…must come to an end, it was a pleasure.
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Hey, everyone. I’m going to be soloing the financial review for this set and I couldn’t be happier to have additional pressure. I’m going to be doing the best I can to extrapolate where I expect prices to go based on any similarities I can draw between cards in this set and cards in the first Conspiracy which I expect to be drafted roughly the same amount. This is an unlimited print run set so comparisons to cards in Modern Masters 2 will only be made when it is used to illustrate how much more profound a price drop will be for the Conspiracy 2 card. For reference, what’s even worth what in the first Conspiracy set?
This set cratered prices. Misdirection and Hydra Omnivore, in particular, were high-demand cards with low supply due to where they were originally printed and the new copies at non-mythic rare just buried them in an avalanche of supply. I expect Conspiracy 2 reprints to share the same fate. Let’s look at what we have so far.
Spitting Slime
This is a bulk rare. I like it, but, come on.
Kami of the Crescent Moon
This was a victim of Nekusar hype plus some non-deck in Modern all happening roughly the same month. This is going to be fun in Limited and if you get a sealed pool with this and Loevold, your deck is built. This will get very cheap indeed. And Nekusar can’t bail it out. Sell these and buy Puzzle Boxes if you didn’t already.
Spirit of the Hearth
This had crept up to $2. It will probably never be $2 again.
Manaplasm
This was bulk before
Ghostly Prison
This is an Emperor’s New Clothes scenario. This high price is predicated on how good it is against Splinter Twin, a card that’s banned into Oblivion. EDH loves it, obviously, but Modern isn’t really killing people with lots of tokens the way it use to. This is less useful. However, it’s a popular EDH card so is a dealer who paid $10 for it going to sell it for $9.50? But the reprinting is going to make people start paying attention to this card, questioning why it’s as high and realizing the new supply and the lower demand means this card will plummet. Buy at the bottom and if you’re holding, well, them’s the breaks. This could have just as easily happened in Commander 2015 or 2016.
Guul Draz Specter
This was bulk before
Beast Within
This is a card that has shrugged off multiple reprintings and maintained a decent price. Could it shrug this off, too? Yes, but only in the long term which means buying opportunities.
Followed Foosteps
This is a bad graph shape if you’re holding these. The buylist price started tanking years before the reprint. This is a bulk rare waiting to happen.
Gratuitous Violence
Well this has been crawling up because of Narset decks, but this is going to crater this. I don’t know if Narset demand can help this pull itself out of the crater its price is about to start residing in.
Forgotten Ancient
$3ish for a card with multiple reprints is pretty promising. I think if this hits bulk, you trade for all of these, despite the reprint risk being pretty substantial. I think it will take more printings than just this one to make this worthless forever.
Throne of the High City
This can start the Monarch shenanigans in any EDH deck. I’m not sure I hate this since if they can’t hit you, you get a free Howling Mine just for you. I don’t think this gets above bulk, but I will be checking EDHREC to see if people are brewing with this so I know whether to move in on foils.
Covenant of Minds
This was bulk before
Sphinx of Magosi
This was bulk before
Horn of Greed
This climbed its way to $9 and with The Gitrog Monster and other land decks popular, it’s easy to see why. I bet this tanks, and I’m a buyer when it does. It’s not just scarcity that made this card a monster lately.
Pariah
This is under $5 and cards under $5 are about to plummet. This doesn’t have enough EDH demand to recover from this in the near term.
Hamletback Goliath
This was bulk before
Sangromancer
This only got up to about $2.50. See what I said about Pariah.
Hundred-Handed One
This was bulk before
Psychosis Crawler
This wasn’t quite bulk, but this should be the final nail in the coffin built by Commander 2015.
Selvala’s Stampede
This is a better Tooth and Nail in some decks and a silly value monster in other decks. Mayael, Maelstrom Wanderer, Omnath – the list of decks which will call this green Browbeat an on-the-spot win is long. It’s impossible to find presale data on this right now, but this has the capacity to gain in price as other cards tank. I think this will be underappreciated off the bat. Target these if the price seems too low, like $2 or under.
Show and Tell
So this is the Blue mythic in the spot where they’re going to print Damnation, I guess. This is going to tank the price of this significantly. Either this card is 50% of the price of a box or this takes a bath. Right now Show and Tell is the same price Sneak Attack was before it was reprinted in Eternal Masters. Right now Sneak Attack is $25. Things will turn out much, much worse for Show and Tell since it’s in a set with $3 boosters not $12 boosters.
Platinum Angel
These are gettable for like $6-$8 right now, which means this is about to be pretty cheap. That’s good because it’s an EDH staple and will always, always trade out. Pay whatever buylist on these is in a few weeks (like $2, I bet) if you can do that locally and sit on them for a year before you trade them for like $5 worth of specs. You’ll never have a hard time getting rid of Platinum Angel.
Damnation
The new art makes it look like Damnation costs 6BB instead of 2BB and RK Post put a power and toughness in the bottom corner, but make no mitake, Wotc knew how badly we needed this card to be reprinted and they delivered. What, did you think they were going to give us a $2 rare that had already been printed 6 times in the same slot as Show and Tell, did you? After EDH players have been begging for Damnation for years? Give them some credit.
