Whaddup, nerds?

It’s time for another installment of “Jason talks about cards that will slowly but inevitably double or triple in value over the next 6 months to a year but not many people are going to notice because everyone is trying to make $0.50 a copy on non-mythic rares in a post-mythic era from a set with Masterpieces in it because Pro Tour hype is the best hype there is” which is the new subtitle of this series. The nautical theme felt forced, after all. If you’re still reading, it’s because you like MTG Finance on easy mode, same as me. Do you want to make a bunch of money? Go buy every copy of Black Market you can find and sit on them. It’s not every day we find a card that is so obviously and inevitably going to go up, after all. I shouldn’t have to make good calls like that all the time – Black Market has enough potential that I should be able to retire from MTG Finance.

I can’t, though. I am going to keep writing every week and coming up with other picks for you. They might not be as good or as obvious but  I always use the smart part of my brain to keep track of what’s going on and tell you what to do about it. Unfortunately there isn’t a ton to be excited about from Kaladesh at this point in terms of commanders that are going to shove other prices up so I was at a bit of a loss this week. That was, until I realized Kaladesh cards are going to be used to update other decks and if those decks gain in popularity as a result of new printings that change their relative popularity, the cards in the decks have more upside than they used to. All of the cards in the decks. It was an interesting thought and it didn’t take me very long to find an excellent example of just what I’m talking about.

Everything’s Relative

When I say “relative popularity” I mean its popularity relative to the other decks in the format and the format itself. It’s hard to track something as nebulous as “true” popularity because you wouldn’t know if the increase in the number of decks being built indicates a change in preference or a change in the overall popularity of the format. That’s why I like how EDHREC is set up because you can nearly eyeball decks that are gaining in relative popularity without having to do any math, and by “math” I mean “looking at 2 numbers and seeing which number is larger” a lot of the time. At worst you need to calculate a ratio.

It didn’t take long to see that Mizzix of the Izmagnus was making moves. Mizzix is the 19th most popular commander on EDHREC of all time with a whopping 616 decks dedicated to the weird Goblin Wizard thing. 19th overall isn’t bad but when I noticed it was the 4th most popular over the last month and the 6th most popular this week, I figured something was up. It leapt past Leovold earlier in the month and the only reason it’s not in 3rd this week is for the same reason Mizzix itself is moving up in relative popularity in my view – new cards. Ezuri is being built and redrafted because of Rashmi and Panharmonicon. Brago is being built and redrafted because of Cloudblazer and Panharmonicon again. Queen Marchesa got Kambal, Chandra, Authority of the Consuls and some land. Nearly exactly as many Mizzix decks were added this week as Queen Marchesa, Ezuri and Brago; essentially the relative popularity of all of those decks are the same but Ezuri and Brago are more popular relative to the total number of decks on EDHREC so the change is most profound in Mizzix’s case. Quibbling beyond that makes little sense because I could easily plumb through Brago and Ezuri lists for picks and I might do that next week if I’m not distracted by something else that seems more important.

New Pizzix in the Mizzix

Why the spotlight on Mizzix all of a sudden? What did it even get that makes people care?

First and foremost, I think although Aetherflux Reservoir is a pretty obvious Ayli/Oloro/Karlov card, it has applications here. Gaining life when you do what you were going to do already (play spells) and either buying yourself a cushion to help you not die or giving yourself the ability to point and click delete someone at the table is appealing. This card is going to be expensive in a year or two but for now, it’s not going to push up individual cards so much as decks. You’ll want to either gain a ton of life the hard way or play a ton of spells and gain life the… other hard way. Look, being able to treat an opponent like Alderaan shouldn’t be easy.

The other card that is more unique to Mizzix in my view is Metallurgic Summonings, a card I’m not super sold on. Luckily my skepticism steered people away from preordering, which would have been a mistake. Now if the card is actually good in EDH I get to jump on the bandwagon and act like when I write about it, I’m discovering the card. It’s a win-win for me, which is rare because normally the position of having to evaluate cards in formats you don’t play sucks. If Summonings ends up a good cards, Mizzix will be one of the few decks that can really take advantage of it. You have mana rocks and such so even if they start picking off the little durdle monsters you summonings, you should still be able to hopefully qualify for the “ultimate” on Summonings and serve a bunch more spells to their domes.

