All posts by Douglas Johnson

Advances in TCGplayer

First things first;

Jason Alt and I have been slaving away at spoiler coverage. Thankfully, we have it all in one convenient place that’s only one click away.  Allow my excitement about how 90% of the set will be flavorful bulk rares flow through your mind. Now that that’s out of the way, we can focus on the best card in Shadows Over Innistrad.

The Best Card in Shadows Over Innistrad

Have you seen this freaking frog? Don’t worry, I’m going to avoid all of the overused Futurama hypnotoad references.
thegitrogmonster

I know that I’m mainly supposed to write about finance and prices and all that jazz, but sweet miss Mary; this card is the bee’s knees in my Child of Alara Lands deck. Every set I always cross my fingers and think “Maybe there will be just one card that I can throw into a certain Commander list”, and this thing is it. Trade RoutesSeismic AssaultLife from the Loam, fetchlands… the possibilities are endless. Oh, you want me to talk about Standard play? Meh, he’s probably a bulk mythic, so I’ll just wait two months to pick up a foil one for my Commander deck at like $1-2.

The Meat of the Article

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Oh, right. I actually have to write about something this week. Well, let’s start with an announcement made by TCGplayer.com last week that will have an impact on the way we buylist cards;

DIRECT IS NOW EVEN BETTER.

Las Vegas, NV, March 16, 2016 – Today TCGplayer.com® announced a dramatic expansion of the TCGplayer Direct service, the only fulfillment shipping program in the World for the multi-billion dollar collectible gaming industry.

TCGplayer’s first of three announcements was a global expansion of TCGplayer Direct. With a brand new international fulfillment program for the collectibles industry, customers worldwide will be able to order from multiple collectible sellers and receive the orders in one package, for one shipping fee and verified by the professional graders at TCGplayer.

This revolutionary offering by TCGplayer allows its sellers to fulfill international customer orders at domestic U.S. shipping rates through TCGplayer Direct. TCGplayer Direct International will be the most efficient, affordable and safe way for sellers to sell collectible products worldwide.

The company also announced an expansion of its current TCGplayer Direct program, which will now fulfill orders of any size without a minimum order size. This change allows buyers to make smaller purchases from multiple Sellers for quick, spontaneous purchases of lower priced collectibles. This means significant sales growth for sellers while improving their profit margins on inexpensive but labor intensive orders, returning valuable hours for seller investment elsewhere.

Finally, the company’s biggest announcement was the launch of a brand new marketplace called the TCGplayer Buylist, a revolutionary, first-of-its-kind program that empowers customers to easily find and receive the greatest prices available for everything in their collection without breaking it apart. Just as TCGplayer Direct combines the best prices for cards from hundreds of sellers, the TCGplayer Buylist provides the highest value for customers to sell their collection to all of the country’s largest brick and mortar sellers through one convenient transaction.

For sellers, the TCGplayer Buylist will help them keep up with the accelerated sales that TCGplayer’s new programs will drive. The TCGplayer Buylist provides sellers unparalleled inventory access from the World’s customers, freeing them from the limitations of acquiring inventory from their local markets. Cards sold to sellers through the TCGplayer Buylist program are received and processed entirely by TCGplayer, delivering more incredible labor and logistics savings for them.

“The TCGplayer Buylist is the first marketplace designed to help brick and mortar stores acquire more inventory for the explosive collectible gaming market.” said Chedy Hampson, founder and CEO of TCGplayer.com. “We’re now able to provide our buyers and sellers with incredible logistic efficiencies that benefit everyone. The ability to instantly find and sell collectibles at one time for the best prices possible online will delight customers. And our sellers receive new solutions that grow their online sales while solving their inventory dilemma as they expand beyond their local town or city into the global ecommerce market.”

Rollout of TCGplayer Direct International begins next week, with the order size expansion of TCGplayer Direct to follow at the end of the month. The TCGplayer Direct Buylist is underway for a summer 2016 launch.

Okay, there were a lot of words there. I know you kids love your TL;DRs, so I’ll do my best to give you a summarized version of what we care about in this announcement.

