All posts by Derek Madlem

Derek picked up Magic the first time during Ice Age and played through the release of Invasion. During Shards of Alara he returned to the game and has never looked back.

Going Mad – Battle for EVE

By: Derek Madlem

With the launch of Battle for Zendikar we’ve got a lot coming at us very quickly. I fear this spoiler season might be more like a bottle rocket than a sparkler, flying high into the air and making a tiny bang and then it’s over. We’ve already seen most of the dual lands, all the Planeswalkers, the now-obligatory mythic nuisance creature from green, and quite a few rares that are likely to be left on the table after a draft with the rest of the scraps.

If you read my article last week, you’ll get what I mean by EVE – expected value equity. In BFZ we’re going to see just a small handful of cards soaking up most of the Expected Value Equity in the set, so cards that would have typically been good for $5-8 will likely end up around $2-4. With only a handful of cards being able to hold value going forward, where do we realistically expect that value to land?

It Takes Two to Tango

You can call them what you want, but I’m going to call them the tango lands because it’s an easy word and the description works on another axis in addition to the card mechanics: the tango is a dance that at first glance seems incredibly sexy and awesome, but the reality is that it kinda sucks.sunkenhollowpromo

Let’s get one thing clear: these lands are not really Modern playable. I’ll let you do the in-depth analysis yourselves because THAT OTHER finance site seems to have misplaced the entire article I once wrote on the matter; but the typical number of shocklands and fetches in Modern broke down as such:

Shocks: 2-4
Fetches: 7-11

So in your typical three color deck, say Abzan, you would have a remarkable four shocklands spread out across three different land types:

2x Overgrown Tomb
1x Godless Shrine
1x Temple Garden

So the argument that we can replace some number of shocklands with tango lands for more flexibility just doesn’t seem to hold up very well as there just aren’t any shocklands in these three color decks to take out. So what about the two color decks?

Well here’s the mana base for one of the most prolific two color strategies in Modern, Bogles:

1x Forest
4x Horizon Canopy
1x Misty Rainforest
2x Plains
4x Razorverge Thicket
4x Temple Garden
4x Windswept Heath

Go ahead, explain to me what we’re taking out here to slot in a Canopy Vista. While you’re at it, show me what we’re cutting to add basics because this deck runs three. Three.

Three.

Taking a look at the basics in other top decks in Modern you gets you a similar result:

Jund – 3
Abzan – 4
Naya Burn – 2
Grixis Twin – 5
Grixis Delver – 4

You get the idea…having the “option” to sometimes save two damage over using a shock land is not going to be worth the sacrifice in flexibility. Modern is a format that is often won and lost on tempo, the same reason we’ll never really see the temples crossing over to the big show.

smolderingmarshpromo

These lands are going to be really sweet in Standard… for six months, then they’re going to be pretty average barring reprints of the Zendikar fetches or a card like Farseek.

Summary: don’t go whole-hog on these lands as they’re destined for pretty mediocre things, between a mediocre existence long term outside of Commander and the reality that they are not going to be where that EVE ends up…they’re a losing proposition for the foreseeable future.

Walk the Walk

Face it, we’re still hungover from Jace, the Mind Sculptor. It’s been five years and we’re still afraid of missing out. We are compelled to closely scrutinize and over pay for every planeswalker printed now because we’re afraid of missing out on the next Jace. The reality is that even the Liliana of the Veil went as low as $25 during her time in Standard before joining Jace in the $100 Planeswalker Pantheon. With Battle for Zendikar we have three shiny new Planeswalkers to sink our teeth into and make bold assumptions of future value:

kioramasterofthedepths1
If you’re not proclaiming loudly “UNLEASH THE KRAKENS!” every time you ultimate this Kiora, you’re probably living your life incorrectly. Kiora has the distinct dishonor of existing in one of the worst two-color combinations for constructed. While those Sultai decks had a good run, they’ve dipped back into the darkness with little recent success and let’s not even talk about how miserable Temur has been this block… but having said all that, did you see that -2 ability? It might be time to dust off these Sidisi, Brood Tyrants and get that Sultai deck back into action.

This iteration of Kiora is probably not significantly better than the last one we saw. She’s almost always going to grant you card advantage as long as you activate the second ability. If you’re doing anything else in a format where “Destroy target Planeswalker” is printed on a card, you’re setting yourself up for failure, but that’s the extent of her power. She does give you the ability to untap a creature to block of a land to cast a defensive spell but does little to protect herself when played onto an open board.