Selvala, Heart of the Wilds
This is pretty boss. It’s going to ramp you quite a bit and draw you some cards to boot. In a mono-green situation, you’re just going to play a ton of huge creatures and draw some extra cards, keeping your hand stocked as you play bigger and bigger dudes. You need a way to keep them off of big creatures, which can be tough in green, but if all this does is tap for GG, then GGG, then GGGG etc, you’re in good shape. If this is not your commander, but is part of the 99, the mana ability is even better. I like this a lot and this is getting jammed in my Mayael deck for sure.
This is preselling for $6 on eBay and that seems about right to me. With all of the gas in this set, it’s going to take quite a bit to get over that mark and I don’t know if this card has the juice. This is going to just fart out Eldrazi all day and that’s cool, but I don’t know if it will be better than Marchesa was in Conspiracy 1 which it would need to do to get over $6.
Caller of the Untamed
This is a sweet ability that you’ll basically never get to use. Bulk rare unless Cube plays this to a degree that would be unprecedented for cube. EDH couldn’t make this not bulk on its own for at least a year or two.
Stunt Double
People play Clone in EDH. Quite a bit, actually. As many times as they have “improved” Clone by tacking weird stuff onto it, they haven’t really made something that was just so much better than Clone that Clone was obsolete.
Until now. They fundamentally changed the way you can play Clone and there’s no reason to be forced to play it Sorcery-speed anymore. Clone is dead. Long live Clone.
This is also going to be a bulk rare with an expensive foil for a long while. Maybe Carter Hatfield, the largest collector of Clones I know and owner of Perfect Storm MTG, can start collecting these and the price will nose up.
Birds of Paradise
Just reprint the stupid Mark Poole art, already. Pay him what you need to pay him and bring back the iconic birds.
As far as this is concerned, this reprint is going to tank its price a bit, but it will be back. If you missed your last dozen chances to buy these for dirt cheap at reprinting and then you were surprised at how high they climbed later, don’t miss this one.
Subterranean Tremors
I don’t think any of the cards in this set can possibly be worth any money at this point. This will be a set with 20 $10 cards. It’s crazy how good this stuff is. If you don’t know about formats other than Standard, this card is bugnutty in formats where this can replace Vandalblast such as EDH and Vintage. This has a ton of upside compared with any card that does any one of the three things this card does. 9 mana is super doable in EDH and getting a Blasphemous Act/Shatterstorm/Devastating Summons for one card is stupid. Cube is in, Vintage is in, EDH is in. People love this card. How much will it be worth? Probably less than its presale price at this point! This set has too many good cards.
Regal Behemoth
Speaking of good cards, this is good. I don’t think this is “be worth money” good but I think it’s bound to be a roleplayer in EDH or at least get tried out. I like cards that make you the Monarch in EDH because if no one else is playing those cards, you’re the one that introduces the Monarch emblem to the game. This is solid when you have it out and you’re the Monarch, doubling and fixing your mana. This is a very EDH card and I could see it being a buck or two in the short term and more in the long term, especially if the flashy mythics that are soaking up all of the value now fall off. I’m still not buying these for cash but I will trade for them, especially foils.
Volatile Chimera
This could be very good in cube, but I feel like there are more EDH decks than cubes and EDH couldn’t save this from bulk. We could see a high foil multiplier, but stores are getting better at predicting that when the set comes out instead of like 3 years later like they used to. I’m not interested in this card.
Berserk
Well, this was unexpected. This is a very narrow card but it’s also a very old and iconic one so seeing it here was a surprise. The price is about to take a gigantic hit, which is what they wanted, I suspect. Infect in Legacy is a thing and this goes in it and that’s basically it apart from Cube. That’s not to say there won’t be demand, but I think this squashes the price of Berserk, which is probably fine. This also gives us decent foils, albeit with the same art as the FTV ones.
An Unlimited Berserk is $100 right now and the price will likely try to start out there, but with all of the gas in this set and MSRP being enforced by stores like Target, pack price is going to tank a lot of these preorder prices. Don’t be surprised to see Berserk for $15 soon.
Duskmantle Seer
This was $0.75 when it was a mythic
Dragonlair Spider
This was about $4 and it had a ridiculous 1.1 foil multiplier, maybe due to distaste for Commander’s Arsenal foils. Whatever the case, this is going to get a big hunk taken out of it. I doubt this ever recovers.
Skyline Despot
This is pretty savage. You’re going to really punish people for not attacking you so this may bring some additional heat, but I could see this coupled with a card like Blazing Archon in my Mayael deck to just bury them in a slow avalanche of card advantage. This isn’t powerful on the level of Scourge of Thrones, though, so I bet this is a few bucks, maximum, but it could start out at bulk and climb.
Grenzo, Havoc Raiser
I like this card a lot and it’s both a sweet commander and sweet inclusion in the 99. I don’t, however, think this will be more popular as a commander than the other Grenzo.
This may start to climb a bit, soon, but I feel like this is probably a pretty good corollary. The new Grenzo is sick, but so is the old one and it’s like $1.50
Exotic Orchard
This card may just be done. It was crawling out of the hole formed when Planechase reprinted it and I don’t know if it can recover. The foil is also likely to be impacted which seemed safer since Planechase only reprinted the nonfoil, allowing it to climb to $10. This is an OK land that can screw you sometimes and it barely hit $4 before this. This is most likely $1 again for quite a while.