  1. People from around the world will be able to order cards via TCGplayer Direct. More importantly (at least, I assume that most of my reader base is ‘Murican), that means it’ll be a hell of a lot cheaper for us to sell cards to the international market if you’re a TCGplayer Direct seller. Want to become a Direct seller? Honestly, it’s not that difficult. If you have an average of four sales a day and you have over 99.5% feedback rating, you can apply right now.Screenshot 2016-03-23 at 9.15.48 PM 
  2. There will no longer be a minimum order amount when buying cards through TCGplayer Direct. Currently there’s a $25 minimum when placing an order with Direct, I assume so they don’t get destroyed on shipping costs. This removal makes it a lot easier for those budget players who want to pick up an entire deck of bulk rares/commons for $20 can do so while only receiving a single package in the mail. Again, much better for those who want to hop into the Direct program but unaffecting you if you’re a small time seller.
  3. Their last announcement is by far the one that will have the largest impact on the market for everyone, regardless if you’re part of the Direct program or if you’re even a TCGplayer seller. They’re coming out with the TCGplayer Buylist, allowing an individual person to ship their entire collection to TCGplayer and get the best buylist prices among those who sign up for the program. While there aren’t a whole lot of details, it could be an attractive option for those players who want to dump a Commander deck or their entire collection without pricing out a billion different stores.

We don’t have the exact details of everything about these new practices yet, but I’d still like to give my initial thoughts to quell some of the questions that I’ve been receiving. One of the biggest responses I’ve gotten to this post is as follows, paraphrased slightly:

“But DJ! How am I going to be able to act as my local buylist if TCGplayer is going to become one of the most prominent locations to sell cards to other brick and mortar stores? People will see their prices, and I’ll have to up my buy prices on collections to compete with Channelfireball, Cardkingdom, etc.”

Well, I’m not exactly worried about this encroaching on me being a local buylist. These same buylists existed before TCGplayer’s Direct buylist, and very few players in my local area made the choice to ship their cards over selling to me or other local players. The biggest advantage you have as a local buylist over TCGplayer that won’t change is that you have cash in your hand now. While CFB/CK/ABU might offer $600 on Person X’s collection, you can still offer $500 on his/her pile of cards because immediate cash dollars have an inherent value when compared against “We’ll send you a check/Paypal you in a few weeks after receiving/grading/verifying.”

You’re also removing a large chunk of the work from their side of the equation. Oh, you have six semi-foiled Commander decks that you need to get rid of to pay for X expense? Well, you’ll have to set sort and alphabetize within sets for every card, and that takes a non-zero amount of time.  Then there’s figuring out how you’re going to ship it safely, taking the time to go to the post office and mail it…. Remember the magic words; “I have cash and can be at your place in X amount of time.” Unless you live in an area where there’s already a significant amount of competing buylists for high dollar staples, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about the Direct Buylist encroaching on your ability to buy collections or lots from local players.

That’s actually a good segue into the next thing I was going to write about. Guess how many stores are going to have a Direct buy price for Scalding Tarn. There’s going to be a lot, right? Okay, how about the number of stores who can afford to put a deep enough buylist for cards like Lightning HelixManamorphose, and Rancor? There will probably be some stores who can port their buylist directly (ChannelFireball, Cardkingdom, etc), but it should weed out a lot of the smaller minnows who are trying to play with the big boys.

Okay, final question. How many Direct buyers do you expect to see put up a non-foil Immerwolf or Savage Lands? Exactly. I’m going to predict that 99% of the stores who want to take part in the Direct buylist will not care in the slightest about paying pennies for the buylistable commons and uncommons that I have grown to love and enjoy. Go ahead and let the big cats fight over whether they’re paying $55 or $60 for a Scalding Tarn, while you’re happily buying bulk commons and uncommons by the tens of thousands and burning through Season 2 of Daredevil while you pick out the $.25 and $.50 cards.

The TCGplayer Direct buylist will allow the big name vendors to fight over paying top dollar for the hot staples in competitive formats. I think the best way to compete with this new market is to avoid it entirely by focusing on what has always been the best way to make money in Magic: bulk and bulk accessories. I’d rather have 23,000 bulk common/uncommon over a single Scalding Tarn any day of the week, and only one of those is going to give you an anxiety attack in the coming months about whether or not its’ going to be reprinted.

