All posts by Douglas Johnson

Mindslicer

Alright! So maybe I was a little mean in last week’s article, and I apologize for that. I’m a little bit frustrated from trying to explain some concepts to people repeatedly, and I wanted to vent it through satire. My message seemed to get a little lost in translation, so let me reiterate the primary point that I wanted to nail down in the midst of all the Modern “buyouts”.

Speculators Anonymous

I do not deny the existence of speculators, as some seem to believe. I know there are people out there who buy Magic cards (sometimes lots of them) in hopes that they go up in price. I’m guilty as charged when it comes to buying copies of  Spawnsire of Ulamog and Heartless Summoning, then waiting months for them to jump. If that should be considered evil, so be it:

“Hi, everyone. My name is Douglas Johnson, and I am a dirty speculator.”

Dirty Wererat x Mystic Speculation

I’m also in agreement with the statement that we finance writers can be a catalyst for a card’s price increasing. Again, Spawnsire is a pretty good example of that. While I remain adamant that Spawnsire would have ended up a $9 card regardless of my articles, I’ll accept that my writing probably caused it to jump a few weeks sooner than it otherwise would have. I neglected to mention our effect on the market, which Derek Madlem summarizes very well here when referring to “the observer effect.” I missed an opportunity to elaborate on that in the content I wrote last week, and accept that mistake.

However, the disagreement starts here. I’m really getting tired of the old, “Rabble, rabble, speculators are making Modern prices extremely high, rabble, rabble.” The shadowy cabal that turned my stack of 100 Heartless Summoning into 100 Benjamins does not have the power to profit by making powerful Modern cards jump by ridiculous percentages and stay at those prices without actual demand.

I will stand by that statement. Nowif only we had an example of a card to showcase it…

Let’s Slice Some Minds

mindslicer

What. Alright. This card will work, I guess.

Untitled

Even MTG Stocks itself is disgusted at the Mindslicer spike, so it refuses to show us the card image on the page. Oh, you didn’t notice? That’s probably because my replacement drawing is basically indistinguishable better in every way. Well, let’s get to work and do some research, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. I’ve never seen a Mindslicer cast in Modern or Legacy in my entire life, although it is pretty fun to cast in a B/G/X Commander deck. However, there’s absolutely no way that the “new” Meren deck is enough to cause this kind of movement.

edhrec

I wonder if the pros are testing some sort of super secret tech involving Mindslicer, Lyzolda, Savra, and the five pieces of Exodia? That’s the only other rational explanation that would drive someone to actually believe that there’s reason enough to expect a higher price point. Maybe a pro like LSV is planning on shaking up the format now that Twin is out of the picture.

LSV

Oh. Alright then.

Actual… Demand…? By Who? 

So there’s no spicy new Commander demand, at least according to EDHREC (the most reliable compilation of EDH/Commander decks that I’m aware of), and LSV made a joke about that card. One or more  psychopaths drank the kool-aid and felt that LSV was being serious. If only we could look into this guy’s mind and see what he was thinking while he was rolling his face around on the keyboard in a combination of clicks that allowed him to fill his cart with Mindslicers and hit “Confirm Purchase”. Thankfully, we have a cameo from your favorite old-man Commander-durdle writer to provide a comedic spin on some historical precedent. I wasn’t a part of the public finance cartel at this time, so I don’t remember the Cosmic Larva buyout as clearly as Jason Alt.

Jason’s Storytime

Reddittt

Thanks, Jason. Now, let’s recap our lesson from last week. As long as nobody buys Mindslicers at the $10 they are now, they have zero reason to remain at $10. The sellers who pick their Slicers out of bulk rare boxes, Commander decks, and out of the toilet will list them on TCGplayer and eBay, causing a drop back down into the dollar bin relatively quickly. Then everyone will forget about this crazy person who bought them out, and players can go back to paying $1 to jam this in their Meren decks. Until yesterday, I firmly believed that would be the case. I heard about the Mindslicer buyout, and thought, “There’s no way someone is actually going to pay anything over $2 or $3 for this card. This guy is going to crash and burn, and I’m going to revel in it.”

