then on opponent’s upkeep phase out a problem creature. Control decks probably won’t play a full four of this Teferi, but 2-3 is the most likely. You can imagine how good this is with Teferi 3, playing board-wipe sorceries during their attack step. 

I think $25 is a pretty reasonable price here, and given the wide array of versions available, that should be a stable price for his lifetime in Standard. Remember that Core 2021 has the shortest Standard window, rotating in a mere 15 months. If cards from this set are going to spike, it’ll have to be in about six-eight months.

Grim Tutor ($28)

Honestly, this has fallen from some terrifying highs early on. People didn’t seem to understand just how few copies of the original were out there from Portal: Three Kingdoms. This is a backup Demonic Tutor, a fixed one, whose only drawback is the life loss. We haven’t had an effect like this at less than four mana, even though there’s been drawback-laden versions such as Scheming Symmetry or Wishclaw Talisman.

Commander players will keep this from dropping very far, though you’re going to see some super-premium prices for Foil Extended Art versions. Demonic Tutor is $30 for the cheapest, and from there, we can figure that Grim Tutor will end up in the $20 range. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was $15, either, depending on its usage in Standard. Three mana and three life is a steep price for getting just what you want, and it’s useless early game.

Ugin, the Spirit Dragon ($25)

The original nonfoils from Fate Reforged have lost about $10 since this was revealed, and personally, I’m not hyped to see this in a Standard full of effective ramp strategies. Nissa, who Shakes the World combos well here, as the Elemental lands remain on the field after Ugin exiles most everything else. 

There’s no deck, aside from Modern’s Urzatron, that plays a full set of Ugin, but there’s a whole lot of Commander decks that wouldn’t mind having a copy. Being $25 this early means he’ll likely end up in the $10-$15 rage by the time we’re done. 

Chromatic Orrey ($14)

Seven-mana mana rocks kind of defeat the purpose of mana rocks, though this is the most mana you can get from a single tap without crazy Everflowing Chalice or Nyx Lotus shenanigans. I can see three-color decks playing this, though obviously your best uses will involve all five colors. I’m not enthused, though, because this is niche and awful for Constructed Magic. This will be $5 in weeks and possibly less.

Fiery Emancipation ($12)

While you can do a lot of neat things with this, be careful with your Earthquakes and Pyrohemias. Not every deck will want to play this, though most red decks should think about it. It’s ‘a source.’ Not a spell, not a red source, but anything you control. Use carefully. I wish this was five mana so people could play it alongside Obosh, the Preypiercer, but at six mana it’s a worse finisher than the companion or Embercleave. I’d be thrilled to see this in Standard, but even something as delightfully modal as Shark Typhoon is 

New Garruk, Chandra, Liliana ($10-$13)

Decent cards in Commander, especially if new Garruk can come down with a Doubling Season out, but the setup cost is pretty high in Standard. New Chandra offers the greatest utility, able to Shock every turn as a plus ability, but overall these are mediocre and will have prices between $5-$10.

Elder Gargaroth ($11)

Let’s look at Questing Beast’s price graph, shall we?

This is a card that does it all, and with haste. Elder Gargaroth does not have haste, and while it’s got incredible value on the attack or block, it does nothing on arrival. It’s a very good card, an example of how good a 6/6 for five mana can be, but the removal and bounce and counters are all too good. If this gets super cheap, I can see it getting back up to the $15 range, but it’s not going to be that expensive right away.

Mangara, the Diplomat ($10)

So this card…I feel like it’s pretty terrible, mainly because your opponent has complete control over when you draw a card. If they are casting two spells and neither is removing this creature, then you’re likely doomed anyway. Same for the multi-attack. Ten bucks is generous for this card, and while you’ll see some optimists putting it in lists, it’s not going to go well. I have a hunch this drops down to a buck or less pretty fast.

Massacre Wurm ($10)

This, at least, has sideboard appeal and Commander demand backing it up. It was a mythic way back in New Phyrexia, which was forever and a half ago. Most of the supply has been soaked up by Commander players over the years, which has kept the price high. Now that it’s getting a reprint, the price will fall to about $7. Juuuuuuust enough people will want this, and not trade it away, that it’ll hold some of its value.

Basri Ket ($7) 

I like the potential on this card. If you’re playing defense, the plus helps you maintain that. If you’re on the attack, the -2 closes things out with ridiculous speed, though it does say ‘nontoken’ and that rules out the double-double if you get to use the ability twice. However, it’s already fallen to $7 and will only have appeal in the aggressive white decks. Three mana planeswalkers are no joke, generally speaking, and I’d be surprised if this went below $5.

Baneslayer Angel ($5)

This was a mythic twice in a row, ten years ago. Even with all the power in this card, it wasn’t above $10 before the reprint and this is going to crash the prices pretty hard. It’ll hold $3 or so, and with Kaalia of the Vast about to get a new printing, there might be some renewed interest, but I will not be expecting too much from Baneslayer.

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.

Look, I get it. We have Core 2021 leaks/previews going on now, we’re about to start preview season in earnest. 