Spy Kit
This is much better than you think. There are endless shenanigans possible with this card and I’ll let the EDH subreddit tell you all about it. I think this could end up being a decent foil though I don’t think EDH demand will move the needle on an uncommon for quite a while.
Keeper of Keys
This is just a solid evasion-enabler that can draw you cards. I’m really excited about this card, although I don’t think it will be above $2. If you look at the stuff that was above $1.75 last time around, nothing of this caliber with its appeal limited to just EDH cracked the $2 mark.
Leovold, Emissary of Trest
This. Card. Is. Insane.
This is the best EDH colors, has elf tribal synergy, draws you a ton of cards, turns Howling Mine and Teferi’s Puzzle Box into bludgeons… I could go on and on about this card. I think this has the potential to be as popular as the last Marchesa or even more-so. The floor on this card is $5 if you ask me and it could go higher. Again, though, Marchesa from the last Conspiracy is very popular and that’s like $5.50 so insane or not, I don’t know if we buy these at $4 for cash hoping to make anything. People are excited at least.
Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast
This seems pretty narrow. It’s not good enough for Vintage in all likelihood except maybe in some sort of Tezzerator deck? I am not sure. I think this goes in a lot of EDH decks like Shattergang Brothers (how good would it be to ultimate this targeting Wurmcoil Engine or Myr Battlesphere?) but I don’t know if that’s going to be enough to prop his price up, much. This is one more planeswalker than I expected to see in the set. Is this part of a cycle? Could there be 3 more?
This is preselling on SCG for $20 and I think that’s a little high even though I like this card. It’s a 3 mana walker that can use his -3 3 times before he dies, which is really good. But until I see someone who knows more about Vintage than I do (almost everyone) or Legacy (still a lot of people) tell me why this is as good as Dack Fayden outside of EDH, I’m out at $20.
Edit – I finally got a chance to talk to some Vintage players about it and they are hyped about this. I still don’t think this gets as expensive as Dack Fayden since this isn’t the only good card in the set, but it could have upside at $20 in their view. His middle ability does a ton of work in Vintage where the number of permanents is smaller and they are more important and 3 mana happens routinely on turn 1 in Vintage. It’s hard to know how the value will be spread out in this set, but it’s bonkers so far.
Wild Pair
This used to be $2. That bodes poorly for the future of this card.
Burgeoning
The new art is pretty sweet and it’s the first time this card will be foil, which is super relevant.
Right now, a Conspiracy Exploration is $11, down from a high of $40. Burgeoning is at like $30 so I could see Burgeoning getting to $10 or cheaper as a result of this reprinting. The foils are anyone’s guess, but I would guess they will decline from their initial price the way Exploration did. Exploration is a very nice price corollary and I’d follow its trajectory to see what to do with Burgeoning.
Sanctum Prelate
Wow. This is one of the craziest hatebears ever printed. This can straight shut people down. It gets worse in EDH where you can’t just name 2 or 3 and drop the mic, but it’s still good there. I don’t know if this is Containment Priest good, but it’s certainly very solid. I’m still waiting on a presale price for this, but I imagine this will be $20 at least. This basically makes me less confident in the ability of Recruiter of the Guard to maintain even $20. I wrote about that card not knowing if there would be other good cards in the set and every card I see spoiled makes me less and less bullish on Recruiter, as good as it is.
Inquisition of Kozilek
This is a crazy price trajectory for an uncommon and while it’s already sinking on its own due to the relative lack of Modern events lately (?) I expect the Conspiracy 2 printing to cut its legs off.
If you’re whining about it being rare and think this won’t torpedo its price, you haven’t been paying attention lately at all. We had an expensive uncommon reprinted as a rare in a smaller, limited-print-run set and we can look at what that did to prices.
Look at the price of Heritage Druid. If you’re worried that Conspiracy, with its $3 booster packs as opposed to $12 booster packs and its unlimited print run versus its ridiculously tiny print run, can’t lower the price of an uncommon printed at rare, you aren’t paying attention. Inquisition could his as low as $4 or $5, especially in the short term. Buy your set then, and buy a second set in case it ever hits $30 again.
Desertion
This is a card that’s in some trouble, finace-wise. It was already down to like $6 because of the multiple printings. The Commander’s Arsenal version was a paltry $9, so sexier foils from a real set are going to start out around that and tank. If Desertion hits like $1, I’m a buyer for cash, though because the price should do an OK job of recovering and they always trade out well. It’s sicko in EDH and cube.
Phyrexian Arena
This card has been printed a lot and keeps on ticking. I expect a dip and I expect people who care about the new art to pay a little more if that’s what they want. The real loser here is the foil versions from other sets which have enjoyed a lot of safety since Arena has been reprinted 3 times since 9th edition and none of those times have been foil. 9th Edition foil is the cheapest at around $50 and we could see the Apocalypse version approach that if people indeed prefer the new art foil. I would say rather than think about how much the old foils are going to be dragged down, think about how high they could get and if you can get a Conspiracy 2 foil for around $25 or $30, I think we can see there should be upside. This is a good card and EDH will always want it because it’s a great way to draw cards in black decks.