That all changed yesterday during our Cartel Aristocrats podcast, when we brought up the topic of Mindslicer. Travis pointed out something I had forgotten about; that you can check the price of the last sold listing on TCGplayer if you have a seller account.


That reminds me: you should probably get a seller account on TCGplayer, even if you don’t currently sell cards. All it takes is a bank account, phone number, and email address, and you can be set up relatively quickly. Even if you have no plans to sell cards at the moment, you’ll have your account ready to sell in the future if you want to quickly liquidate cards that spiked, like Mindslicer, and even if not, you’ll have access to this information regardless.


Last Listing

tcgplayer

tgplayer
I don’t actually own any Mindslicers. Well, I might have a couple; I have to dig through my bulk rares this Friday…

So this is what the listing looks like when you’re putting something up for sale on TCGplayer. You have the lowest listing column on the left, which you usually need to match if you’re trying to move your cards as soon as possible. The price on the right is the “market price,” which attempts to average the  most recent sales for that product. The middle column, while rarely used for listing cards, is helpful in situations like this. It actually tells us what someone else paid for the card, although it doesn’t say when. It’s kind of like checking the eBay completed listings…

mindddd

My Mind is Sliced

Wait, don- … Why wou-… Alright, then. So someone needed a playset of Mindslicers at $9 a piece. That’s… interesting. And according to the “last sold listings” for the Ninth Edition and Odessey versions on TCGplayer, people have purchased non-foil copies of varying conditions $7, $8, $9, and $10. On the cast, Travis even said that he saw the last sold listing hit $30 for a single copy.

I don’t understand. This was supposed to be a “lol, someone tried to buyout Mindslicer and is going to fail miserably” moment, but human beings are actually buying this card with no evident reason. There’s no unstable decklist that was leaked onto the internet that was supposed to be hidden tech for the Pro Tour, no Travis Woo character streaming and encouraging people to buy. There’s nothing. I see tons of users on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit suggesting that this is going to crash and burn with no buyers, but there’s still at least one person drinking the Kool-Aid and buying copies.

The guy who bought this card out should absolutely be criticized. I’m not trying to defend him, or suggest that buyouts like this are a positive thing in the community. However, the blame is not entirely on our spooky speculator if Mindslicer sticks at a price that is above a couple dollars. For whatever unholy reason, there were multiple people who bought into Mindslicer at the $7 to $10 range. That’s demand, regardless of why they bought it or their mental capability to grasp long-term consequences.

If Slicy finds a nest in the $4 or $5 range two weeks from now, that means one of two things has happened.

  1. People continued to buy into the card well after the initial craziness wore off, and the woodworkers who pulled these out of binders/decks settled on a reasonable price, while Master Buyoutmancer ships out copies to various stores at the new price, proving that a consistent number of people are willing to accept the new price and establish it as a norm.
  2. The remaining copies from the woodworkers run dry, and players stand their ground while refusing to buy at the new price. Buyoutmancer is left with a stack of god knows how many pieces of cardboard that he can’t make money off of without refusing to lower the price back to a rational number.  Then he gets to use them as toilet paper while he suffers from explosive diarrhea because he’s too poor to eat anything other than low-quality chinese food for the rest of his days.

If someone tries to buy out a card for no reason, but players accept the new price and pay it, rogue speculators are not the problem. We are.21

#MTGFINANCE Truths Revealed!!1!

JA: Ahem. I now call the weekly #MTGFINANCE cartel meeting to order. Let us waste no time; time is money, and we all love money. The masses are still angry over the Gaddock Teeg spike a few weeks ago, and they have rightly decided to point blame at our shadowy cabal. However, this fury and passion from the average player is trivial in our grand plan. The sheep shall have no choice but to buy our $75 Auriok Champions, drawn in by the money machine named “Modern.” While they may recognize there is puppeteering behind their pathetic children’s card game, it is impossible for them to pin down who exactly is pulling the strings. They are forced to submit to the almighty addictive power of this game, and we shall become infinitely more wealthy with each passing day. Now, will each of the cartel members present his successful market manipulations? The sooner that we finish our reports, the sooner we can begin to bathe in the money pit.

