I’m pretty sure this wasn’t me. I’m pretty sure this spiked during Eldrazi Winter when every other card that was ever mentioned in the same card as Eldrazi spiked all gangbusters and people bought everything they could without waiting for decks to put up results. I’ll gladly take credit for this if you made a bunch of money, I guess. OK hang on. Did you buy these at $2 like I suggested when I said these could be like $5 in a few years based on slow, incremental demand from casual and EDH players? Did you sell these at $10? Did you stack mad scrilla and then go to a strip club and make it rain? Did you foil out your Vintage deck based on how much money you made from this card? If so, this was totally me. My articles make cards go from $2 to $10. You should read all of my articles and donate 10% of what you made to the Brainstorm Brewery Patreon.

Did you lose money on Path because you didn’t take my advice when these were $2, pay attention when people played these in Eldrazi decks on MODO and only notice it went up when it was $10 and you bought then not thinking they could go back down to like $4? Are you mad at me? Well, in that case, my articles can’t spike cards out of nowhere, don’t be ridiculous. What? You don’t believe me? OK, let’s get rich.

This is played in decks like Trostani and it’s seen Modern play. Also, some dude burned a big stack of these and then later offered someone like $10 grand in bitcoins to play 4 Seance at a Pro Tour (“It’s pretty obvious it’s you, Jason” – some dipshit on reddit) before disappearing back into the aether. With some unhinged pyromaniac torching copies to reduce overall supply and trying to make this card a thing (it’s stupid with cards like Mulldrifter, yo) this will be $10 in no time. After all, it was in one of my articles. When this hits $10 a copy, I’m selling all of mine, taking my thousands of dollars and quitting writing to focus on manipulating the real stock market.

I’m pretty sure I can warn people about cards that are going to go up on their own, but I’m also pretty sure I can’t make stuff go up for no reason. I’m not Travis Woo.

What was I even talking about last week? Oh yeah, wedges.

Let’s talk about the other three Nephilim, or two if I don’t get to all three, or one if I decide to write like 1,500 words about Dune Brood Nephilim. Whatever. They have spoiled like 2 cards from Eldritch Moon, it’s not like spoiler season for Commander 2016 is breathing down our necks. I mean, maybe. Maybe they’ll just dump all the cards in one day. That would suck. Look, I’m going to tackle the remaining Nephilim and by extension their wedges the same as I did last week and I’m going to just write until I feel like I’m done writing. Deal? Excellent. Did you read my piece from last week? My Descendants’ Path remarks might make more sense if you did. If not, here it is in all of its resplendent glory.  Feast your eyeholes on that, you lucky so-and-so.

Let’s hit it.

Dune-Brood

This one is pretty good but no one seems to be all that interested in doing thangs with this guy. If you look up decks posted by people who lunatic playgroups allow them to run Nephilim as commanders, no one is really jamming Dune-Brood. You know why they should? It’s missing a color and that color isn’t green. This has green in it. That means you can just double all of the tokens all of the time. Speaking of which-

Brief Aside

This card makes Sand creature tokens. Hazezon Tamar makes Sand Warrior tokens. I’m willing to be that if Dune-Brood is in the… Jund deck running Lingering Souls-colored deck, there will be a Sand creature token in it. Hazezon Tamar makes Sand Warriors which are slightly different, but I’d be willing to bet that since they’re both 1/1 creatures, if the one from the Commander 2016 precon looks  cool, Hazezon Tamar players might want them and the small amount of them means a lot are needed to satisfy just one player. I could be wrong, but I am led to believe this could be the case.

I’m not hoarding 50 of these to go in my Prossh deck.

I AM sitting on 50 of these to use in my Prossh deck. Hey, these spiked in late 2013. I wonder if that’s significant.

End Aside

Dune-Brood makes tokens, wants you to have lands in play and wants to deal combat damage to a player to make it all happen. Blue is really useful for that last one, but we have cards like Rogues’ Passage and Whispersilk Cloak. Making the most of our token army is the important part.

If the rest of the deck is concerned with making tokens the way Dune-Brood Nephilim is, there is a non-zero chance this gets a reprint. This is approaching $10 and that’s pretty crazy. I scooped these when they were near bulk and I’m pretty proud of my foresight. I don’t think I even played EDH back then. People thought these might be buoyed by Selesnya in Standard and when that didn’t really happen, I had no trouble snagging these from people. These will get additional upside from a token deck if they’re not reprinted. I mean, Doubling Season, too, but that’s so expensive you won’t make much money and the buy-in is pretty high.