We also have Double Masters coming up soon, and what feels like tons of Mystery Boosters on their way to retailers.

We might even get our local stores open soon! We know we aren’t getting any MagicFests in 2020, but today I want to focus on a product called Jumpstart that is going to be released in about six weeks. 

Let’s dive in with what we know and what value is to be gained.

First, the basics. We’re looking at the official Jumpstart page and the Draftsim aggregation. We’re getting more than 500 cards in this set, a number that would have seemed ludicrous before Mystery Booster showed up and blew us away.

There are exactly 37 new cards in this set, legal only in Commander, Vintage, and Legacy. This is where the value is likely going to be concentrated, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. We’re also getting about 120 reprints from Core 2021, leaving us 350 reprints of existing cards. We don’t know yet if there’s going to be foils, or Box Toppers, or Showcase cards of some kind. 

We did get told that there’s no foils, but I’d be surprised if there were no special versions, and special can mean a lot of things. 

The set is designed to be played like this: Grab two packs (20 cards to a pack) and combine them together. Each booster has a theme that won’t be apparent from the outside, and this is designed to be this sort of mix-and-play experience. If you dig randomness (which I truly do!) then this promises to be fun.

What I want to think about is that with 350 reprints and a short list of known themes, there’s some higher risk-of-reprints out there that I want to get out of. 

Here’s the list of themes alluded to so far, and keep in mind that some of the themes are ‘Mythic Rare’, meaning that they will have only one set of 20, whereas other themes can have a random selection of themed cards. For each of these, I’m going to list a likely reprint and a dream reprint. We don’t have pricing for this yet either. This is only part of the 46 themes, too. The cards in this set are going to be Historic-legal too, and that will inform the picks I’m making.

Even if my picks are wrong, Jumpstart is going to offer us money. It’s meant to be a fun summer diversion, something that will perfectly fill downtime at a MagicFest or other events. Instead, it’s going to be crammed between other releases: Core 2021, the flagship of summer, and Double Masters, the high-value reprint festival. There will be a very short window to buy this and play this, and that means you should stock up on the reprints (not a lot of copies going into circulation) and the new cards (ditto) when we’re all going gaga for the cards in Double Masters.

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.

Wizards said that Ultimate Masters would be the last Masters set for a while. 

That was November 2018, and now we’re finding out that in August, they are back. Understandably, some people are upset and trying to avoid holding things that are about to be reprinted. We know a couple of cards already, and Double Masters has a bit of a theme they say, so if you’re picking up Twincast right now you might be unhappy when we get the full list.

But take a breath. We need to talk about what previous Masters sets have done to prices and what to do if some of your favorite specs get caught in the reprint vortex.

Let’s start with two iconic creatures of Modern: Noble Hierarch and Tarmogoyf, both of whom have had multiple printings. 

I put a purple dot on the timeline for the approximate time the card was reprinted, both of these have had that multiple times and finally in Ultimate Masters again.

What I want you to see is that the price recovered each time, until this most recent time. Noble was nearly $100 at one point, and the Goyf was famously a $200 card even in the reprint version. (For a laugh, go back and read Pascal Maynard’s article after picking foil ‘Goyf over the perfect Burst Lightning in pack 3 of his top 8 draft, I would have taken the shiny one too!)

So for these staples to lose value and stay down, two things had to happen: several targeted reprints and a big format shift.

Both of these cards were reprinted in multiple sets, and the two-drop was even mythic for most of those. The bigger news is that in late 2019, Pioneer was launched, and that’s caused a drop in a lot of Modern prices as people played less of that format and more of the new one. 

That’s what it will take for cards to go low and stay low…and that might not even be enough.

What you have to figure out is why a card is expensive, and that will tell you if the reprint will damage the price long-term, or if it’ll rebound in a year. A whole lot of the Modern Masters sets have that rebound, simply because people need the cards, and in a lot of cases, playsets of the card. Hierarch is not something you add one or two of to a deck; it’s a card you’re really hoping is in the opening hand and you wouldn’t mind drawing two.

Those two cards are staples of Modern. Let’s look at a more niche card that was expensive not because of play, but from pure scarcity: Daybreak Coronet.

Easy to forget that this was a $30 card until it was printed in Modern Masters 2015, when only one deck wanted four copies. As a rare in Future Sight, there weren’t that many copies to go around, but once there was a new supply, the price dropped and stayed dropped. Being in Ultimate Masters was the nail in the coffin, and this’ll never break $10 again.

This is what’s going to happen with Mana Crypt. You can’t reprint a card over and over again and have it maintain its price. Yes, it’ll be pricey, but the Eternal Masters version is at $175, Mystery Booster is $140, and the Double Masters will be cheaper yet. There’s a lot of other versions to chase, but these will all have the same art and the other prices will come down.

Constructed formats aren’t the only drivers though: Commander moves prices too, arguably more than any format besides Standard. Commander prices are a bit more real to me, because you’re not buying a playset, you’re buying one copy per deck. You have to have four times as many people wanting a card. For me, the example of this cycle is Doubling Season:

I’m convinced they could print this yearly at Mythic and it would be a $30 card. So many copies of this don’t get into circulation, because when you open one, you either put it in a deck that needs it or you trade it to someone else who needs it.

