Not the most popular, but still popular. The fourth most popular this week and fifth most popular this month per EDHREC. That would seem to indicate popularity is increasing as more and more people buy the Commander 2016 decks and start building with them. While it’s no Atraxa, the third most popular deck of all time per EDHREC, it’s still trending in the right direction. We’re of course talking about Saskia, the commander I left for last because, frankly, so much of what’s in the deck comes in the precon. As people start to build a bit more and add some unique cards and that tech catches on, we’ll see stuff emerge. We’re sort of stuck scouring decklists for clues rather than just checking the main EDHREC page because it’s currently lousy with cards from the precon. Rightfully so – we have discussed the precon effect in this series before and I’m sure we’ll have to do it again. Basically, if a card doesn’t look terrible enough to cut, people will favor leaving it in over taking it out because there is some small, intended amount of synergy there and they don’t have to buy a new card that way. It will take a minute for new old cards to shove old new cards out of those slots.

Saskia is a pretty brutal commander, though, and the stuff that he makes happen ends games quickly. Even though the decks being built are skewed toward precon contents much more than the other four decks which we’ve already covered and that’s why I handled this last and gave it another week for more data, there’s still stuff that’s going to move. How could it not with such a popular deck? It’s more popular this year than The Gitrog Monster and Leovold both. Could it be because the deck comes mostly built? Or are people that jazzed about four color commanders? Either way, let’s look at what we can look at.

Right off the bat we see a card that was reprinted in an FTV that didn’t do much of anything to its price and has been laying dormant for a while. Waiting. Biding its time. I think the time is now. This is mythic, it’s an angel, it’s at its historic low and it just happens to straight wreck the game coupled with Saskia and the other cards in the deck. Pair this with Eldrazi Displacer to ruin everyone’s day or just get one extra attack phase which can translate to quadruple damage if you hit the player you targeted with Saskia. Good luck not straight murdering someone. Tap their team down with Naya Charm and take them to pound town. They’ll think they live in whatever town the Pound Puppies was set in, they’ll be so pounded. Did they ever actually specify where the pound that the Pound Puppies lived was located? Or didn’t it ever matter because they’re puppies and they have no way of actually knowing where they live because they’re in a pound? And are also puppies? Did you know Frank Welker and Peter Cullen from Transformers did voices on that show? Nancy Cartwright from The Simpsons, too. Lotta voice talent on the Pound Puppies, even if it was a depressing as shit show about puppies essentially on death row. Did they ever get out of the pound? Like, get adopted or something? I never watched Pound Puppies, I was like 2 in 1986. What was I talking about? Oh, Aurelia. Yeah, buy this card. It’s time.

This isn’t quite at its historic low but it’s below its recent high. Could Modern help this card? Certainly. Is a reprint all that likely? At its price point, it’s doubtful…ish. I still think Commander 2017 will have ally-color, two-tone decks and GW tokens seems like it’s pretty likely. How much will this go up in a year? I don’t know, but Irelia and Iroas decks love to run this and Iroas just got reprinted meaning anyone who wants a cheap copy of their commander to build a deck in the worst color combination in all of EDH is welcome to it. I think Saskia decks should jam this more often than they are. If they start to, this is a good pickup under $7 but I don’t like paying much more than that.

Basically everything we said about Aurelia is true here, except Gisela managed to dodge the FTV printing. This is basically at a historic low not having fully recovered from the Commander 2015 printing, but with a Commander 2017 printing not all that likely, this is probably the time to buy in. This card is nuts in decks like Saskia and since it’s a mythic angel on top of being a card that is seeing a resurgence in its utility, this seems like a slam dunk. This flirted with $20 historically so I don’t think it’s out of order to suggest you could buy this at $4 and expect it to hit $10 before you cash out.

Next up in our “How the hell did this dodge a reprint?” series we have Savage Beating, a very aptly named card. This IS a savage beating and if you are attacking the person you targeted with Saskia, you probably just murder them. I wish I could run 4 Naya Charm in the deck and always be cilling people, but even if they have blockers, giving them double strike and coming back through for a second wave of the beatfaces is probably going to crumple even the most robust of defenses. Commander 2016 and this deck specifically would have been the perfect venue to reprint this card and since they didn’t, we’re forced to ask ourselves where they could reprint this at this point. There are a lot of variants on this card, which means it is shielded from reprint slightly because another variant could be reprinted instead. In fact, at $10, Aggravated Assault seems like a juicier reprint target than Savage Beating.