This is not where I would place my bets for BFZ’s money cards.

gideonallyofzendikar
There’s a lot of misevaluation to this card going around. Gideon is a 5/5 indestructible creature for four mana the same way as Sarkhan was a 4/4 flying haste Indestructible for five mana… only kinda. When Gideon is not in creature mode (your opponent’s turn) he is still  going to die to attacks, and won’t even trade in combat as he just stands there staring at the creatures thumping him upside the head.

The ability to crap out a single 2/2 creature every turn is cool, but the last time we saw this trick they had haste and showed up in a color that had access to some mana ramp.

The ultimate? Meh?

This is not even the most powerful Gideon ever printed so I don’t expect this card to see heavy play in Standard (or any other format) unless there is a fairly incredible ally deck being preconstructed for us (don’t worry, there’s not).

obnixilisreignited2

That leaves us with Ob Nixilis Reignited.

Phyrexian Arena + Murder + the best Underworld Dreams you’re ever going to see? Check. Ob Nixilis has the starting loyalty to ensure that he doesn’t die as soon as he hits the board.  Ob Nixilis will often function as a pseudo Time Warp, drawing you a card and blanking your opponent’s next attack phase as they try to take him out, but on an empty board he’s going to be the Boss Monster. The ability to outdraw your opponent is a time-honored method for winning at Magic and the ability to do so while removing any threat your opponent plays is a lot like Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

“Derek said that Ob Nixilis is the next Jace!”

No, but one could draw some parallels if you stretch hard enough! Realistically I think Ob Nixilis is going to be an incredibly powerful card for his 18 month reign in Standard, the flexibility in having card advantage coupled with board control on a single Planeswalker is too powerful to ignore; admittedly he is going to be kept in check by Ruinous Path, a spell trope that is sure to keep all future Planeswalkers from dominating a format in the same way that Jace TMS did.

I can see Ob Nixilis staying above $15 for the bulk of his time in Standard, but am going have a hard time seeing him anywhere above $25 for long. If we didn’t have the expedition lands in this set pushing his price down, I could imagine an entirely different world for Ob Nixilis…this card does seem pretty sick.

The Hard to Kill Green Guy

So it appears that Wizards is noticing that players love mythic green creatures that are a pain in the ass to permanently deal with, so in the vein of Vengevine and Deathmist Raptor they give you this guy:

undergrowthchampion

The obvious places to start with this guy are the fetchlands and Sword of the Animist. Maybe we’ll see a world where Animist’s Awakening is dumping piles of lands into play and this guy gests huge off of that, but a 2/2 that gains “Divine Shield” every time you play a land is going to go a long way to clog up the board in the early game. While I don’t think this is going to go crazy high like Deathmist Raptor did, this is probably sustainable in the $5-8 range after release and may be enough to put some price pressure on all of those Sword of the Animists sitting in spec boxes.

Oh Man, Lands!

Manlands were a foregone conclusion from this set, though I admit that I’m really surprised to hear that they’re dividing the set up across the two sets. So far we’ve only seen the Blue / Green land and it’s about what you’d expect:

lumberingfalls
If I was to guess blindly what this card would be, I would have expected a 2/3 Hexproof with a three mana activation, but they decided to up the ante a little bit and give us a 3/3 for four, which is probably reasonable given how hard these will be to kill outside of combat. Having a land-creature that dodges pretty much all removal is going to make it extremely difficult for control decks to continue playing with such low creature counts.

The value of these manlands is going to be extremely meta-dependant. If blue / green continues to be a bad combination, then this land might just never get a chance in the sun.

Wrap Up

Placing bets on Battle for Zendikar is going to be hard. The shadow of Expeditions Lands looming over the rest of the set like a specter of anti-value is going to mean that a very small handful of mythics and rares will hold almost all the value in this set, we just have to identify where to divide that equity and place our bets there.