 

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Bulk is Like Play-Doh

Does anyone else remember playing with Play-Doh when they were younger? That stuff was a child’s best friend. You could live out your wildest six-year old imaginations from the highest chair in the house, while Mom watched out for the four-year old brother crawling around beneath ready to eat up any of the delicious clay that fell to the floor.

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Of course, it was never actually anything like the picture above. That was a cold, hard, sweet-smelling lie; similar to Play-Doh after it hardened because you didn’t touch it for like five minutes. The real stuff wouldn’t mix without turning into grotesque colors, ruining your idea of a rainbow or multicolored house. Other than that though, it was a wonderful blob of molding clay that you could turn into anything your heart desired.

I find bulk to be a lot like unused Play-Doh. I mean, it’s a lot harder to make rainbows and ice cream out of Magic cards, but the core concept is still there. You can mold it into any number of different shapes and sizes to fit the needs of your customer base. While the majority of competitive players don’t really care about the Suture Priests or Jace’s Erasures of the world, we can be thankful that the invisible and silent majority of players really could care less about bulk. In fact, they’re one of the main sources where we’ll be acquiring the recent bulk. I’ve mentioned this in previous articles so I won’t go too into depth on bulk acquisition this week, but phase one is just putting your name out there in the local scene and being “that one person” who wants to fill their house/apartment with Magic cards.

My Preference

If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you know what I’ve been molding my bulk into. I pick through it for the Rancors and the Blood Artists, even snatching out the Ajani’s Pridemates. Those were alphabetized, while the remains were randomized and packed into 1,000 count BCW boxes (Disclaimer: These actually hold approximately 1,200 cards, so don’t pack them to capacity if you’re trying to sell 1ks). I sell those out of my small display case in town for $7 per thousand, and continue to be surprised at their enduring popularity.

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This method certainly doesn’t take a whole lot of effort, but you can scale the amount of money you squeeze from a thousand cards up with the amount of effort and time you want to put in. For those of you who are true masochists  grinders and actually enjoy sorting cards by set/alphabet, there are a few select buylists out there that will pay you handsomely for your Netflix+sorting multitask skills.

If you’d rather not turn down the dark road of becoming a real “Magic Financier”, then don’t worry. We have some other options available that involve a significantly lower time investment. If you can set up a consistent stream of “old” bulk from NPH or later, certain stores like Coolstuff are willing to pay a solid amount of coin.

Sorting of old/new

CSI

It’s a lot easier to sort rarity colors and set symbols than letters in the alphabet, so this might be up your ally if you get all of that NM Revised bulk that has been stripped of all its’ dual lands. I’ve also found CSI helpful when I bought bulk that was already sorted by common/uncommon, and I didn’t feel like randomizing it or increasing my volume of 1K boxes at the shop. Once you pick out all the Mindcranks and Vapor Snags, Coolstuff will take the scraps without you needing to put in a whole ton of brain power or effort.

My Future

While I pick relatively thoroughly, I don’t pick down to the nickel. At least, I didn’t before visiting Card Advantage in Athens, GA. After having a few conversations with the owner, I am now (well, I will be over the summer when I actually have time) a certified Blueprinter. What the hell is a Blueprint? Just one of the most extensive buylists for common/uncommon picks that you’ve ever seen, created by some of the most amazing people in the industry. (Disclaimer 2: Thomas Dodd did not pay me or MTGprice for this advertising space; my high recommendation of them comes only from my own personal experience). While this style of buylisting is certainly not for the faint of heart, you can pick your bulk absolutely bone dry with methods like these, then ship the rest off to CSI.

Blueprint1

Blueprint2

Oh, you didn’t know that you can get almost a dime a piece for common Sludge Crawlers? That’s twice as much as an uncommon Retreat that actually sees play in the Modern deck. If you thought Sylvan Scrying was dead after the reprint, you’re dead wrong. Card Advantage will pay you a dollar for five of these things, which later equals ten more bulk rares in your pocket when you buy someone’s collection. See where I’m going with this? Once you get used to the extensiveness of the buylist and the types of cards that people on Amazon buy, it will only get easier and faster.