What I like best about Savage Beating is that it’s a second spike. Really, all of the Relentless Assault variants are. When Narset was printed, everyone wanted to rip these effects off of the top and get infinite attack phases and hella value. They are starting to return to “normal” now that demand has cooled a bit, but I don’t think many people who built a Narset deck are going to take it apart so this new demand needs new supply. Since there are fewer loose copies of Savage Beating to come in and plug the holes in supply at the low end (meaning they are introduced into the market for their buylist price by people who had them in a binder rather than sold to the end user at retail) the price is bound to go up as the cheapest copies start to disappear and are replaced by slightly more expensive copies. I think this card has a lot going for it but Saskia’s price spikes are lagging behind Atraxa and Breya, meaning there is time to get copies but also time to second guess yourself. Do the former but not the latter – Saskia is increasing in popularity as more and more people open these decks.

This card has so much going for it, it’s not even funny. Everything about the shape of this graph should be making you salivate right now. Actually, that part’s pretty funny; imagining you salivating over a Magic card like a cartoon wolf staring at a prey animal/cartoon woman’s jugs. It’s just cardboard, settle down. Should we go into everything this card has going for it? Okey dokey.

This was first and only printed in the original Commander set. That means supply is pretty low and is a lot lower than anyone really thinks. This is going to see a few more copies printed in the Commander Anthology set, but that’s not going to really introduce that many copies into the market because no one is paying $160 or whatever for Commander Anthology just to bust all the decks apart and sell them off piecemeal. People who buy that product are buying it to play with or collect. Supply is and will likely remain low for the foreseeable future.

The shape of the graph is incredibly encouraging. Not only is the retail price starting to finally take off, the buylist price is moving along with it. Dealers are selling out at the current price and they are expressing their confidence in it selling out at a higher price. Dealer confidence is good because it’s endorsement of your pick by someone who does this for a living.

This is just about the EDH-iest card ever printed and it’s pretty nutty in Saskia decks, though currently it’s more likely to be run in Kynaios and Tiro decks. Casual players love that it’s a big, dumb avatar, competitive players love that it doesn’t let your opponent have blockers and dealers seem to be loving that they’re selling out. It’s in a great place and I think you’re pretty safe buying this.

If there is a theme to this article, it’s “Cards that dodged a reprint somehow” and the next installment is a card that managed to not get printed alongside Elesh Norn. This recently spiked and with new demand from a deck like Saskia that absolutely loves your opponent not being able to play creatures to block with and wants your creatures to have haste. Urabrask is kind of tricky to reprint but at its price point, it might be a good inclusion in Commander 2017 since it’s not too expensive but is a fun, splashy mythic. I think this can at least get up to its recent peak of $15ish before that happens, though. Urabrask is a shoo-in for a deck like this and will continue to impact a lot of EDH decks until it’s reprinted or prohibitively-expensive, whichever comes first. Modern has a non-zero chance of coming along and randomly spiking this, also.

Saskia is taking a bit longer than Atraxa or Breya to spike cards but that’s OK because it just means we have more time to pick up the stuff we want to pick up. Pay attention to what people are building with on EDHREC and don’t be afraid to go into a few decklists by clicking on the links at the top and seeing if there is any original tech in there. Cards from Mirage block don’t need much of a push to go off, for example. You make money by being ahead of price increases, so stay sharp and be ready to sell when others want to buy. I just jammed all of these decks on an Amazon wishlist so I expect to get them for Christmas and I imagine there are a lot of people out there just like me. Cards aren’t even close to being done spiking, so keep an eye out for the next card to go up instead of worrying about what spiked already. Until next week!