 

Going Mad – Welcome to the Chase

By: Derek Madlem

In case you missed it, Wizards broke the internet on Saturday night with their PAX preview party for the upcoming set Battle for Zendikar. The stream was pretty abysmal thanks mostly to the inclusion of Wil Wheaton making butthole jokes and telling us that the Eldrazi were the good guys… and that every single card was “AWESOME” even if it was probably closer to mediocre at best. They unveiled a lot of sweet things that I’m stoked to talk about in the coming weeks, but they also decided now was the time to jump the shark:

Sharks

In Battle for Zendikar we’ll have a subset of full art FOIL lands encompassing ten fetch lands, ten shock lands, and five of Zendikar’s new dual land… and they look AWESOME. They’re being referred to as Expedition lands and I want a playset of each… but I’m not exactly ready to sell off my Power 9 to acquire them. Did I mention they’re going to be rare? No, rarer than that.

In the stream they were described as being about the same rarity as a Mythic FOIL rare but a little more common because there are 25 of them vs. 15 Mythics. While we’ve yet to see exactly what that means in terms of actual rarity, there is roughly one FOIL Mythic rare in every 216 packs of Magic, so let’s use that as our starting point. For reference: there are 216 packs (36×6) in a case of Magic!

Parameters

So what are these going to be worth? It’s a safe bet to assume that all of these are going to be worth more than their regular FOIL counterparts, even if they do have a questionable hedron-laden frame.

Here’s what current incarnations of these cards look like financially:

Zendikar FOIL Scalding Tarn – $180
Khans of Tarkir FOIL Polluted Delta – $90
Return to Ravnica FOIL Steam Vents – $45

So what kind of premium do we place on the new hotness? The fetchlands are likely to hold a higher premium than the shocklands because of their inclusion in Vintage and Legacy, two formats where players are no strangers to “pimping”.

It’s no stretch pricing the full art Scalding Tarn in the $250+ range and I can see that anchor point pulling all of the other fetches up to the same price range with the blues easily settling in the $200-250 range and tapering down from there to Marsh Flats at $150 or so.

The shock lands are easily going to top out with Steam Vents and Watery Grave in the $100-125 range and the rest spanning the $75-100 range.

The new duals will bring up the rear with a likely top end in the $50 range based almost entirely on rarity as I don’t expect these cards to have much impact outside of Standard; there’s just too few scenarios where these are better in Modern than a shock land and they are unplayable in Legacy and Vintage.

This is the point where I insert a disclaimer stating that all of these estimates are probably on the conservative end of the spectrum, and that some of these (looking at you Scalding Tarn) could hit obscene numbers initially.

So that’s pretty awesome right? Even the disappointment of opening a tango land because it could have been a fetchland won’t feel that bad…a free fifty bucks is nothing to sneeze at! But what impact will these cards have on the financial market as a whole?

arid_mesa

Aggregate Pricing

For retailers, the bulk of the initial singles supply comes from opening boxes. Typically when you look at a new set, you’ll see that the preorder prices typically create an EV (expected value) per pack that exceeds the price of a pack. As time goes on and more and more singles flood the market, the value of a pack fast approaches an equilibrium where the singles contained within a box become roughly in sync with the price of a box…then MTGO redemptions hit the market and that price implodes as additional cards enter the market.

The effect this has on the secondary market is very noticeable once you know what to look for. Let’s take Khans of Tarkir as an example, because some of the singles prices are almost criminally low. Khans featured the five card cycle of fetch lands that we’ve all grown to love and everybody JUST HAS TO HAVE. Because those fetch lands took up so much of the EV equity, many other cards plummeted in price. As retailers and players alike shredded packs to acquire fetch lands, they were left with piles of Sarkhan Dragonspeaker, Siege Rhino, Wingmate Roc, and other competitive level rares…but they were only selling the fetch lands and were stuck with piles of these other cards – until they lowered the price.

The contents of an in-print Magic booster box can only be worth so much money. What’s this have to do with the Expedition lands? If the Expeditions lands average out to $120ish each and show up one per case, that’s essentially soaking up $20 in EV equity from every box, which will push prices of every rare in the set downward. Combine this with 50¢ a piece on full-art basics and you’re easily looking at $35+ EV equity being carved out of every box.

Earnings Expectations

Wizards of the Coast is a division of Hasbro, the company that derives much of it’s income from Transformers and and licensed action figures from intellectual properties like Spiderman or The Avengers. The licenses for much of the Marvel product lines can evaporate on a whim from Disney so Hasbro has a lot of it’s eggs in the Transformers basket, an intellectual property that has relied on half hour commercials (cartoons) and blockbuster movies to boost sales. With no Transformers movie on the horizon until 2017, Hasbro is looking elsewhere to make up that lost revenue…lucky for them, Magic has been experiencing year over year growth for the last seven or eight years.