This is pretty reprintable, but I could see this card shrugging off a reprint in a Commander product and approaching $10 again within a year or three. I feel like this could hit $20 in a world where Doubling Season is approaching $50 despite a Modern Masters printing. I used to think I liked this card at $4 but not really at $10 and now I’m starting to think I don’t hate it at $10. It’s very fair compared with Doubling Season and doesn’t scale with Planeswalkers the same, but it’s also in a format where you can run both in most of the decks so the comparison almost doesn’t matter.

This will never be $20 again, but maybe it could be more than it is now. The Duel Deck printing hurts its upside, but this is a stupid finisher in an aggro token deck, and this deck most certainly is that since you trigger the Nephilim by hitting them.

Barring a reprint, this is a $10 card someday and right now I get these as throw-ins on trades. The graph indicates both that player demand is up and that dealer confidence is low. I expect the buylist in 6 months to a year to be what retail is now.

This is such sicko tech. Maybe a little too sicko since this is pretty obscure. Still, how easy will it be to hit them with your Nephilim and all your tokens when you can give them all protection from four colors? I think this is the most perfect card for these new decks and meanwhile, last summer dealers thought paying an entire dime on a bulk rare was too generous. This has upside, but maybe not enough unless a lot more people start reading my articles on Gathering Magic.

I feel like all of my picks are either too obvious or too obscure. I’m not sure how much there is for me to help you with that you couldn’t find on your own/ would matter for this card. Let’s move on to the next Nephilim. The Nextilim if you will.

Ink-Treader

This is the most fun one, for suresies. Sure, the reanimator one is cool, but this is the one that lets you do all kind of nasty stuff like Lightning Helix every creature on the board, draw your deck with Crimson Wisps or just kick a Rite of Replication until everyone decides they want to shuffle up and play another game and just let you win. There are so many stupid interactions with this card that I imagine the real commander will be Riku-esque but with white so that’s awesome. I bet you’re going to just cast all of the spells and sometimes benefit from targeting Ink-Trader and probably Zada when you’re not just doubling, reflecting or boosting spells. This deck will be insane if it’s anything like this nephilim. If we’re going to benefit from this nephilim and creatures like it, there are a lot of cards with upside. Like, a lot.

This is obscure, but in a world where a spell that targets one creature targets all creatures, this gains control of all creatures. That seems fairly strong. At $2 as a Weatherlight rare, this has upside for sure.

You choose targets when you cast which means this will copy for every creature on the board, even if you lose the first flip. This is already moving in the right direction, and a nudge is all this will take to double or triple in a shorter term that it’s already slated to. This is a solid pick provided it interacts with a few creatures in the deck and kills people spectacularly with Nephilim out.

Of all of the threaten effects, this one scales the best with the Nephilim trigger and is a $0.70 foil. I’m not excited about any of the rest, really. This is a better Insurrection, a card you should run on top of this. All red decks should run it, frankly.

I would google Ink-Treader Nephilim decks to see if anything pops out at you. I looked at a lot of lists and it’s more cheap cards like Cerulean Wisps than it is good gems like Debt of Loyalty, but the deck looks like fun and if the commander in the Commander 2016 deck functions at all like the Nephilim does, it will be the most fun deck of the five and you’ll make some money on cards that are auto-includes.

Because I have to, not because I want to –

Witch-Maw

Pros 

• One more way for Primal Vigor to hit
• Encourages you to build Voltron, which can be fun
• Makes cantrips more useful
• The new commander they design could have a prowess-like ability or prowess itself

Cons

• Prowess without red feels lame
• This is boring and removal undoes a lot of work
• We might not get a Legendary Voltron card in the deck
• This is boring

Other than those reservations, if the deck ends up being a sort of prowess-type deck, there are cards with upside for sure.

Despite multiple printings, this card is still a $3 foil with upside. Conspiracy 2 could give us another printing, but I think this card gets played in an all-in deck like this one and you should consider it.

This price is trending in the right direction. How much of a case do you want me to try and make for this card? It says on it what we all want cards in a deck where were place +1/+1 counters to say – “If one or more +1/+1 counters would be placed on a creature you control, twice that many +1/+1 counters are placed on it instead.”  That’s another Doubling Season, bruh. Put this in your deckhole.

I talk a lot about how second spikes tend to spike harder and faster than the first time around. This only needs a little nudge, Modern could give us that nudge which we’d be fine with so we’re in a position to benefit from additional upside exposure and this does work in this deck. Voidslime will, too, but this seems juicier to me for some reason.

This is never going to be cheaper. It will be more expensive in the future but it will never be cheaper than it is right now. This seems fairly obvious. Dealers have a lot of these after the spike, but these should still be in binders. Grab these. This isn’t predicated on Witch-Maw as much as it is reality in general.

I don’t think there is a ton more to say, here.