Insidious Will is not a card that was an impetus for Mizzix seeing more play, nor was Spirebluff Canal nor was Saheeli’s Artistry, but I think all of these cards make the cut in a decent percentage of Mizzix decks, but it’s hard to say how greedily people want to jam new cards considering they’d have to cut something out of a deck that was already running well if they want to make room for new stuff. That’s easier for a Fast Land than it is another Cryptic Command, although Insidious Will is too many cards in one not to consider. It does everything this deck wants.

What’s got upside moving forward if we get a sustained increase in the popularity of Mizzix that isn’t completely nipped in the bud by Commander 2016?

Mizzix’s Mastery’s graph is a bit all over the place, but with the price seeming the plateau and there being little chance of decreases in the price of cards like Mystic Confluence, it seems like we’re entering a period where the total price of cards in the precon will no longer be bound by MSRP. This means Mizzix’s Mastery can go up in price without anything else going down. The weird balancing act of MSRP enforcing the total price will be out the window, so watch Mastery. It hasn’t impacted Legacy (and who’s even playing Legacy anymore?) the way we might have hoped, but it’s impacting Mizzix decks in EDH and every copy that ends up in a Melek or Jeleva deck means there is one person who has a copy of Mizzix that needs a copy of Mizzix’s Mastery that didn’t come from the same precon as the Mizzix. If you need 1.01 copies of Mizzix’s Mastery for every Mizzix deck built, you’re going to see the price move. I like it at its current price (near historic low) a lot.

Even though this card is at its historic high point, it’s by no means done going up. EDH is pushing the whole cycle (except Increasing Devotion, which was pantsed by a reprinting) up and now is basically your last chance. These cards are decently reprintable, but with them all but ruled out for Commander 2016 and not super likely in Commander 2017, you have a few key venues for reprinting them ruled out (not ruled out per se, but I’m confident enough that they’ll dodge reprintings in both C16 and C17 to the extent that I’d bet my own money).

It’s hard to find a card that seems more directly tied to the fate of Mizzix. As Mizzix gains in popularity, demand for this card will grow at an equalish (not 100% of Mizzix decks run this, though they all should) rate. Expensive and powerful, this is the perfect example (another would be Expropriate) of a card that rewards you for doing what Mizzix does. Once this costs like 4 or 5 mana because you have so many experience counters that every spell is trivial to play, you’ll see how trivial winning the game is, also. You should be able to find a way to win the game if you resolve this and if you don’t, a Feldon’s Cane or a Mizzix’s Mastery or something should be able to finish them off. Drawing your entire deck, discard all but 7 cards then aiming a big Mastery at the table is a very satisfying way to win, and casting Enter the Infinite for cheap seems ideal. This spell was made for Mizzix and as Mizzix gets more popular, expect this to grow – not that it wouldn’t have anyway.

This is never getting cheaper. With multiple decks that want this effect, though perhaps none more than Mizzix, and Origins fading fast from memory, this little enchantment that could, and still can, is a pretty safe pick-up. Its effect is very simple but the scry on top of the spell cost reduction means it’s never irrelevant, even when you have more experience counters than you know what to do with and your opponents can’t seem to even temporarily get Mizzix off of the board. I like this moving forward.

This I’m interested to watch. I don’t know whether Mizzix is going to push it up all that much or not, but what I do know is that I should keep an eye on this card and this reminded me of that. It’s not so much what this card does or doesn’t do, although that factors. What is most interesting is that this will be a good test case for how recently a spiked card can grow based on some sort of demand (if there is any mind you – this is all contingent on a “maybe”) because copies never got a chance to fade into the woodwork. Are we at an artificial low because price memory is propping the price irrespective of demand? Will that matter if new demand kicks in and the card begins to climb? Are there too many copies because there are a lot of copies of any recent card? I want to see what happens to this card, an EDH staple to be sure, because it can inform what will happen to other cards that are picked up by casual formats as soon as they are out of Standard (this might help us figure out what is going to happen to Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time, also, though I think I already know ).  How the price of Goggles diverges from a card like The Chain Veil will be incredibly instructive. Then again, The Chain Veil could leave the goggles in its wake, and that wouldn’t surprise me, either.

That does it for me this week. I hope you’re not let down – I kind of expected a few juicier cards in the Mizzix deck, but there is a real problem with something I’m calling “The precon effect” that I’ll delve into a bit deeper. Possibly not on this website – it’s possible I’ll be writing more EDH content in addition to my current MTG Price and Gathering Magic articles very soon, and I’ll announce that here when I know more. Thanks for sticking with this series, everyone. Until next week!