Sylvan Scrying

Let me repeat this for those who are going to scroll to the bottom and write an angry message about how I’m wasting my time sorting cards for pennies on the hour. This industry pays off depending on how much time you put into it. People like Ryan Bushard built a full-time job out of bulk, and there are some people out there who actually enjoy sorting cards. If you want to go out and find the next underpriced Shadows Over Innistrad Standard staple, I think you clicked on the wrong article.

Am I going to be spending the next week working on my Blueprint with the 150k cards in my dorm room? No, I don’t have time for that. I will, however, use my last summer break before starting graduate school to grind value out of this, learn the .03 cards to pick, and practice speeding up the process of set sorting/alphabetizing while watching Netflix or professional League of Legends streams. While the remains that didn’t get Blueprinted won’t be up to par to be sold as 1k boxes in my display case (I don’t think my non-competitive customers would appreciate if half the cards in the set were missing), those leftover Play-doh droppings can be molded into cash dollars from another vendor like Coolstuff, and be sold as true bulk.

bulk
No, those are not World of Warcraft cards.

End Step:

Can someone explain to me why the pre-release foil of Lotus Bloom is the same price as either non-foil? I feel like there are only a couple dozen people in the country who went to a Time Spiral prerelease, and Lotus Bloom certainly isn’t getting another printing anytime soon considering they pumped out Suspend a few years ago and it’s extremely high on the Storm reprint scale. Do people not like the Christopher Rush artwork on the promo? Someone help me understand.

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Reserved List in Commander

So About Those Legacy Cards….

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How about that? Magic prices have been going crazy over the past few weeks, and a lot of it is thanks to the Eternal Masters Announcement that I personally haven’t really talked about a whole lot. I’ve been more focused on casual hits and collection grinding recently to worry about that kind of stuff, although I did enjoy the jumps on a few Legacy staples. Thankfully, the market that I want to talk about today moves a lot slower than the more competitive land of 4-ofs. While the wake-up call of “Reserved List is here to stay” has driven some interesting Legacy prices spikes, I’m happy to say that Commander has so far remained relatively untouched. If you’re someone who’s been on the fence about certain Commander staples for a while, let me be one of the first to say that you don’t have a lot of time left.

Why Commander?

First, let me address some of the reasons for speculating on cards when their sole demand comes from singleton formats like Commander, Cube, and Tiny Lea-hahahaha…. Sorry, I couldn’t write that with a straight face. Anyway, let’s say for example that you buy 9x SP copies of Volrath’s Stronghold for $21.29 each. You know that it’s a powerful staple in almost every black Commander deck, and you’ve jammed it in at least a few Cube drafts before. According to EDHrec, Stronghold sees play in 10% of all decks that can support it. While this isn’t close to the numbers of staple cards like Eternal Witness or Sol Ring, it’s still a strong showing and a versatile card.

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You did so because you’ve been noticing the supply dwindle on TCGplayer from 48 sellers with no price filters, all the way down to 30 sellers as of 3/1/2016. You want to check vendor confidence in the card, so you check SCG’s storefront and their buylist. They’re currently out of stock on Volrath’s Stronghold at $30, and their buylist for NM copies is $17.50, which is 75% of the TCGmid price today. Starcity wants more Strongholds, so I’m going to follow suit.

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One of the problems in speculating on a 1-of wonder is the inability to unload a significant amount of copies relatively quickly. Patience is a virtue when dealing with Commander cards and finding the right buyer for them, because we’re not shipping them out in playsets or selling into the hype from tournament results. We have to accept the slow trickle of sales as they come, and that type of strategy certainly isn’t for everyone. It’s probable that this is not the single best Magic: The Gathering card to buy right now if you’re looking to make a huge amount of money in a short period of time (In other words, it’s not the next City of Traitors where you can easily sell playsets to aspiring Legacy players). However I think it’s safe to say that cards like Volrath’s Stronghold and Earthcraft are some of the safest buys you can make at the moment (Except bulk rares!), especially if you intend to jam them into your Commander decks for the next year or so.

Specsheet Tracking

I sometimes obsess over cards that I speculate on, because I’m that confident in them. Many of the cards that I buy in collections and set aside for later have an “Eh, maybe one day” feel attached to them (Breaking // Entering, Seance, and Aggressive Mining are some of the forerunners in this category). However, the rest are the vocal majority that I’ve chosen to write about. I like to break down as many aspects of the card as possible, and keep my finger on the pulse day after day to check any minuscule change. Noticing the small 2-3% increases in price day after day is often the sign of an incoming spike in the near future.