For the most part, Hasbro stays “hands off” as far as Magic goes, relying on the people that have made the game a success to continue making it a success…but you can bet that Magic continuing year over year growth is an expectation that is on the table.

Last year Wizards sold more packs of cards than ever, thanks heavily to the fetch lands and partly thanks to a pile of dragons. This is awesome, a growing game is great for everyone involved right? But some growth is not growth…what do I mean? Let’s look at an example:

For the first year let’s say there are 10 total Magic players and they buy 10 packs each.

Magic sells 100 packs.

Which scenario the following year is better for the game long term:

15 total Magic players buying 10 packs each?
OR
10 total Magic players buying 15 packs each?

If you guessed 15 players buying 10 packs each, you and I are in the same boat.

So this year Wizards is staring down an expectation to beat last year’s sales, they’re already returning us to one of the most beloved planes to face down some of the most revered villains in Magic’s history and that should be enough, but what if it’s not? Enter Expedition lands. These are all but guaranteed to sell more product and Wizards is likely to experience another year of continued sales growth. But what happens next year?

Another gimmick? FOIL full-art Planeswalkers? Tarmogoyfs and Vendilion Cliques? Rishadan Ports and Wastelands? Wizards is painting themselves into a corner with the expectation of super ultra rare promos in future sets. If the sets after Zendikar and its expansion don’t contain this type of promotion will the players feel shorted? How much will that affect sales?

Seriously, how do they match this level of awesome in a future set without resorting to an escalation of gimmicks? Where does this road lead us?

Sports card collectors will tell you that they’ve been down this road before. The sports card industry underwent an escalation of absurdity when it came to chase cards and as collectors cracked open cases to find these ultra-rare chase cards, the rest of the contents (that would have traditionally been worth money) became near-worthless.

Hallowed Fountain

Why Now?

Why now? Seriously, why is Wizards resorting to gimmickry now? Since Wizards doesn’t release print run or player base numbers to the public anymore we can’t be sure what exactly Magic’s growth looks like. Did the Magic player base grow 2% last year but sales increased 4%? That’s important information to know.

My biggest concern going forward is where the growth is coming from, if we’re reaching a plateau in playerbase growth and Wizards is pushing out super ultra chase rares to increase revenue in a different manner, that will have a significant impact on the secondary market long term. Cards rotating out of Standard will take longer to rebound in price, or they might stop rebounding at all.

For a card to appreciate once it’s rotated out of Standard and into Modern, the demand for a card in non-rotating formats has to grow…something that won’t happen if supply greatly exceeds demand.

Miscellaneous Concerns

Another side effect of the Expedition lands is the shift from buying boxes to buying cases of product. I’m already locking myself in to either buy a case of Battle for Zendikar or none at all…missing the box that contained the Expedition land would be an absolute blowout when it comes to getting a return on your initial investment. Along this same vein is the reality that loose boxes will partly become “damaged goods” as retailers can just start opening packs until they hit the Expedition land and then put the rest of those boxes on the shelf to sell individually or as single packs. Sure those other boxes “could” have an Expedition land in them, but it’s going to be less likely given Wizards’ collation methods.

The impact on local game stores is also something to consider. Nobody opens a game store to sell packs of Magic, it takes far too many boosters sold to pay the rent; the real money is in singles. But what if the bulk of those singles aren’t worth anything anymore? Many retailers will tell you that their bread and butter is selling cards ranging from $5-20 because the margins are always good and the profits add up quickly. If the average rare in a set is worth 20% less because of super ultra chase rares, that’s going to have an impact on their bottom line. Sure, they can sell the super ultra chase rares as well…but almost anyone will tell you that they would rather have ten $20 cards to sell than one $200 card because expensive cards just sell slower.

Silver Lining

In a sense, the Expedition lands could have a very nice socialist redistribution of wealth effect on the secondary market. If so much of the EV equity is being soaked up by these super ultra chase cards, the price of most of the other cards should go down, essentially creating a situation where the people that have the money to shell out for these stupidly rare cards are subsidizing the price of singles for players that can’t afford them at all. This means that maintaining a competitive Standard deck will likely get a little easier…for the next two sets, then we’ll see where Wizards goes from there.