DJ: My Heartless Summoning plot worked brilliantly. The weak-minded fools still believe that I only bought 100 copies one year ago, instead of my actual purchase: 100,000 copies in the past week. I have personally manipulated the price up to a stable $6 TCGplayer mid from the minuscule 50 cents that it was mere weeks ago, and I will slowly trickle my cards back onto the market as planned. $60,000 was a small price to pay those couple of mindless drones to play the Heartless Eldrazi deck and generate hype for my scheme. No one actually wants to play that pathetic pile of 75 cards. My estimated profit from this buyout is… a lot of money

TA: On a similar note, the Inquisition of Kozilek buyout marks another success in our plot to force the price of that Eldrazi deck into the four-digit range. While the piles of cash that I acquired from this single-person buyout is a cute way for me to pay for my newest fleet of Ferraris, the true reward is the unmatched arousal I feel when reading the complaints of the poors. We can continue to blame the players for this spike, even though there is only one recorded instance of another human being wanting to build this black Eldrazi deck. Everything is coming to fruition, and I plan to spike Inquisition of Kozilek once again in approximately four days. 

JC: Day 1456: The players still believe that I am one of them, and I have gleaned much information about their laughable cognitive processes and dissociation from basic economics. My test post on the Hype-Generation Subreddit was successful, and confirms a new weapon in our arsenal for manipulating the price of Magic: The Gathering cards that have zero competitive applicability in any format.  Spellskite is now a $40 card for no reason whatsoever, and despite there being no actual demand for the card, some smoke and mirrors have led to this new price being set in stone. But hey, I’m not sure such a small spike is worth my time, so instead of releasing my 600 copies onto the market, I will distribute them throughout the office as coffee coasters. On another note, Johnson, you owe me half of your 400 Spellskites as a result of our wager. I have bested you in fair and honest #MTGFINANCE combat, and you will uphold your end of the bargain. 

CH: My attempt at shadowy market manipulation did not succeed as well as the rest of yours. While I also made a written submission to the Hype-Generation Subreddit, the price on Urabrask the Hidden didn’t even move enough for me to buy one Ferrari with my winnings. The low-level speculators outside of the cartel were able to point out my plot successfully, so we will have to wait until next month to attempt another buyout on the New Phyrexia Praet-

JA: Shut up, CH. We will now adjourn to the money pits. Meeting adjourned until January 12, 2016, at exactly 1:30 a.m. EST. 

Big5
The true face of the #MTGFINANCE cartel….

I’m Back, Baby

‘Sup nerds? You may remember me from my masterpiece article like five months ago, and now I’m back again to shed some light on the Magic financial world when it needs me most.

You already know why my expertise is needed, right? Prices have been absolutely crazy over these past few weeks, and I’m here to save the freaking day and expose the evil Cartel Aristocrats for the market manipulators that they truly are. The above documentation with the fancy slanted lettering is a perfectly accurate transcribing from their most recent secret meeting. I managed to sneak in by disguising myself as one of them, which wasn’t hard considering how insanely rich I am.

Also, who is this peasant people keep talking about
Also, who is this peasant people keep talking about?

What’s that? One of the guys in there has “DJ” as his initials? Yeah, don’t worry about that. No relation. Dude was freaking handsome, though. Seriously, drop-dead gorgeous. But me? I was just a fly on the wall, writing down some serious #MTGFINANCE truths to drop on you, the precious reader.

As you can tell by my daring journalism efforts that would put Corbin Hosler to shame, these buyouts are real. I mean, sure, I tend to buy and sell a bunch of Magic  cards on a level that would make most of you weep, but buyouts…? I would never partake in such an evil, organized effort to isolate a certain card on the market and purchase all of the copies available for hopes of selling it for more later on. While buyouts are an effective way of making easy money, today I fight for the people, and the player.