Burning Wish
Some speculative buying began to abut reality in a way that exposed the price was artificially high. This card doesn’t get played like it used to. Goofy Wish board combo decks in Legacy and Vintage aren’t as appealing when you can dummy-proof the game with cards like Past in Flames. This is a fine card, but it can’t possibly maintain above $10 with the copies we’re about to get since it was on the decline already and was barely clinging to $12. This is a $5 card soon, I think. I also think it may have upside at $5.
Hallowed Burial
This card is going to slip to a buck or two. It was played in Modern sideboards for a hot minute, including back in 2014 when everyone was all “Modern plays a copy of this in a sideboard? BUY EVERY COPY ON TCG PLAYER!” and cards like this and Fracturing Gust were $10 overnight. I think this may have upside when it gets very cheap. The thing about EDH is you can pay an extra mana for upside on your wrath effects (or more than one mana – I win games off of the back of a big Decree of Pain) and this is a good wrath variant. Modern doesn’t have to fight pod decks like it used to do this isn’t as appealing anymore but I still think this is a trade target when it craters, and it will.
That’s all of the reprints from the last day or two. The next cards will be a little murkier without anything solid to compare them to from the first Conspiracy.
Dack Fayden peaked at $60 last time around. We could see that again if we don’t have multiple cards trying to pick up all of the slack from the whole set. A strong planeswalker would have to be quite strong indeed to compare to Dack, for example. Another card that isn’t a planeswalker would need to be played in as many formats. It’s tough to judge.
Kaya, Ghost Assassin
Kaya is not going to be $60, I fear. She is cool and EDH players are excited but I don’t think this impacts the game enough for Legacy and Vintage and Cube. The colors it’s in are awkward. If you want a WB walker in your cube, you have a dozen decent Sorin versions to choose from. This is preordering for $20 and while it could have upside at that price, I would have to be misevaluating this card AND the rest of the set so far pretty badly. If there were no other good card in the set, I could see maybe wanting this at $20 for speculation purposes, but there is one. I think $20 may be the price this settles near, but it’s hard to imagine.
Recruiter of the Guard
This is a card that could hit $60 in a world with no planeswalker in the set? Maybe? I guess it really depends on what else they reprint to soak up some of the value. This snap sold out at a $20 preorder and I think this could get closer to $50 before they are out of pre-sale copies to list.
People are comparing this to Imperial Recruiter which is wrong, but I don’t know how wrong it is. It has some distinct advantages in decks like Death and Taxes which was splashing red in some versions for Recruiter. There are a lot of decks running Recruiter but that has a lot of different roles in a lot of different decks and this doesn’t do all of them. It’s better in a D&T variant, sure. It could go in a reworked version of Aluren where you can grab Whitemane Lion or Deputy of Acquittals to get your combo going? Maybe? I don’t know, Aluren sucks and this can’t grab Lobber Crew and killing someone with Lobber Crew and Harpy is the one reason I’d play Aluren. Oh, and this new card can’t grab Painter’s Servant. So that’s a big red X in its “How does this card stack up against Imperial Recruiter?” column regarding whether it could be an affordable replacement for Recruiter in the best deck running Recruiter.
I am not super high on a non-mythic in a set with other cards in it. Let’s not forget a great deal of Recruiter’s price is predicated on its relative scarcity since it’s a P3K card. Let’s also not forget that this is a rare and Dack Fayden was a mythic. That means $20 is a more likely ceiling.
I like this card and it’s fully possible this is the best card in the set. I do, however, think the set will be structured such that this won’t need to soak up all of the value. I expect a high foil multiplier but I don’t expect the foils to be like $600 like Dack’s were unless the set is truly garbage. Oh, and like Dack, this card is super reprintable in Eternal Masters, so I’m a seller if I crack this in a draft, not a buyer.
Capital Punishment
This is a bulk rare even if it gets played in EDH, which is the only format which could conceivably play it though I’m not sure we want it.
Paliano Vanguard
Draft-specific cards end up bulk rares unless they’re cube all-stars like this isn’t.
Queen Marchesa
The other Marchesa is $5-$6 right now. I expect this to be less popular so the ceiling on this is basically $5. There might be money to be made in the short term, but just know that this is headed to $5.50 or lower and you don’t want to be holding them when it does if you paid more than that. I don’t know how much cheaper I like this at because I don’t know how close it will get to the old Marchesa’s price. That’s a very popular commander and it’s in blue. This will not be as popular and it’s in worse colors. That all bodes poorly.
Archdemon of Paliano
I kind of don’t understand this card. It could be silly fun to draft it late in the pack where your last picks are garbage, anyway. Still, I don’t want this in cube and that’s the only thing that could save this. I’ll be padding out instant collections with copies of this forever.
Is this good enough for Legacy where the draft-specific stuff doesn’t matter and you’re left with a better Juzam Djinn? Do we care about this in a world where Tombstalker both exists and doesn’t get played all that much? Hard to know. I think this is probably bulk, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people decided this was playable in Legacy. Stranger things have happened.
Arcane Savant
This is going to be sicko in cube. I have a feeling foils of this will be something absurd like 10 or 20 times the price of the non-foil, especially if the foil ends up a bulk rare.
“Protector of the Throne”
When Protector of the Throne enters the battlefield, you become the monarch.