In Conclusion

I love these lands and very much want to own a playset of the shocks and fetches but know that despite my Magic budget and resources being well above average, that’s not even a fathomable reality for me. I couldn’t even begin to consider shelling out the $12,000 or so it would take to complete a playset of these cards. I’ve grown accustomed to not having everything thanks heavily to the From the Vault and San Diego Comic Con products, so I can live without.

I’m not against the idea of these cards existing, I’m against the level of unattainability that they’re being offered to us and concerned what this means for future Magic releases. Is it only a matter of time before we see these promo subsets with every release? What’s this mean for the secondary market as whole? These are real questions that we have to consider if we’re to continue playing the #mtgfinance game in the coming years.


Shameless self promotion: I’ll be working with Hotsauce Games at the SCG Open in Cincinnati this weekend, stop by and see us!

Going Mad – Modern & Legacy & Vintage – OH MY!

By: Derek Madlem

Maybe you spent this last weekend underground, or on a boat, or even on a smaller boat than that (the kind without free WiFi), but there were a couple of fairly substantial tournaments this weekend that you may or may not have heard about.  While you were not glued to the screen honing your Magical craft via proxy Wizarding the rest of us tuned in to see some pretty sweet things happening on coverage.

Leap

My Horse

Since the moment I first saw Evolutionary Leap, I knew the card was abstractly powerful and that it was only a matter of time before someone broke it. I sang praise for Evolutionary Leap from the rooftops and the world was split as to whether this card was hot garbage or hot fire… turns out it might actually be hot fire. Chris VanMeter proved that Evolutionary Leap is not “slower than Chord of Calling” by piloting a sweet elves list that was capable of churning through the entire deck to find and cast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn as early as turn two, thanks entirely to Evolutionary Leap.

How did it this dream scenario string of shenanigans go?

Turn 1: Forest, Nettle Sentinel
Turn 2: Forest, Nettle Sentinel, Heritage Druid…tap for three, play an elf to net some mana and then stick a Cloudstone Curio or Evolutionary Leap to generate as much mana as you could possibly need.

The Evolutionary Leap method sacrificed the elf to burn through and find another elf and net one mana at each step until casting a Regal Force or Emrakul

Cloudstone Curio bounced an elf to replay at a net gain of net two mana per cast, then cast Elvish Visionary and draw the whole deck or just play an Emrakul to end the game.

Vanmeter didn’t crush the open with this deck, but it did do well enough to show “proof of concept” and silence many of the haters. A lackluster performance with a new deck on it’s first outing doesn’t prove it’s bad, it just gives us a baseline to tweak and tune from.

Cloudstone

Evolutionary Leap has only climbed about 25% since this deck showed up on camera while it’s partner in crime, Cloudstone Curio, has casually tripled up. We’ve seen Cloudstone Curio spike before and come back down to Earth, but this time it’s more likely to stick as it’s been tempered in the fires of battle rather than it’s price being based on a theoretical synergy with Beck // Call.

Evolutionary Leap is still a really cheap card in the grand scheme of things (hovering around $2.50 as of writing this article) so it’s not too late to pick up a playset or even a small mountain of them. I’m fairly certain we haven’t seen the last of this card as new innovations are sure to continue bubbling up to the surface. For those keeping score at home this now means that two out of my three pet cards from Magic Origins are seeing some serious action, now I’m just waiting on Woodland Bellower to bring me the Triple Crown.

Abbot

Modern Shakeups?

Ultimately the Modern event was taken down by the format’s greatest antihero: Jund. Herrera’s Jund list featured mostly just the usual suspects but added a little spice with a card I’m pretty fond of: Abbot of Keral Keep. The top 32 decklists of this event show a diverse and robustly healthy format where everybody gets to play pretty much any style of deck they want…and Splinter Twin didn’t even make top 8.

Meanwhile in sunny Philadelphia…

Eternal Weekend was in full bloom with 744 players sleeving up Legacy decks to battle for a really big Tundra and glory. The only thing more surprising than the Legacy turnout was the reality that this event would have been even larger if it wasn’t for the World Magic Cup Qualifier running alongside it, peeling off a non-zero number of players. Reaching 750 players for a non-SCG non-GP event proves that Legacy is alive and well in the hearts of Magic players.