I couldn’t think of what to write about this week. When I’m not doing the set review stuff, I tend to try and pick a new commander that could force other prices up, because that takes weeks, it’s obvious when it’s going to happen, and I’m not the kind of writer that can write about card prices after they go up and have people praise me for it.

I couldn’t think of a commander to write about this week and it was bumming me out. Depala? Yeah, no thanks. As much fun as building around a dwarf beeping around in a bunch of cars can be if you’re playing against opponents who just opened up a commander precon, it’s probably not very competitive. I’m really gunshy after I gave casuals a little too much credit, predicting an increase in the sale of a lot of clerics when Ayli was spoiled. I was half right – Ayli became one of the most popular commanders in the last 6 months and she spiked a lot of prices. The half I was wrong about was which cards – clerics are largely unchanged while lifegain cards that were already being propped up by Oloro and later, Karlov, saw a bump. Nailing which commander is going to spike cards isn’t helpful if you don’t correctly predict which cards. I’m not going to tell you to buy a bunch of dwarf tribal stuff only to have Depala come along and make a bunch of artifact creature stuff and equipment spike and you’re holding a bunch of useless dwarf cards like a straight buster because you assumed I knew more about EDH than you do (I mean, I do, but I don’t know more than every EDH player combined and that’s whose behavior I try to predict, usually successfully).

If I didn’t think the Ayli whiff was a fluke, I’d quit writing this stupid column and talk about something else. I’m not the kind of writer who gets to write about something he knows nothing about and have people praise me for it. I’ve spent years studying EDH finance so you don’t have to which I imagine is great for those of you who don’t want to. So, no, I do think the Ayli thing was a fluke – I correctly predicted her power level and overestimated the casual community’s affinity for building a tribal deck they’ve been clamoring for. Everyone was upset when we didn’t get a good GR werewolf but when we did get a bad one, some of the prices of werewolf cards went up because of people who don’t understand how this works buying speculatively and they’re back down already. If one of the 10 most popular EDH generals from the last year can’t spike foil Starlit Sanctum, you making money from foil Moonmist on the back of Ulrich of the Krellenhorde is a pipe dream.

That’s a long way to go to tell you I didn’t want to write about Depala this week. Meanwhile the rest of the list wasn’t too exciting, either. Oviya looks like a good inclusion in the 99 of an existing deck, but there’s literally no reason to play her over Rhys which gives you Cathar’s Crusade and all but one anthem effect. Pia Nalaar is good in maybe a Grenzo deck but I don’t want her at the helm of mono-red even a little bit. Padeem looks like an OK inclusion in a different deck and I’m sure a non-zero number of people will build with him/her at the helm but, again, not going to compel anyone to build the deck enough times that the price of anything goes up. Same with Kambal – there’s no reason not to play Karlov or Ayli and just jam him in there. I was getting frustrated. Then I realized the card I wanted to write about had been staring me in the face all along.

Of course! Panharmonicon is this set’s Doubling Season! This card is going to change the way EDH is played! How many cards will this card alone spike? I fired up EDHREC and moseyed over to Panharmonicon’s page and got ready to write an article about how Panharmonicon is the best general in the set.

What I’m Actually Going to Write About

Oh yeah. I missed one.

Oh yeah. This guy dude thing  genderless creature. Gonti, Lord of Luxury is one of the aetherborn and it’s going to be very popular in EDH. Want to know how absurd it is that I neglected Gonti when I was going over the list of potential commanders in this set to write about? I wrote about Gonti on Gathering Magic two weeks ago. The card is very good and it’s already one of the most-searched creatures from the set on EDHREC and it’s got the highest affinity percentage with Panharmonicon. This goes hand in hand with what I consider the best EDH card of the set. It does something pretty new for a commander, also – while a lot of the legendary creatures are bad versions of better creatures that already exist, this does something relatively new and pretty potent. I have a lot of thoughts on this and they are informed by having already drafted a deck based on this card that people seemed to like. Let’s get a stew going.

Bye These Crads

When I first read Gonti, I was interested in ways to rebuy it and get the trigger over and over. The deck is going to be mana-hungry but a lot of EDH decks are and I figured that would take care of itself, especially in mono-black. I wanted to make sure the effect was repeatable so we could really get an advantage and one of the ways I thought about doing this was sacrificing Gonti for mana and using Deathmantle to get multiple triggers. This is already going up, it’s already played in other decks, it’s already a part of several infinite mana combos (composite golem ftw) that have even been touted by (terrible, just the worst) modern players. Plus this was a Jason Alt Pick of the Week on Brainstorm Brewery which gives it a lot of upside those other factors don’t. This won’t go up just because of Gonti but Gonti will help, something this card didn’t need. Buy these, watch the foils and be glad you got in when they were cheap, then hold them too long and get smashed by a Commander deck reprinting. If these aren’t reprinted this fall, though, it will be at least a year and a lot will happen to this price in a year. If you didn’t buy in at the floor, there is still time to make money. Oh, and this is good with Panharmonicon, the card I’m pretending is the general of this deck.