If damage would be dealt to you, you may instead have that damage be dealt to Protector of the Throne.
Bulk.
Custodi Lich
This is one of the best cards that makes you the Monarch, and it disincentivizes people to attack you better than any of the other Monarch-centric cards. This may get above bulk. Note that even if this is the only Monarch card in your deck, you can use this as a kill spell that also draws you cards. I think this will be above bulk.
Adriana, Captain of the Guard
To the extent that there are only a few legendary creatures ever that fewer than 10 people submitted decklists for to EDHREC.com this is playable. But that is by no means an endorsement. This is just another super boring Boros commander, it forces you to play subpar creatures if you want to stack melee triggers and it’s a non-mythic rare. I think this is headed for bulk bins and I’m not even optimistic about the foils.
“Confiscate Riches”
Sorcery
Council’s dilemma – Starting with you, each player votes Time or Money. For each player that voted Time, take an extra turn. For each player that voted Money, gain control of a permanent that player owns. Exile ~.
This is exactly what I want a 9 mana EDH sorcery to be. This is an excellent Time Stretch variant and even if you take 0 extra turns, you still get an awful lot of value from this. I’m in love.
I’m pretty starved for spoilers, as are all of you, I’m sure. I was about to do a whole article about zombies with upside based on Gisa and Geralf or an article about lands you should get in foil because they’re harder to reprint in Commander precon decks and luckily I procrastinated a bit. I waited until it was 8 AM on the west coast and was rewarded with a juicy spoiler that made me happy that they’re finally spoiling Conspiracy cards, although waiting this long means they’re going to dump a bunch at once and they’re going to do with same with Commander 2016 which comes out in November. I’m not looking forward to getting one spoiler a week and then getting 300 spoilers in one day, but I guess what we want as players doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the new card is sweet.
You’ll notice it doesn’t have any + abilities, forcing you to use her 0 ability to blink and reset herself if you want to keep using her other abilities. However, you can also use her 0 ability on other creatures and that’s what we should focus on because that makes her a great candidate for a few decks that already exist in EDH and which could see a bump in interest with this new tool and with other potential cards for the deck being a possibility in Conspiracy 2: Throne Boogaloo.
We have written a bit about blink stuff before but this spoiling is another event and events are worth talking about. Could this be this set’s Dack Fayden? If it is, what does that mean? Do I mean Dack Fayden in financial terms or just in buildability terms? Let’s look at implications of printing a BW planeswalker.
Last time we had a Planeswalker named Dack Fayden. While everything else in the set tanked, Dack soared. Non-mythic rares, even good commanders, sort of became bulk and a lot of expensive Legacy cards tanked, also. This meant Dack had to soak up a lot of value since it was the card in the set with the highest demand.
Even after an Eternal Masters printing cut the price in half, this is still over $25, which is insane. Before the reprinting, the foils topped out at $600, briefly.
Financially, I don’t see Kaya being anywhere near as financially relevant as Dack Fayden. She’s way less exciting and the value of Conspiracy Dos is going to have to come from other cards due to how exciting she isn’t in Legacy and Cube, etc. From financial standpoint, calling her Dack Fayden is a little premature and probably super inaccurate.
But will she be the only planeswalker? If she is, will there be room in the set for another card that makes people excited about playing an Obzedat or Ghost Council deck in EDH? How likely is that? Could Obzedat or Karlov or something similar be in the set?
Based on the last Conspiracy set, we had one gold card at rare or mythic and one at uncommon for each of the ten two-color combinations. Can we expect the same this time around? If so, don’t expect anything to serve as a “tell” to players that they want to build some sort of Obzedat blinky deck because we’re more likely to get Unmake in that spot.
I saw an interesting theory on Facebook today.
This was a Magic judge you probably all know spitballing about the set. Could Kaya being 75/221 mean every card after her is a land or gold card? A ton of gold cards in the set would mean that there is plenty of room to reprint Obzedat, Karlov, Teysa and any number of other Orzhov baddies that could lead to a run on Orzhov staples predicated on Kaya.
Bad news. If we again look at the last Conspiracy set, Dack Fayden was card 42/210, Brago was 41, Vampire Hexmage was 133 and 210 was Reflecting Pool. We simply can’t glean anything about how many gold card we’ll have based on the number in the set and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume there will be more gold cards in Conspiracy 2. There will be 11 more cards than last time, but those are likely more conspiracies or some cards related to some new wrinkle in the rules. If there are 11 more gold cards (10 and a land or artifact, obviously) then there will be one more card in each two-color combination, possibly rare, probably common. I don’t expect more gold which means Kaya is on her own to get people excited about playing a Planeswalker that spend every third turn flashing herself out to reset if you’re trying to syphon everyone’s minds.
But Kaya still has the potential to be an exciting card and could be a benefit to decks in black and white that are already blinking stuff. Does anything bear looking at that didn’t bear looking at when we talked about blinky stuff when Eldrazi Displacer was printed? I bet there are some opportunities, especially in black. Let’s take a look.