This really is too easy sometimes. Commander 2016 is available in stores and people have started to buy it in earnest. Now that players have the physical cards that come in the precons, now and only now they are starting to buy the cards that aren’t in the precons that they want for their decks. They didn’t buy them when spoilers began to trickle in and they knew Deepglow Skate was broken. They didn’t buy them when Atraxa was spoiled and they knew they were going to build some durdly planeswalker deck. They didn’t buy them when the list of the Atraxa deck was fully spoiled and they knew which cards weren’t going to be included in any of the Commander 2016 precons. They didn’t buy the cards during the two week period where everything was fully spoiled when they and everyone else was making their theoretical builds and submitting them to Tappedout so EDHREC could build their databases with everyone’s builds and tip off financiers to which cards were important. No, they waited until they had the Atraxa deck in hand, tore it open, spread the cards out – only then did they look online and exclaim “Oh my stars, look how much Doubling Season costs!” You had like a month to get The Chain Veil and only now is it spiking. The same goes for Krark-Clan Ironworks, Time Sieve and a dozen other cards we identified in this series before they went up.

I don’t think cards are done going up, either. While Atraxa and Breya are making stuff spike, I think Yidris and Kynaois/Tiro aren’t done. In fact, in the case of the latter two decks, I don’t think the cards have really started despite there being a relatively similar amount of decks registered on EDHREC. There aren’t the sexy targets like we had in Breya and Atraxa, but I still think there are cards worth talking about. So let’s talk about what Kynaois and Tiro are going to do for us.

Group Hug is an odd approach to the game. Gaining other people life, drawing them cards and developing their mana in the hopes that they will leave you alone can usually work pretty well but when it comes time to close the game out, you may find yourself  in some trouble. You may use the approach to try and help the second-strongest player kill the strongest one and then try and mop up, or you may try and play for second place. You may also just play a deck where you have a lot of symmetrical effects like Mana Flare but you take advantage of them more than the other players because you are set up to win before they do. Maybe you make everyone think you’re helping them with the extra cards they’re drawing until you deck them. What I do know is that you need to protect yourself and cards that do that are always going to be winners.

There is decent reprint risk here, I think, but I don’t really know when and where. What I do know is that this has quietly doubled over the last few years and while flashier cards that are played outside of EDH like Ghostly Prison are getting all of the attention, this card makes them pay 4 mana to attack with their creatures in the Kynaios deck and that’s two Ghostly Prisons by my count. Even at $5 I like the buy-in on this card. It’s from Invasion, a set where there are plenty of $5 uncommons. A playable rare seems pretty reasonable at $5 by comparison. Aura Shards is $8 after a commander set reprint and is uncommon from the same set. Aura Shards is also in 5 times as many EDH decks as Restraint, but I think with commander sets giving us commanders that encourage us to build enchantment cocoons, I think the gap could close. At 3 times as rare you also mitigate that demand gap a bit. I think $8 is reasonable for Restraint and if you find these under $5, I think it’s a good buy. This pairs very nicely with this deck and its strategy and also with 5 color decks. It’s almost always going to be better than Propaganda, but even if it were just a functional reprint of that card, scarcity could give it upside – look at the P3K cards that get played in EDH because they’re spare copies of staples.

This has been flat for a minute, but perhaps there has never been a commander that let you take advantage of this card better. Since you’re drawing all sorts of extra cards, it’s negligible to skip your draw step and you never have to worry about coming up with cards to pitch to the cost to keep this shield up. There is very low supply online and the price has been flat for so long it’s unlikely to get a reprint for price reasons and it’s a bit pernicious to include in a precon. With limited reprint prospects, dwindling supply and a potential spike in demand, this seems primed to make some moves. Since it has hovered in the $4 to $5 range, the odds of this being hidden in dollar boxes seems low so it’s unlikely that a wave of discovered supply will mitigate a price increase predicated on copies disappearing from retail outlets. This protects you very well and with the extra cards you draw at your end step helping you keep this around indefinitely, especially if you’re further drawing with cards like Consecrated Sphinx. This may be a nonbo if you’re trying to deck yourself and win with this next card, but it’s certainly good at making sure you stay alive.