However, the rules of demand work the other way as well in Commander, as evidenced by Collective Voyage:

This was $15 in the summer of 2016 but only because it hadn’t been printed since 2011. A reprint in Commander 2016 destroyed the value because not enough players needed a copy for their deck. This is what’s going to happen to some specific cards that haven’t gotten many reprints, like Kaalia of the Vast. She was in the first Commander set in 2011, then the Commander’s Arsenal, and finally the first Commander Anthology. She’s never been in booster packs, and it looks like we’re going to devour Double Masters. I would be surprised if new copies went for more than $10.

Let’s look at a couple of cards that might be in Double Masters:

Time Stretch ($17-$70, 10th edition and Odyssey)

Sure, we could get something like Time Warp for one extra turn, but I think the prices are right to give this a reprint. This doesn’t have the exile clause that newer cards tend to have, and cheaper spells exist. I’d love to try casting this in Limited! A reprint here would end up at about $7 or less though, as the supply is the problem currently, not the demand. 

Kalonian Hydra ($20-$30, M14 and C16)

This would fall to $5 and start recovering not long after, because the doubling effect fits into a wide range of decks. It’s displayed this pattern before, and has had just enough reprint via the second Anthology to keep the price from skyrocketing. Also, this would be a nice treat for all the Zaxara the Exemplary decks that just got built!

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.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about how the prices in Ikoria were about to take quite a bath. If you added up the price of every card in the set (regular art, nonfoil) it was just about $400. 

Today, that’s down to $250. Oof.

The question is, though…are prices done falling? Let’s take a look.

Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast ($11, up from $10)

If you follow a few Magic professionals on Twitter, you’ll have heard that some form of Lukka Jeskai Fires is the best deck in Standard. Oliver Tiu went farther: 

I played Standard back then, and I was too busy playing eight fetchlands in Mono-Black Vampires in order to help Vampire Nocturnus be amazing. I don’t have a comprehensive view of Standard through the ages, but I can tell you that on Arena, that stupid deck is resilient and powerful.

Lukka has avoided the downturn in prices that most of Ikoria has felt, being a four-of in the best deck ever surely helps with that. The deck has also avoided having something banned so far, and that’s an accomplishment in and of itself.

The metagame share isn’t as dominant as the deck’s adherents would have you believe, though. Lots of decks are putting up 5-0 finishes, but the power of this deck is the redundancy and the thievery, thanks to Agent of Treachery. 

The main point here is that Lukka’s price has resisted falling due to the wave of product delivery, and the only thing keeping me from diving in is Agent’s rotation in October. I would expect this price to stay firm or even rise a little farther, depending on when paper Magic events start up again.

The Triomes ($5-$7)

These are up about a dollar each, on average, and I think that’s the Commander crowd diving in. These are AWESOME in Commander, as long as you’re playing colors that match up with some of the Triomes. It also helps that two very popular decks, Temur Reclamation and the aforementioned Jeskai Fires, each have a Triome of their own to play. That alone would keep the price high, but the price to really pay attention to is the cost of owning a Foil Showcase version of each of these. They were nearly $20 earlier in the week, but have bumped up to the $25-$30 range. It’s not clear how much inventory of Ikoria Collector Boosters is still going to be opened, but having rares in that range will do a lot to shore up the value.

This week, I bought the seven foil EA Triomes I needed (My Ur-Dragon deck is getting five of them!) and I’m glad I did it now. The basic versions are a lock to get reprinted at some point, we’ve got Commander Masters later this year and that’s a draftable set which will desperately want powerhouse fixing.

Here’s the sort of graph I’m expecting for the Triomes:

It won’t happen this week, or even this month, but these are too good, too flexible, and popping up in enough formats that these will be $10 by Thanksgiving (presuming no reprint).

Shark Typhoon ($4, up from $3)

Interestingly ,there was a time about a month ago where this was being sold for nearly $10 before people came to their damn senses. It’s trended downwards, as has almost everything in the set, but being a big part of Fires, Control, and Reclamation decks is something that will get a price going back up.

There’s no shortage of six-mana enchantments that do wonderful things, but the cycling ability on this one is hitting it out of the park, causing people to not flinch at playing three or four of these. Don’t overlook that it’s not only uncounterable (unless you’re meta enough to pack Tale’s End) but it gets by Teferi, Time Raveler’s static ability. 

Control decks will always exist and want some number of this card, and Fires decks will exist in some flavor for the next year and a half. I’d hope that this fell down to $2 by the end of Ikoria’s season, giving it plenty of time to rebound up into $5 at some point.The rest of the set has fallen hard. This is good from a speculative standpoint, and it’s nice that some part of Standard is accessible. The Apex cycle is delightfully cheap, if you’re thinking about getting in for Commander or fun mutate decks. Extinction Event is awesomely inexpensive, and four-mana Wrath effects are always going to be worth playing.

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.