Sanguine Bond has been printed 3 times, I don’t see it being printed soon and I think it’s got upside at its current price. It’s half of a devastating “if life totals change, I win” combo and it’s already beginning to recover from its third printing. Exquisite Blood is the limiting reagent, here, and that has more chance of tanking from a reprint than going up and I don’t like advising people to buy $12 cards hoping to sell them when they hit $15. Instead, I think scooping a ton of the loose copies of Sanguine Bond, the card that’s better on its own, frankly, is the play. You’re going to ding them when you gain life, making your Exsanguinates even more saucy. Using Kaya to blink Gray Merchant of Asphodel? Turn it into an even faster clock. I see opportunity here.
Now here’s a card that didn’t really seem to mind getting a reprinting and has already started to shrug it off. If you bought in at the floor like a smarty, you’ve already doubled up. This card has moderate reprint risk since it’s such a powerful staple, but we’ve had the Orzhov and mono-black Commander precons already and with 4 color decks this year and 2-color (Orzhov won’t be among them) decks likely for 2017, it could be quite a while before this is reprinted. There is always the risk it ends up in Conspiracy or one of those Planeswalker decks, but I think this is pretty safe and it’s going to go up. So far we’ve looked at two cards that were reprinted in Commander decks and are rebounding. The better a card is, the better an opportunity to buy becomes when it tanks after a reprinting. Maybe when we get the full Commander 2016 spoiler, I’ll look at some cards I expect to crater then recover.
Hey, this guy works pretty well in a deck with a planeswalker that can remove creatures from play and then put them back into play later, doesn’t it? It sure does. This has been flat for so long I’m starting to think that maybe EDH can’t drive prices at all. Hundreds of decks on EDHREC employ this card and while EDH demand will be slow to move the price at first, once the market’s $1 copies dry up, these will be expensive to restock. Cheap copies gives you a chance to buy cheap foils for now. All in all this is a card I keep saying is going to go up, and it will. I don’t know how long it will take, but it’s going to be worth it when it does.
Literally the only reason I would suggest this card, which has been reprinted into powder of late, is that I think it’s possible they may be all done reprinting it. That and this basically can’t get any cheaper. Legacy copies are still above $7 and those could be the first to recover. This pairs so well that it’s worth looking at even though the constant reprints are a beating.
We can expand beyond just white and black decks because decks with white and black in them but also other colors could use all three of her abilities.
Nope. As someone pointed out in the comments below, Karmic Guide has protection from black, making it a poor choice to try and blink with Kaya. You can jam it in the deck and use Eldrazi Displacer or you can use Deadeye Navigator or Mistmeadow Witch but you’re not going to get up to any shenanigans with Kaya. How long has it been since I read the text box on Karmic Guide? I’ve mostly been gesturing at the card, grunting, tapping 1U for Deadeye Navigator and grunting again when I put something from my graveyard into play.
Sharuum, for example, has a lot of cards worth blinking.
Some cards, like Gilded Drake, aren’t worth mentioning because they’re expensive. Not that Sharuum plays Gilded Drake, but you know what I mean. Drake is good with Kaya. I could easily have just not included this paragraph, I guess. Oh, you agree? Well if you’re so smart, you write an insightful article about prices before they go up instead of after they go up. Let’s talk about Sharuum, fine.
I’m pretty sure like a year or two ago I said “Man, that Archenemy printing ruined this card but this could go back up over time” then forgot about it. I can’t find the article where that would have been, but this did what we expected and it grew. This still has room to grow. Have you noticed it puts someone to 10 life? I’ve dealt trillions of damage with this card before, which felt really good. Infinite lifegain combos don’t always cut it, remember that. Some playgroups errata this to reduce their life to 20, that’s how bad this feels when you smash someone in the teeth with it. I’ve even used this to draw my whole deck with Necropotence looking for combo pieces, resetting my life to 10 as needed. This card is good with blink and we have more ways to blink it.
I think this must have been some sort of promo if the foil is under $4. I feel like I thought that last time I looked at this card’s price. I may have even noticed the recent arbitrage opportunity (the white area where the buylist price is above the retail price forming a white triangle under the blue line). This is a good card, it’s good to flash, it’s good to play in Sharuum and I like it a lot.
There are a lot of cards that interact with Kaya – Karador decks do some shenanigans, for example. The point is, we have some time before the card even comes out and people start testing with it in earnest and then start buying the cards. Some of these will go up because of Kaya, others will go up over time and some of these are cards I already said would go up and did and I think they can go up more.
I’ll be hopefully delving into some more spoilers next week. I’ll try to stay on top of the regular spoiler coverage you’re used to, also. I’m staying right where I am, continuing to give you guys the best EDH finance content you should all be reading irrespective of whether or not you play EDH. That is not and has never been the point. As sexy as it is to watch someone play Liliana on camera at the PT and buy a bunch for $23 and have half of your orders get cancelled on Monday and then when they do show up the price is already plummeting and you list them on TCG Player and lower the price a bunch of times and when you finally sell them you cleared $2 a copy after fees… actually that sounds terrible. I’ll stick to buying Squandered Resources for $0.25 and laughing when PT prices spike. Thanks for being loyal readers and I’ll try to repay you by continuing to be an equally loyal writer. You guys rock.