These buyouts are obviously a concerted effort by an organized group of fat cats at an attempt to ruin #MTGFINANCE for the rest of us, while simultaneously making themselves very rich. (Maybe even richer than me, and that’s something that I just can’t stand for.) I will help you all stand up against this shadowy cabal of evil speculators, and I’m not even going to charge you for it. What a benevolent writer I am (although I’ll probably definitely put it down as a tax-write off)!

So let’s work together and get Heartless Summoning back down to 50 cents. Don’t worry though, we won’t stop there. We’ll get Inquisition of Kozilek to drop back down to its’ original price of $13, because there’s no true demand. After all, Modern season doesn’t even start for a couple of months! How could anyone possibly need copies before that?

But DJ, How?!?

Don’t worry, ladies and gents. I possess a secret strategy honed by a combination of practice, training, and natural-born talent. Every single plan has a fatal flaw, and I know exactly how to make their empire crumble. We can take down these speculators, together, with the power of teamwork!!!

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Fortunately for us, these multi-billionaire speculators have one fatal weakness that will be their ultimate downfall: “Don’t buy cards.” That’s it. As long as you don’t purchase their cards at their inflated prices, then they don’t get the satisfaction of swindling you out of your hard-earned cash dollars (I mean, you should still buy my cards, but don’t buy theirs. Trust me). Now here’s where the real magic happens.

If Spooky Speculator A can’t sell Spellskites at $40 and wants to make her money back, she has to drop the price, maybe to $38 or so. If we all work together and hold up our metaphorical picket signs and say, “We won’t pay your outrageous price on Spellskites! This card should be $1.30,” then the price drops even more, because the cartel has to move copies in order to make money. While this will be difficult, it’s theoretically possible. Here’s an accurate scientific model of all of us working together to beat the cartel financiers.

GokuSpiritBombFrieza02

Unless…

Now, I said before that every single strategy and plan has a weakness. Unfortunately, that includes my brilliant anti-marketing scheme. If somehow I got my intel wrong (not likely), and somehow these price spikes were caused by actual player demand… then there would be an issue with our heroic plot. True player demand would suggest that our unified boycotting efforts were meaningless, because some psychopaths actually bought the cards to play with in their decks. Our powers of friendship and teamwork will be useless to stop these people from buying copies to play with at the new prices.

However, I’m sure we have nothing to worry about. None of these buyouts generated from low supply, player demand, or people wanting to prepare for a format. It was all #MTGFINANCE speculators. Trust me: I saw the cartel speak and share stories with my own eyes.

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174

Painful Choices

Welcome back to another Thursday installment of my article series. I really appreciate you reading these, and I’m hoping that you had a wonderful New Year’s celebration. I know that last week I said I would bring back an old persona of mine, but a spoiler came up that I think is a bit more pressing. I was going to just write this article on the running MTGPrice spoiler coverage, but it ended up being a lot longer than a quick blurb about a card’s price that I’m trying to restrict myself to. If you’re not tired of me bombarding you with green link text yet, you can go check out our running spoiler coverage right there in that convenient link.

The card/bulk rare I want to spend an entire article talking about is none other than Remorseless Punishment. The most recent in the line of “your opponent chooses which bad thing they want to happen,” this five-mana sorcery has gotten a resounding “meh” from the Spikey players of the world, and a “I want to copy this with Howl of the Horde and then Increasing Vengeance from the non-competitive players that I see and commonly interact with on Facebook. If you’re one of the former, you can probably agree with me that this will not see competitive Standard  play, and we certainly won’t be seeing it in any Modern lists. Five-mana black spells in Modern are reserved for game-winning effects like Ad Nauseam, and this is not going to have that kind of impact unless your opponent is sitting with no creatures, no hand, and has three life left.

remorselesspunishment

If you’re not planning on sleeving up Grixis Twin for your next PPTQ and you just like to jam Magic cards with your friends over a kitchen table, you probably have a bit of a different opinion on this card. Your wheels are turning on how to make this deal 10 damage, or how to combo it with Liliana’s Caress to limit their options further. My co-reviewer Jason Alt said that this is going to pre-sell for more than it should, although I don’t think SCG is going to pre-sell a rare for less than $.49. Vendor confidence in this card is extremely low, and I can’t say that I blame them. This is not the (potential) Constructed all-star that Kozilek’s Return is. This card has an entirely different market, one that I have quite a bit of experience interacting with.