Dig

So what was hot? How about Dig Through Time showing up in six out of the top eight decks and making a strong case for the ban hammer. With so much of the blue’s primary arsenal pairing well with Dig Through Time, it’s hard to imagine a world where Dig doesn’t get banned in Legacy (and likely restricted in Vintage). Dig Through Time is painting itself into a corner financially, quickly turning into a terrible long-term pick with very few chances to curve out. Even the FOIL copies are going to have a hard time paying off big if the only place to play them is going to be Vintage, Cube, and Commander…especially when you factor in the prerelease versions.

But then there’s Splinter Twin…in Legacy. Max Ansbro was able to pilot Splinter Twin to an impressive 10-1 record in the swiss portion of the event. It’s easy to write this off as Max simply being an “archetype master” because Legacy is a format that rewards players for knowing their decks just as much as it does playing a good decks, but dropping only a single match in eleven rounds of swiss at the year’s premiere Legacy event is no small feat. 

splinter twin

What’s this mean for Splinter Twin? It definitely brings the card to center stage and only embolden’s any case against allowing the card to continue being legal in Modern. Do I think that a card being Legacy playable is reason enough to ban it in Modern? If that were the case we’d have seen Abrupt Decay, Tarmogoyf, and Delver of Secrets banned a long time ago. What it does do, though, is amplifies the conversation that’s already being had. Splinter Twin is not disproportionately strong in Modern, but it is an abysmal deck from a user-experience perspective…nobody likes to be on the losing side of “HA HA GOT YOU!” combos backed up with a pile of counter magic.

Ultimately I think that the success of the Legacy Twin deck has more to do with Dig Through Time than it does Splinter Twin so I don’t expect much to happen to the price of Splinter Twin any time soon outside the potential for one of Wizards’ lazy “Pro Tour” bannings just to shake up the format. Banning Splinter Twin in Modern right after reprinting it would be an embarrassing mistake for Wizards so I doubt we even see a shakeup banning at this point.

Dig Through Time having the ability to search up and piece together multiple pieces of combos (however bad) only furthers the case for its banning in Legacy and there’s probably a strong case to be made for restricting it in Vintage for the same reasons.

Jace

Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy has found his way to Legacy and this pretty much sums up how I feel about it:

At this point I’m still just dumbfounded that people continue trying this card but even more so dumbfounded that it keeps showing up in high profile finishes. Did I mention there were also four copies in the 5th place Grixis Control deck for the Modern open?

I’m to the point now where I am almost forced to acknowledge just how good Jace is and take him for a test drive. Apparently Merfolk Looter was just on the cusp of greatness for all these years just waiting for some sweet Delve spells to push it over the top.

I want to say that Jace is probably just a flash in the pan, but it’s starting to look like he might be a multi-format all star in addition to being a casual favorite. I really feel gross typing this: Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy is likely the second best Jace ever printed and as time goes on, we’re going to wish we had those FOILs, so grab them now while they’re only casually stupid-expensive.

Vintage

The slow death of Vintage has been a greatly exaggerated “fact” for years now. This year featured the largest Vintage Championships turnout yet with over 460 players, that’s over a hundred additional players compared to last year’s turnout.

Dack Fayden

Breakout cards in Vintage are often irrelevant as far as #mtgfinance is concerned because the market for these cards just isn’t that deep. That said, there’s a very good reason why FOIL Dack Fayden is nearly ten times the price of a non-FOIL Dack Fayden – Vintage players are willing to spend money.

Hangarback

While it’s easy to point out that Dack Fayden is snowballing in popularity in Vintage, the real breakout card from this event came from Magic OriginsHangarback Walker. Normally I would just pass this off as Vintage being Vintage; ridiculous things happen all the time in Vintage – people attack with Slash Panther, people play a NON-FOIL copy of Polluted Delta from Khans of Tarkir right next to their hand-painted Mox Emerald, some people even go so far as to white-border their entire deck using acetone and an eraser… these people are occasional savages that will occasionally do savage things. Some of these things are easy to ignore, but what I can’t ignore is a card showing up in decks ranging all the way from Standard to Vintage. Enter the Hangarback.