The new FTV is out and it’s… full of cards? I don’t know, what do you want me to say about it? Usually they have a theme and this has to be the loosest possible theme ever. Literally anything could be in FTV: Lore. There’s lore behind Joven’s Ferrets and those have never been foil. The worst part is there are going to be people who wanted the lore they like in here and it didn’t make the cut. “No Helvault? This is bullshit” I’m sure at least one person has said. Can you imagine? Everyone thinks the stupid lore crap they like is the most important which is why doing this particular FTV is bound to be fraught. The people who don’t give a hot fart about lore won’t care about the flavor of the junk you jam in here, we’ll just be upset that we’re paying our LGS $80 for a set that has Near-Death Experience in it. The people who give all of the farts (of every temperature) about the lore are going to be upset that you didn’t include Argus Kos, Wojek Veteran because they were reading the Ravnica book the first time they touched a pair of boobs or whatever reason people get nostalgiac for M:tG Lore.
Luckily, we have additional metrics for judging the success or failure of FTV sets apart from “Do we care about cards with terrible foiling?” and “Do we care about Vorthos crap?” and that is “dollar sign question mark” which is all we should be caring about. Should I write this article with at least a bit of an eye toward EDH? I guess, sure. Fine. I can’t imagine writing this from an EDH perspective without a finance bent and I can’t imagine writing this from a finance perspective and being entirely agnostic to EDH. Either approach is going to result in roughly the same article, anyway. Let’s just talk about these stupid cards and get it over with, shall we? I mean, I’m getting it over with, You’re being entertained and educated so I guess you’re trying to savor this experience. Just remember this took hours to write and will take minutes to read. What do you care about? EDH playability? Accessibility? Finance? I’ll try to talk about everything I think is relevant. Let’s light this candle.
Traditionally, FTV printings tend to affect the non-foil price way more than the foil price, especially if no foil was available before. This is a $1 card with a $13 foil and I don’t see a garbage, curly FTV foil dragging the foil price down a ton when it’s hardly a credible alternative. People who like foil cards do so because they like the best version of the card and an FTV foil hardly qualifies. I imagine the FTV foil doesn’t do much to the foil price. If this had never been foil before, this would be closer to Hymn to Tourach but even then we got a set foil very soon after and people couldn’t wait to not have to play it.
Cabal Ritual has a good foil already and there’s not much reason to expect the FTV version, even for people who prefer the new art, to replace them. If anything, this is close to Kird Ape which had been foil once before. We don’t have pricing data that goes back that far but assuredly, the FTV foil wasn’t a threat the the 9th Edition version.
Especially not long-term.
Ultimately I think the foil may get dinged a few bucks but will go back up, unless we get a reprinting of Cabal Therapy in a future set that doesn’t have FTV foiling. If it has this same new art, all bets are off. For now, I don’t expect much movement, nor for EDH players to care much.
This is a different ballgame. EDH players are less antagonistic toward FTV foils than Legacy players, especially given the fact that sometimes FTV or Commander’s Arsenal foils are the only foils we have. That’s not the case here with Conflux foils fetching $15, which is a decent multiplier for such a weird card. I think the $15 price tag of the foil could take a minor hit and I bet a lot of the new foil Confluxes end up in decks and may keep the price from recovering. This saw a bump in Legacy Dream Halls a while back and that obscures the price a bit. I think it’s possible that new supply could reveal that there’s not as much demand as anticipated, although Conflux is getting a decent amount of play in EDH per EDHREC.
A good corollary is a recent FTV card from the same set and same price point, though a different rarity, something there being a set proportion of FTV cards smooths out a bit.
I’d compare Conflux to Martial Coup, though Coup’s drop is obscured by Commander 2014 and FTV: Annihilation reprinting the card twice within months of each other. You see the big hit to the non-foil price, so let’s see what happened to the foil price since C14 didn’t do any of that.
No change. You’d swear FTV Annihilation never even came out in August 2014. That’s something to bear in mind. It did seem to reverse some growth and hurt the long-term prospects of the set foil despite being a garbage FTV foil, though, so if you have money tied up in foil Conflux, maybe get out, though it seems like you have some time.
This won’t do as much as we want, I fear. This may give some people a chance to buy a $58 card at MSRP if they’re very lucky, a set with a $58 card in it plus some other cards for like $80 in a lot more cases and could see people upgrade to a foil affordably. At $215, the Dark Depths foil is sure to take a bit of a hit, or a big one. The FTV foil is obviously less desirable. This is the money shot for this FTV so let’s really try and accurately predict what this will do.
This is an awkward corollary. FTV: Realms came out in August of 2012 where I drew the arrow, but demand in Modern Tron that people didn’t anticipate when Punishing Fire was banned saw this card still being purchased 4 copies at a time. I don’t see Dark Depths maintaining the same insane growth curve as Grove, but this does show how little of an effect the FTV can have on price if there is sufficient demand. I think the FTV copies can smooth out the growth curve of Dark Depths and dampen it a bit but the copies won’t be enough to hold the card back if it continues to be as good a card. Banning it in Modern attenuated its price to a great extent and Modern demand ultimately made it go nuts, something I’m less convinced will happen to Dark Depths with demand from Legacy and EDH, 1-of formats for the most part.
Again, the FTV printing barely had an effect, although Ancient Tomb was a sleeper in Legacy (which was weird because City of Traitors spiked twice in the time Tomb was doing nothing). It could be argued the FTV printing delayed its price explosion, but demand couldn’t be staved off for long. I think we could see Dark Depths’ price flatten a bit, but ultimately I think another reprinting in another venue will be needed.