Browbeat

You knew Browbeat was worth $1.50, right? I think that’s one of the more well-known “picks” that is impossible to keep down in price. It was in a Planechase a while ago, and then reprinted in a Duel Deck, but is still rock solid and easy to sell at $1 locally (or $.50 on a buylist if you’re lucky).

Browbeat

On Jason’s paragraph about Remorseless Punishment, he talked briefly (and linked a very helpful article from 2006) about something called the “Browbeat effect.” The shortened version (I’m assuming you’d rather stay here and talk with me instead of leaving this page), is that while both effects of Browbeat are very powerful and cost-effective on their own (a 2R Lava Axe is incredibly powerful and undercosted, as is a 2R Concentrate), the power in these diminishes significantly when your opponent gets to pick their poison. The common sentence that I hear a lot to describe this is: “The card will never do what you want it to do, it will do what your opponent wants it to do.”

If that statement is true, then why is the card constantly bought  from my display case at $1 a copy, and why is it immune to reprints from a value perspective? Well, probably because the vocal and competitive minority are looking at the card from the wrong perspective. In order to “properly” evaluate the card (and the “Browbeat effect” as a whole), let’s step into the shoes of somebody who has never been to a Magic tournament and just wants to slam cardboard with their friends with 78-card unsleeved decks.

Hi, my name is Johnny. I’m a fictional character that DJ made up for the purposes of this article. I really like to play red and black, and enjoy effects that burn my opponent. Unfortunately, red doesn’t have cards that draw more cards consistently; that sort of thing is left for blue, green, and black. Thankfully, Browbeat is really good in my burn deck. My friend Sam really hates taking direct damage, so he pretty much always lets me draw three cards off of it, even if he’s at full life points. I really love the look on some of my other friends faces when they’re thinking about what to do, because either way I get a really powerful effect for three mana!

Thanks for the interview, Johnny. I’ve had multiple conversations that were similar to this, and stitched them all together to sort of represent the type of player who is comfortable paying $1 for a Browbeat to jam it in his burn deck. The kitchen-table grinders who really want to upgrade on the arms race are the ones who give Vexing Devil a reason to be $10. As someone who regularly plays against (or as) the burn deck at Grands Prix, you laugh at Vexing Devil because it’s a burn spell that gets countered by Path to Exile or a 4/3 that gets countered by paying four life. Johnny sees a way to “guarantee” four damage for one mana on the first turn of the game, especially since the “control decks” full of wraths, counterspells, and planeswalkers that we know and love are much less common in the non-competitive world that’s mostly made of tribal, mill, ramp, and combo.

Vexing Devil.full

So the argument against this card is that it doesn’t do what it wants you to do, right? What if your primary goal of building the deck wasn’t winning? If the endgame of building your kitchen table burn deck is simply having fun and enjoying a game with your friends, the bar of “what do I need my cards to do” changes. Now you want your cards to help you have fun, and Browbeat fills that void for the invisible crowd that most of the competitive crowd doesn’t interact with anymore. Just like Dash Hopes and Vexing Devil, it’s a lot of fun to start throwing Lava Axes for just a fraction of the price; even if the card sometimes only ends up being a Concentrate or Counterspell.

Now, the other assumption used in the debate is that your opponent will always choose what mode is best for herself when it comes to these punisher cards. But again, we’re looking at this through a different lens than most of the rest of the world here. If you’re sitting at table 547 in round one of a Grand Prix and you slam Browbeat on turn five, your opponent is more than likely going to have the game experience and knowledge to analyze the situation and then select the option that hurts themselves the least. However, that’s not where any of these punishers are going to see play.