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While this spreadsheet model is far from perfect, I think it’s a decent representation of the factors that I’m trying to keep track of in my single-card case studies. Creating an “MTGfinance” routine in the morning can take less than ten minutes; simply scroll through Twitter, check your mtgstocks interests, and take quick glances at the applicable pieces of information in the spreadsheet above.

So Other than Stronghold….

Oh, right. Volrath’s Stronghold is obviously not the only card that we need to keep our eyes on here.

Tower

Yavi

wind

earth

Is “Buy reserved list cards” going to be earth-shattering news to anyone with a cardboard cutout degree in Magic finance? No, of course not. You all have already made your money on Mox Diamond and City of Traitors, so these singletons are irrelevant to you.

 

End Step

  • Breaking news: Wizards just announced the first werewolf planeswalker, which we can probably assume will follow the trend of being a double-sided walker like Garruk Relentless. I would assume that she is able to flip back and forth between forms due to the following line “she can control the transformation, in both directions, with relative ease.
  • As we talked about last week in the Werewolf article, the Shadows over Innistrad checklist that was spoiled shows no mention of any legendary werewolf or planeswalker, but it is labeled “CH1/297”. I think this all but confirms that we will receive a second checklist card with a separate set of double-faced cards to represent [Ed note: Wednesday’s Werewolf Planeswalker announcement supports this]
  • I do not think that Wizards will reuse the templating from the Origins planeswalkers, because “Legendary creature turning into planeswalker” now has the flavor attachment of igniting a spark and having time pass between the two faces of the card.

It’s Not About the Pro Tour (Okay, I Guess it is)

Okay, it’ll probably contain a lot of stuff that pertains to the Pro Tour. What I mean is I’m not going to try to perform some fancy analysis of the decklists and then tell you to sell Eldrazi Mimics, Eye of Ugin, and Chalice of the Void. That should be fairly easy to figure out, and it’s probably too late to capitalize on the maximum possible value by the time you’re reading this. You should be aiming to sell on Saturday Night and Sunday, after the top 8 lists get posted. I sold Chalices at $50 on Saturday night, but I also sold Simian Spirit Guides at $6 each while I slept. Oh well.  Anyway, today I’ve got sort of a hodge-podge list of things I want to talk about, to bear with me as we skip around a bit throughout the article.

I’d like to start out by thanking those who defended me last week, and those who contributed thoughtful and rational disagreements without resorting to ad hominem. I appreciate all of you for reading my content, and constructive criticism is always welcome.

Let’s revisit Spreading Seas, and see how that card ended up after last week’s article. The minuscule supply of foil copies on TCGplayer and SCG finally ran dry in the couple of days leading up to my article’s release, and the card has been sitting comfortably at $20 for the past few days. Interestingly enough, Seas didn’t have any effect on the Pro Tour; it was far too slow to contest with a swarm of turn 2 kills through combat damage. While I would love to list mine on TCGplayer so I can try to sell before the race to the bottom, I’m putting my inventory on ice for my trip to Georgia this week.

If you own any foils, I suggest selling out now to anyone who is brewing a list to try and wash away the Eldrazi menace. You made your money if you bought in a week ago, so start racing to the bottom and cash out now while the card is still appetizing as a way to hate on Eye of Ugin.

Spreadingseasfoil

Non-foils managed to stay under the radar, and the TCG mid price has managed to avoid moving by more than a few cents. However, if you dig a little bit deeper into the actual listings, you’ll see that there are very few copies left at the $1 that the TCG price would have you believe; SCG has about 150 at $1.50, and I’m keeping a close eye on that count in preparation to sell mine on Facebook. A large majority of the listings are for at least $2-3 for near mint, and I don’t suggest buying at that price whatsoever. Let me make this clear. I DO NOT SUGGEST BUYING THE MAGIC: THE GATHERING CARD FROM THE ZENDIKAR EXPANSION PACK, FOR OVER $1.00 USD IF YOU ARE ATTEMPTING PURELY TO LATER SELL THE CARD FOR A PROFIT. (Danny: this sentence feels really weird to read to me, not sure how to fix it)

If you’ve been hoarding Seas for the past few years and setting them aside from collection picks, bulk trades, or being your own buylist in the community and picking them up at $.25, this is our chance to shine If the retail on Seas “officially” hits $3, you’re going to want to open the floodgates. A lot of the desire to include this in the current meta comes from Eye of Ugin being a big bad wolf, and any targeted bans at the deck also hurt the financial potential of Seas. Move ’em now, and be happy if you can get $2 retail on local Facebook groups or $1 buylist eventually.