$3 card with an $11 foil? Seems pretty straightforward. This should attenuate but not entirely inhibit growth. Douglas Johnson cares a lot about this but I don’t expect anyone else to. They didn’t even give it new art.
Wait, Helvault IS in this set? Gross. I was just making a joke earlier about how Vorthos people care about dumb cards like this. You know what? I’m leaving it. I don’t care if it makes me look dumb for reading the list of cards in this set and forgetting I saw Helvault in it and then making a joke about how Helvault wasn’t in it. That’s how little I care about a $0.60 card with a $2 foil that’s getting a printing with a bad foiling process that no one will care about.
$8 card despite an Archenemy printing? $30 foil? Popular EDH General? It’s going to be tough to find a corollary for this to predict what will happen. Even with a whole FTV: Legends to look at, are there any cards around $8 with 2 non-foil printings and 2 foil printings? I guess the best we can do is look at what FTV: Legends did to $8-$10 cards that were growing steadily before the FTV.
Oona was still growing after the FTV printing and it only fell off with its reprinting in Modern Masters. The foil took a hit from Modern Masters, also.
Oona cost roughly the same as Memnarch does now right after her FTV printing and while I don’t have data, I can speculate the numbers were very similar. Modern Masters brough Oona’s price down in a way the FTV didn’t seem to be able to. Oona might have stayed an $8 card with a $30 foil even after FTV if not for Modern Masters, so I think Memnarch’s price will remain relatively stable.
A bulk rare with an 18x multiplier? Have we seen something like that in a previous FTV set? How about Upheaval? Bulk rare, $15 foil, small amount of demand from cube weirdos. What did the FTV do to that price?
It reversed some modest growth on the non-foil (I’m not sure what the growth was predicated on, honestly).
It likely held back a little growth in the foil, though it’s obscured by some shenanigans. Honestly, foil Upheaval is going in cubes and cube players don’t want an ugly FTV foil if they can avoid it. I think Mind’s Desire likely has the same fate, although maybe Mizzix or something goofy like that wants it in EDH? I think Mind’s Desire likely has a similar trajectory as we saw with Upheaval. Mind’s Desire isn’t banned in EDH the way Upheaval is, and that helps, but otherwise the cards are eerily similar.
Momir has new art and all bets are off. If the card sits in your Command Zone the FTV foiling process is less worrying and the new art could see Momir players upgrading.
Momir was seeing very positive trending and his plateau preceded his annoucement in FTV: Lore so I imagine it could reverse itself a bit, although I’m not sure. The new and different art is a bit of a game-changer. Nothing in FTV:Legends quite compares but let’s take a look.
Rafiq more then recovered from its lowest point on our graph, which was months after FTV: Legends came out. The set foil is a bit above where it was also, but not a ton. I feel like the new art may have helped Rafiq out and I predict pretty similar price trajectories for Momir based on what we saw for Rafiq.
Bulk gets bulkier. I want to like this card but can’t, even in a pillowfort deck with Worship.
If I had to guess, the Invasion version is so much more expensive than the 8th edition version is someone guessed people hated white borders and they bought out TCGPlayer and the other dealers updated their prices because they do it with an automatic algorithm instead of a human brain which lets this stuff happen. Whatever the case, this is a $4 card in my view and the FTV won’t change that given how much price shock can be absorbed by a lot of copies floating around and this being the third time they printed the card foil. 8th foils have a black border, also, so any appeal Invasion has over 8th for non-foils is gone. Ultimately, this won’t matter.
This has never been foil before! Too bad no one plays it in anything.
$8 uncommon with a $25 foil. This card is going to be tough to nail down, but if I had to guess, I’d predict price drops for both and the plateau in the price means that demand needs to catch up to supply before the price moves, and additional supply will only put that day off.
If the price dips for Tolaria West the way it did for Dryad Arbor, I think you want to buy in. Arbor isn’t played nearly as much as it used to be and its price is nutty. With Tolaria West able to tutor for 0 cost stuff it will always have a place in the game and barring another reprinting, I think it’s a solid pickup if it drops. For reference, here’s the foil trajectory for Arbor, also.
Demand overall is clearly up, so if Tolaria West’s FTV graph looks like this did at the beginning then tanks, buy at the floor, clearly. Tolaria West is a good card and it’s only getting better as more people find uses for it in Modern.
Jammed in a $12 precon, reprinted as a GP foil, banned in Modern – nothing can hold this card down. I don’t think the ugly FTV foil will hurt this card much and there won’t be a ton of demand for the ugly FTV foils. Could the $240 set foils suffer? They could, a bit. Foil Jitte is out of proportion with non-foil Jitte because the precon copies diluted the number of total copies a bit which explains the multiplier. This is a Legacy and cube and EDH staple and the price will go up over time unless they keep reprinting it. I don’t see this dipping much even in the short term, but if it does, there’s opportunity there.
A $4 card with $30 card seems like the exact profile of a card that an FTV printing won’t do much to. The non-foil can’t go down much more and the foil is clearly demanded by people who will pay extra for a nice foil and don’t care about an ugly FTV foil. I imagine the FTV one ends up almost exactly the same price as the non-foil and that’s all I have to say about that.
Well, that’s all. Come back next week, I guess.