When we’re slamming cardboard on kitchen tables, the players involved in the game are statistically going to have less experience playing at a highly competitive level. I don’t think it’s wrong to assume that even though there’s almost always a “correct choice” when presented with a Browbeat scenario, the opponent of someone actually playing the Browbeat is not going to always choose that correct option. When this happens, Browbeat actually does do both of the things that the caster wanted it to do: it gives him the Concentrate when he was hellbent, and it helps him have fun by casting a red card draw spell.

So how does all of this factor into Remorseless Punishment? It obviously doesn’t go into the same deck as Browbeat, unless you want to build some sort of weird R/B “bad choices” deck. It has the potential to do twice as much damage as Browbeat or Dash Hopes, but you have to put in some serious effort to get those kind of results out of the card. Like Jason said, it’s probably going to be a more expensive Blightning most of the time. However, I don’t think that’s going to stop the player casting it from having a lot of fun forcing his opponent to make two painful choices, and the kitchen table player still has room for his opponent to make a mistake.

The point of this article is not to tell you to go out and buy Remorseless Punishment at 49 cents each from SCG. This is not a Wasteland Strangler. This card is a Crucible of Fire. You wait until you can buy these at 10 or 25 cents, and then wring your fingers together like a villain until your #mtgfinance cabal of 300,000 non-competitive players slowly scoops up supply over the course of two years until it’s a $2 card. Even if you never get the chance to buy in at 25 cents or lower, I would still respect the potential demand for this card and treat it differently than other true bulk rares.

End Step

  • ‘Tis the season for Modern-legal cards to spike in price! One of the sideboard cards that I think some people have forgotten about since about a year ago is Night of Souls’ Betrayal. It saw play as a two-of in the sideboard of the mono-black Eldrazi deck that saw camera time in the Modern Open, and I’m pretty sure there are only seven copies left in all existence because it’s a rare from Kamigawa block. I’m not saying that this is a spec target, but I think you buy your copies now if you think you’ll need them.
  • In other news, can someone please explain to me why foil copies of Genesis Wave only have a multiplier of two compared to the non-foil? It’s the epitome of “cast big spells and big things happen” in Commander, has one printing from half a decade ago, and I see almost every green player in my local group sleeving it up. While EDHREC disagrees and suggests that only the mono-greeniest of mono-green generals play the card in high percentages, it just strikes me as odd that such a Commander-iconic card only has the standard foil multiplier of two.

Foil Modern Commons

Because I was sitting in my bedroom at a loss for something to write about this week, I reached out to the Twitterverse as an attempt to stir an idea. Thankfully, @PhillyB322 had a great suggestion for a starting point to kick things off.

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Literally

At this point, you’re probably thinking; “Really? Literally no store has foil Blighted Agents? Pshhhh.. Hyperbole at its’ fin-”

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Wow. Huh. I literally cannot find a single foil Blighted Agent on the U.S. market. No beat up copies, nothing on eBay, ABU, CK… Wow. After some further research, I managed to find the European market stocked with a few copies, if you A) really need them for your own Infect deck or B) are convinced that these can jump to $25 or $30.

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So what’s the reasoning behind the vanishing act? It doesn’t look like someone bought out the entire internet recently with the intent to make a profit. If they did, I think we would have seen players and store owners coming out of the woodwork: digging their copies out of bulk, swapping them from decks, and listing them online to start a race to the bottom. If we check the MTG Stocks foil graph, the only recent movement that the foil has shown is a slight bump from $14 to $18 in the past month or so.

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So What’s the Takeaway?