We’ve already seen Hangarback Walker make it’s presence known in Standard and Vintage, and there are murmurings of it’s power in Modern affinity…how long until Hangarback fills in the gaps and shows up in Legacy? When a card has such a strong cross-format appeal, there’s significant upside to picking up FOIL copies – just look at Abrupt Decay as a great example. When a card defies convention and sets up (work)shop in multiple formats, it’s likely to be a player for a long time and I think Hangarback is on the cusp of that level of greatness.


 

Going Mad – Stay Classy Grand Prix San Diego

By: Derek Madlem

It’s the week after a Pro Tour and we’ve seen the decks that are sure to dominate the Standard format until rotation, the format is solved and it’s pretty obvious where to place our bets. We’ve had a couple weeks of SCG Opens and then the culminating tournament to solidify the metagame and declare a public enemy #1. Now we’re just coasting to the finish line as we wait for a new set to be released and we can start this process all over again. Right? Right.

Well… wrong

Skimming through the top 32 decklists, I was expecting to see a good percentage of the field rocking the Ensoul Artifact Thopter deck that took Pro Tour Magic Origins by storm, after all it was clearly “the next Caw-Blade” if you listened to the Pros and the parrots in the coverage booth. What happened in San Diego is a testament to R&D’s ability to create a variety of flexible cards to combat a variety of threats; and by variety of cards, I am actually just referring to exactly one card – Dromoka’s Command.

Dromoka's

Dromoka’s Command may be the first card printed as a utility spell to have an entire archetype form up around it. Dromoka’s Command is the backbone that the entirety of the Green-White Megamorph deck builds around. Not only does Dromoka’s Command effectively remove enchantments from the board, it is also does pumps creatures, prevents damage, and removes opposing blockers… three things that seem to be relevant in most games of Magic, killing enchantments is just a bonus. But it’s power was not relgated solely to the Megamorph decks, it also showed up heavily in a variety of Abzan decks. This all proved to be bad bad news for those Thopter decks; as it turns out, a deck that’s built around a couple key enchantments is vulnerable to enchantment removal +1.

Dromoka’s Command showed up in 17 of the top 32 decks, pretty much the only non-land cards that saw more action were Courser of Kruphix (19 decks) and Den Protector (18 decks). The most surprising bit in all of this? Dromoka’s Command is somehow still under $4. Dromoka’s Command is one of those cards that’s going to see play for years, it’s not quite Abrupt Decay level of utility in older formats, but it’s rarely a card that you’ll disappointed to draw. This also seems like a great long-term pickup in FOIL as it’s currently sitting at a very meager $11.

I am also an advocate of picking up at least a playset of Dromoka’s Command because it has roughly 14 months until rotation, which makes it a fine card to buy purely for play value (dividends) and there’s ample opportunity for it to creep up in price this October as the format shifts.

The Card that Isn’t

A really spicy brew took down the title in San Diego, this deck relied heavily on one card: Sphinx’s Tutelage. The deck featured an array of cheap draw spells that allow you to essentially burn through your deck grabbing more and more draw spells and dumping more and more cards into your opponent’s graveyard, looking at the decklist I have a hard time figuring out how this deck came out on top after 18 rounds of Magic… but even a ham sandwich can win a tournament if it draws the right pairings each round.

Sphinx's Tutelage

Sphinx’s Tutelage is a card you can invest in… I guess. But I’ll offer you a reality check: this is a niche strategy uncommon in a core set; this is NOT Stoke the Flames. Sphinx’s Tutelage is NOT Path to Exile or Murderous Cut or Bile Blight or any of the diverse playable uncommons we’ve seen crest $2 in the last few years. Sphinx’s Tutelage is a Hedron Crab or a Mind Funeral… it’s a card that in a couple years you might make a dollar off of. You’d probably be better served buying up copies of Alhammaret’s Archive, a card that should also hold onto some long-term heavy appeal in Commander.

While I am extremely skeptical about a deck featuring Sphinx’s Tutelage gaining traction in Modern, if it does you can expect Visions of Beyond to be the big winner… not a mass printed core-set uncommon. Being a cheap draw spell coupled with the Ancestral Recall payoff makes Visions an absolute all star alongside any conceivable Sphinx’s Tutelage build IF such a thing ever comes to fruition, which I’m currently doubtful of.