This is the card I’m most excited about, so I think with it out of the way, we can talk about mana before we move on.

Did you notice this creeping up to its pre-reprint levels? These at $1 was absurd and didn’t last long and that Commander reprinting gave us an opportunity to get a lot of these for cheap. I think this won’t stop at its current level, despite the reprint. This is very, very good in black decks and if Nirkana Revenant is any indication, the ceiling on this is very high despite the gigantic difference in the relative scarcity of the two cards. The effect is in-demand enough that there is upside to Ghast if you buy in around $2 because it will be $5 soon and could go even higher. Another reprinting won’t sink it forever, so if it hits $1 again, buy even harder because it has shown it can recover. This solves your mana problem in the deck, is cheaper than Nirkana Revenant and is everywhere. I like this card a lot.

This is a “watch” not a “buy” but it’s worth mentioning. If this gets any cheaper, it will be attractive for two reasons. The first is that the lower it gets, the less impetus there is for a reprinting and the more likely something like Cabal Coffers gets printed instead. This has 3 printings and that has taken a toll on the upside – this is unlikely to see $40 again. The second reason this will be attractive as it goes lower is that some deck in Modern will want this again and you will have copies ready to sell. People keep cards for Modern but almost everyone has a deck and a little build stock – a lot of Modern stuff is sold off when it falls out of fashion only to pop off again later. This is a card that will be more than it is now, so if you can buy it when it’s less than it is now, you’re sure to make money.

Were you frustrated seeing how expensive Crypt Ghast got while you weren’t paying attention and did you find yourself wishing you could know when a card was at its floor and was bound to go back up so you could buy at that point rather than after it was too late? This card is Crypt Ghast when Crypt Ghast hit $1 after its reprinting. You want a card that’s going to be $10 again and is $4 now? This is so obvious that pointing it out feels like cheating.

The rest of the ways to make mana in this deck are expensive and I don’t see much upside.

We do have some other ways to rebuy Gonti’s effects, though.

Someone tried telling me that the first spike wasn’t the result of Star City buying every copy of this card when Beck//Call was spoiled. It’s probably a co-incidence that the price was $3 on April 9th and $12 on April 12th, right? Hey, when did Dragon’s Maze come out? Was it April 2013? This is all probably EDH demand that did that.

Speaking of EDH demand, it exists. That said, it probably can’t sustain the current price and it appears to be tailing off. I think you watch this because if the only reprint this will get is a Masterpiece I think this has upside from wherever it bottoms out. You can probably make money buying now, but you can probably make more buying later and I prefer more money to less money. This is great with Gonti, among other decks, and cross-format applications only give you more chances to make money. EDH staples can maintain their prices well making them safe investments and other formats can give you a big boost making cross-format cards perfect buys. I like Curio, but I’ll like it more later.

Second spikes are a thing and this has demonstrated it can be $3 and that means increased demand could push it toward those levels again. This could get lower but it’s likely that it goes up, especially with more attention from players wanting to rebuy ETB effects. If you’re in a color where you can Deadeye Navigator or Eldrazi Displacer at will, you’re not liable to be hyped about this, but if you have no choice, you might want to give this a try. Gonti plus Panharmonicon make me want to ABC.

This returns stuff. This is just the kind of card that is going to be worth money long-term based on EDH demand. This is also way less reprintable than a lot of cards. This isn’t exactly a Phyrexian Arena but sometimes it’s better. If you’re letting stuff die or putting your general in your yard so you can cast him later, this is a card you trifle with. So trifle with it and 100 copies of it and you’ll be glad you parked the cost of a dinner at TGI Friday’s in an appreciating asset rather than in giving you and a date diarrhea.

That’s all I got. I mean, there are more cards that have less upside and fit the theme of the deck less, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with those cards this week. What we do need to do is eventually bring this week’s article to a close. Thanks for sticking with me and reading my silly column every week. Share this on twitter and facebook and let’s all make some money on cards that are going to go up anyway. A store can sit on these for a year or you can buy them and sit on them for a year then sell them back to the store. Until next week!