I like this about as much as I can for someone who liked this more at $2. My enthusiasm hasn’t been dampened but I won’t pretend we weren’t better off getting these at $2. Then again, I used to pull these out of bulk, so it feels good to think about this card going to $10. This card is a great way to win the game and we have already called this cheaper than it is now so we were able to make some money off of it. Can we continue to make money even if we have no copies and are buying in now for the first time? I think so. Innistrad boxes are hella expensive and this seems tricky to reprint outside of supplementary product. I think the odds are good that we have ally-color decks for Commander 2017 so if this isn’t in the Dimir deck, I expect this to spike hard then. I also think this will grow a bit before the start of C17 spoilers. I am betting money this doesn’t get reprinted, are you? The buy-in price isn’t bad right now if you are.

The purpose of mentioning cards I have already mentioned is severalfold. First, I want to remind you that we liked these cards in the past and they have gone up. Secondly, I want to call attention to the fact that we had a reason before to think these cards would go up and now we have another reason. That makes me think they will go up even more. Annex is in the same class as Collective Restraint. Tricky to reprint, this is also specifically references planeswalkers and is more likely to force them to pay life the more aggressive their deck is (and therefore less likely to have access to white mana). We talked about this card earlier, but for a different reason and now we’re talking about it again. Seems like a winner to me.

Between Leovold and Kynaios, demand for this card isn’t going down anytime soon. It’s a tad on the expensive side, but as a conflux rare, there is room for growth. It’s been enough time that copies are starting to dry up and with nothing to replace them, this card is going to grow sharply if it shakes off its current inertia. Lots of mine effects went up due to Nekusar and new demand means they could continue to grow. I am pretty enthusiastic about this one in particular, especially with how many times Temple Bell and Howling Mine have been printed.

This oddly benefits from being worse than Rites of Flourishing. While Rites is on its third printing, Heartbeat has been mostly left alone to grow quietly. You’re likely to play both, especially in a redless deck with no access to cards like Mana Flare and Zhur-Taa Ancient. However, of all the new decks in the last few years, Kynaios is the most likely to want this card. Casual, 60-card players use this card a non-zero amount. I worry about this going up so quietly that copies may be squirreled away, but I feel like casuals are demanding this and ferreting out secret copies and a demand increase will likely directly correlate to an increase in price.

Whereas high-demand commanders are already spiking prices, I think there is still opportunity for the cards here. Lower-demand commanders will still nonetheless get built. People haven’t even opened the decks they’re getting as Christmas presents. There is time to get in on a lot of these cards.

One thing I caution is to not be impatient. Don’t invest money in EDH cards unless you can afford to wait a while. I recommend buying stuff to play your other formats and trying to trade it into EDH cards before they drop in price due to rotation or whatever. EDH cards hold their value longer because they are non-cyclical. Trading a Smuggler’s Copter that will be a bulk rare when it rotates into a whole big stack of Panharmonicons and Ghitapur Orrererys is going to make you feel like a genius in a year or two, and your trade partner will be happy to do it, too. If this stuff doesn’t go up immediately, DON’T PANIC. How long have people been holding onto The Chain Veil? We knew it would spike eventually and this week it finally did. It took a while, and if you bought them back when I first said it would be a $5 card soon and got impatient when they weren’t $5 within 6 months and sold out, you’re kicking yourself this week. If you took the last year to accumulate copies through trading, cheap eBay lots, SCG sales and Puca Trade, you’re happy this week. Font of Mythos may take a year or two to go up. It may take another card like Leovold getting printed to finally break its stalemate and head upward in price. The point is that we all know it can do it. If you don’t want real money tied up, find other ways to accumulate copies of EDH cards you want as specs. The whole reason we’re buying EDH cards is they go up slowly, predictably and inevitably, they’re easy to identify, easy to move and we can play with them while we wait them to go up. Patience was rewarded this week as cards like The Chain Veil finally moved and patience will be rewarded again. We called Anvil of Bogardan when Nekusar came out and it took Leovold to make it go up. Concepts are used and reused and commanders will come out in the next year or two that will create additional demand for cards that aren’t growing right now. Just remember that cards that let us cheat are always good and we’ll all make some money. If you’ll excuse me, I have to buylist a pile of Time Sieves. Until next week.