That Vastwood Seer

Nissa, Vastwood Seer continues her run as the most prevalent flipwalker, showing up in a stunning 15 of the top 32 decks compared to a paltry 6 decks for the former financial frontrunner Jace. Nissa is clearly here to stay as a heavily played Mythic staple and Jace is establishing himself as an all star role player. Expect their prices to continue diverging as Nissa hovers around $25 with a slow decline and Jace continues to adjust downward at a much faster rate.Nissa

The rest of this pantheon is performing much more in line with my previous expectations: ie, not at all. There isn’t a single copy of Kytheon, Chandra, or Liliana in the top 32 decks and that should put the writing on the wall as far as these cards go. While we’ve likely not seen the last of Liliana, Heretical Healer thanks to her inclusion in those Modern Collected Company decks, the outlook is grim for the other two.

The Card that Wasn’t There

On the breaking news front (at the time of writing this article) we have the full spoiler for FTV: Angels and it doesn’t include Linvala, Keeper of Silence. While this would have mattered a lot more before they banned Birthing Pod than it does now, it still puts a lot of pressure on this Mythic Modern staple. At the time I’m writing this Linvala is hovering around $35… but you’re probably looking at $50+ Linvalas today as you read this. Special thanks to the finance community for that one guys! In reality this card was likely to go up either way, people just have a psychological disconnect when it comes to FTV printings. A card like Linvala will stop climbing for fear of a reprint and then once that fear is confirmed or denied, it will adjust accordingly. This was a good card to pick up either way as FTV printings are traditionally disliked by most players because the FOILs look fairly atrocious.

Linvala

While it’s disappointing to see Linvala absent from this product, she can probably just go ahead and join the club alongside Damnation as a card that desperately needs a reprint and somehow dodges it time and time again despite numerous glaring opportunities to do so and we’ll now start the yearly tradition of excluding only the most obvious choices from the From the Vault releases. But if you look on the bright side, we finally have that Iridescent Angel reprint that we’ve all been waiting for! Now’s your chance to buy in.

There is still the outside chance that with the new block structure we’ll see a Linvala reprint in Battle for Zendikar. The absence of a Core Set means that a lot of reprints will need to be implemented within regular sets. This will essentially tie reprints of legendary creatures to their home planes as non-planeswalkers don’t really get to experience interplanar travel yet. Yet.

Fetchland Insanity

I have a proposal for most of you that are taken aback by the recent upswing in fetch land prices: don’t buy them. At this point it’s not a matter of IF but WHEN the Zendikar fetches will be reprinted. Wizards seems to be pushing enemy colored pairs over the next year with the reinclusion of the opposing painlands, enemy colored Commander decks, and the likely inclusion of the long-awaited enemy colored manlands as the flagship duals for Battle for Zendikar. That push, plus the acknowledgement that Modern card availability is an issue should be enough to sooth fears that these cards are just never going to be available ever again.

Whether those fetches show up in a supplementary product (unlikely) or the next large set (April, as the other fetchlands rotate out of Standard), they ARE going to be reprinted – it’s only a matter of time.

Misty

Now’s the time for some tough love. Dad talk, have a seat children. There’s been a lot of outrage about the new price of fetches being unaffordable… but were they really affordable before? I’m going to say that for those outraged at the new price that these fetchlands were never truly affordable. If they were – you would have afforded them. YOU WOULD ALREADY OWN THEM. Now they are just STILL unaffordable; functionally, nothing has changed.

In reality there are only a handful of decks that really NEED the exact fetch land for their deck, most decks are perfectly able to get by on Khans fetches with only a fractional percentage of a decrease in efficiency. What does that percentage mean for the average Modern player in weekly tournaments at the local shop? You’re going to lose, at most, one or two games per month, and those games are not necessarily going to mean the match. Does that percentage point matter more elsewhere? Only if you’re going to be playing in competitive level events that span nine to fifteen rounds on a regular basis.

The real question that you should be asking yourself is: if you have serious issues with card affordability, how do you justify spending $40-70 a pop to play in an SCG Open or a Grand Prix? Competitive Magic is expensive. It’s always going to be expensive and the rewards are a rarely going to be cover the buy-in. The entire game is built on the foundation that players will continuously buy more and more cards and that a subsection of those cards being worth money.

Transparency: I bought zero copies of Linvala or the fetch lands this week

Stay classy #mtgfinance