While we’re swimming around in the original Zendikar block, let’s take a look at another couple of enchantments that caught my eye.

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Both of these are enchantments from the good old Stonesculptor set, which was released six years ago (You might remember that as the year Inception and Toy Story 3 were released). They both appear to have significant casual appeal at first glance, because players will always want to build Megrim and Kraken decks in kitchen table land. I’m going to predict that one of these cards will probably be $5 in a few years, akin to Sigil of the Empty Throne before it got throat-punched with a double-reprint. The other will continue to stagnate and be mostly forgotten about; even without a multiplayer reprint product. Will it be the discard win condition, or the fish finder?

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Here’s my theory; Quest for the Nihil Stone, even though it appears to have a casual appeal, will be ignored by casual players because it doesn’t beat out The Rack, or Liliana’s Caress (by the way; the fact that Caress has gone this long without a reprint is astounding, and I wouldn’t be holding onto these any longer than you have to) in the casual and competitive Rack decks. The deck has enough win conditions without Nihil Stone, and I’ve never actually sold one out of my dollar box even to the people who play discard religiously. While “people I’ve met” isn’t exactly the most statistically relevant sample size, I have never met a single non-competitive player who actually gives a crap about Nihil Stone, and I hang out with a lot of kitchen table players.

On the other hand, Quest for Ula’s Temple makes a great argument for a “why is this card $5” a few years down the line. If you pick up Magic and you want to smack nerds around with giant sea creatures, you need this card. You need four of this card. Nothing else drops free sashimi onto the field like some good old Ula’s Temple. With Kiora still alive and swimming after getting beaten by the Eldrazi harder than a Pro Tour competitor, it’s entirely possible that we see her again later on in the story. With more Kiora comes more big fish, and a few more people itching to make the sea monster deck.

Even with the world-specific name, the casual appeal of this card makes it very easy to jam into a supplemental product. To be honest, I was surprised that it wasn’t in the Commander 2014 mono-blue deck until I actually double-checked my work. While it obviously won’t see a reprint in a standard-legal set due to the time-specific setting of original Zendikar, it could possibly be jammed into a duel deck or Commander product along the way.

“But DJ, doesn’t that mean foils are the easy long term play here? A foil version wouldn’t be printed in a supplemental product, so it would avoid the price drop of a reprint entirely.” 

Not exactly. While Modern and Commander staples are generally strong foil targets, the pure casual crowd wants to stay away from foils almost entirely. These players just want the cheapest version of the card to help make their zombie deck come to (un)life, and the foil multipliers on cards like these with minimal Commander appeal are extremely low. One of my favorite examples is Lich Lord of Unx;

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Other prime candidates for low foil multipliers are Captivating Vampire and, that’s right, Quest for Ula’s Temple.  While foil copies are likely to avoid getting hit by the Yu-Gi-Oh! hammer, they’re just as unlikely to be going up in price at the same ratio as the non-foil. They’ll also be just as hard to get rid of; you’ll probably have to sell them off at the same price as non-foil just to get the kitchen table players interested.

End Step

Remember how I mentioned that Laboratory Maniac was suddenly a $4 card, and I didn’t mention why that was? I was scrolling through my Facebook feed last week, and I saw someone in the casual Magic group wanting to build a deck with Lab Maniac and Inverter of Truth. While this isn’t exactly going to go head-to-head with the Pro Tour lists, it’s definitely another Leveler-esque shenanigan that will usually give you a couple of extra turns left to put the Maniac on the board and win. They curve into each other well enough, and the Inverter can bring back a Maniac that you milled earlier while digging with Thought Scour. Both of those sentences are what a kitchen table is going to tell you right before they buy your Lab Maniacs for $4 each.