So what’s our battle plan with this information? Do we go narrow within the deck Blighted Agent sees play in, and pick up other foil Infect stuff? I can’t really think of anything else in the deck that has a similar multiplier that’s ready to jump. We missed the boat on Groundswell foils (well, I did; I sold mine on TCGplayer for around $4 if I remember correctly. You might have made a bunch of money buying my copies, and would be laughing at me right now), while the non-foil continued to be pressured into the ground by the reprint that it received in Duel Decks: Zendikar vs. Eldrazi.

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Some of you know that I’ve been on the Glistener Elf train for a while; I still firmly believe that holding non-foils of Elf and Agent are the correct play (buylisting them at $.10 and $.25 seems criminal while Deceiver Exarch is chillin’ like a villain at $3.50, even with the aid of a reprint in the Commander 2013 set. If you have the privilege of picking NPH bulk, I’d hesitate on shipping those Modern common/uncommon pieces, at least until the end of winter.

Foils of Glistener Elf might also be a play at $4 to $5. I’ve been holding onto these for almost a year now (I think), but I keep holding off on selling them because I think it’s absurd that such a hard-to-reprint card that sees play as a four-of in a Modern combo deck could hang out at $4 to $5. I know that it got an FNM promo a few years back, but still…

Going Wide

Alternatively, we could jump over to other Modern decks with commons and uncommons with foil multipliers that appear to be criminally low. You’d be surprised at how little Modern play a card needs to see to be worth money: my friend Izzet Staticaster from back in my Kiki-Pod days is now a $10 to $12 foil, even though it basically only sees play as a one-of in the Grixis Control and Grixis Twin lists. Is this also a common Cube card that I’m not aware of? It’s from a more recent set than the Infect twins, sees less play, and yet the foil has still been holding its own at the post-spike price for about a month now.

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Hmm…. So what’s an example of a highly played, foil, Modern common that hasn’t already spiked? Well, maybe this little guy here:

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While he does have a Gateway promo from back in the yonder days, I’m definitely surprised to see this little flier so cheap. Is this the next Izzet Staticaster? It certainly sees enough play as a consistent four-of in Affinity, ruining the lives of mono-red players everywhere. It’s hard to reprint again with that good, ol’ Phyrexian mana, and you can pick up a playset of either version for around $10. While I’m not one to normally speculate on cards at full retail, I definitely like Vault Skirge foils going forward into Modern season.

Is there anything else from Affinity that we can look to in the relatively under-appreciated commons and uncommons? While most of them have been reprinted into dust, the pack foil of Signal Pest has been lagging behind its promo version. Whether that’s simply due to an art preference is open to debate, but if you’re looking to foil out an Affinity deck, I would start with these two aggressive and cheap (in both senses of the word) one-drops.

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End Step

  • SCG gets a bad reputation sometimes for having overpriced cards. That’s literally the only complaint you can honestly make about the store, and it’s not even their fault for charging prices that people are willing to pay. However, their holiday sales are definitely worth checking out. Here’s what I just recently picked up from the $1 sale:
  • Screenshot 2015-12-16 at 12.01.59 AM
  • Unfortunately, a lot of the cards that I was originally going to buy didn’t make it to the end of the checkout process. I was going to get away with 43 SP copies of Boundless Realms at $1 each, but someone else sniped them before I could finish my purchase. The same goes for those other 10 copies of Heartless Summoning, and about 15 more Mimic Vats.
  • The Seize the Day are for an arbitrage attempt, so we’ll see how that goes. My experience with SCG’s grading has been extremely positive, and most of the SP cards that I’ve ordered from them have been NM by my and my customers’ standards. I’m hoping that MP will basically be my SP, so that I can still make a few dollars by just shipping out most of those Seizes to another store, even after the dust is settled with grading.
  • As a closing statement, I’d like to remind you to check out as soon as possible when you find a great deal like those Boundless Realms that I missed out on. I got greedy by putting them in my cart, and scanning through the rest of the $1 sale to see if I wanted to add anything else to my cart beforehand. If I had locked in that order of 43 Boundless Realms first, it would have been well worth paying the shipping costs for separate orders by making sure nobody else could snipe them out from under me. Misplays were made, and lessons learned!