Obviously when we know more, we can make some more targeted calls, but I think a lot of these picks were cards that had upside already and a little nudge is all they’ll need to get there. Cards predicated specifically on the Nephilim should wait until we see what they do with the new commanders. As always, we’re just speculating somewhat baselessly, but if we use a logical approach and identify some cards early, we can buy while everyone else is scrambling to figure out what to play with the new cards. It’s about being proactive, not reactive, and that’s why we’re talking about these interactions before the set comes out, not after.

That’s all for this week. Buy Seance.

Go read my article from last week if you haven’t already. I’ll wait.

Also, what manner of lunatic are you? I realize that we’re getting new readers all the time, I guess, but what are the odds that the very first article of mine you’d ever read is the second part of a two-parter unless you’re wearing your underpants on your head right now. If you read it last week and could use a refresher, I linked it above. I couldn’t make it easier for you. Actually, yes I could – I’m linking it again so you don’t even have to move your mouse up. I’m assuming you read by dragging your cursor along so you know which word to read next. I mean, not YOU, you’re cool. But someone reading this. Probably.

Why is it so important to re-familiarize yourself with the piece from last week? Well, it wasn’t the cleanest of breaks, frankly. Sometimes when I do a multi-part series, I have a plan going in. Maybe an outline written on paper, telling me which points to make in which sections. Maybe colored tabs for organization. Other times I start writing and eventually I figure out the topic I want to write about only sometimes I run out of space and I hit my word count without necessarily making all of the points I wanted to make. I talked about having two theses last week and I feel like I covered the first thesis pretty well. Pretty well. I don’t think that anymore, though. The benefit of reading your comments and tweets and the intervening week has made me realize I have basically two choices at this point.

What happnened was I discussed my first thesis – people will build new 4-color decks. That’s a good thesis. Come on, I can say that. That’s no like an ego thing – that’s a legitimately good thesis because like all good theses, it’s built upon a very obvious point. Of course people will do that. The second thesis, if you couldn’t guess, is that people will use the sweet new 4-color goodies and build 5-color decks. The second thesis was likely to take an entire article because I wanted to talk about all of the ways people were going to cheat stuff into play with five-color decks. Are you starting to see the problem?

I left a bunch of stuff out of the last article. Some of that was for obvious reasons – it wasn’t appropriate for the first thesis but was for the second. Why write about Fist of Suns last week when it can’t go in a four-color deck? Also, I plan to write about Fist of Suns later so when I do, act surprised. Seriously. I’ll know if you don’t. What, are you too good for a little whimsy in your life? If I can act surprised after getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the new Star Wars movie and overhearing some dude in a nacho cheese-stained homemade Jedi robe talking about how Han Solo “HAD TO be the one who got killed” and then go back to my seat to watch the rest of the movie with a pretty huge plot twist spoiled for me, you can act surprised when I talk about Fist of Suns later. And if I just spoiled Star Wars for you, that movie came out 6 months ago, what were you waiting for? For George Lucas to release a special edition where Han shoots at Kylo Ren first? Act surprised when you see the movie you were clearly dying to see because that’s how it happened to me.

So basically I feel like I needed an article-and-a-half for the first thesis and like, half an article for the second one.  Basically, how about we just mention the second thesis and then just talk about all of the cards I think could have upside, including stuff that could go in a five-color deck first and then just gradually listing stuff that could easily have gone in last week’s article if I’d had room? Just kidding, I’m going to do it anyway because this is my article.

Thesis the Second – Fist of Suns

People are going to use good four-color spells and creatures and mana fixing and they’re going to build five-color decks with them. And why not? They can mix and match the new decks and use any card from any of them. Now, could they have done that before, like when Commander 2014 came out? Could they have added a Scrap Mastery and a Containment Priest and a Cyclonic Rift and a Song of the Dryads and a  the black deck was terrible? Sure, but when there is an actual impetus to do something like I feel like Commander 2016 is going to present, people will do it to a much larger extent and that’s important going forward. I think with new mana fixing possible, new spells that are going to be powerful because how else do you justify making them so hard to cast and as many as 15 new four-color legendary creatures, any one of whom could pair very nicely with a commander like Child of Alara or Progenitus, we’re bound to see new 5-color decks in a big way. There are a lot of cards that specifically pair with 5-color decks but not 4-color ones.

Remember this card? No, not from earlier in the article, I mean from 2014. Remember Travis Woo put this in a terrible deck and then someone on coverage said “OMG SOMEWUN IZ 5-0 with teh best deck everz” despite that person having 3 byes and then every dipshit PTQ grinder bought a playset and then those same people complained about how speculators are ruining Magic when the price went up? Remember that? This card is good enough to cheat Emrakul into play in Modern, it’s good enough to cheat… well, not Emrakul, but something either big or hard to cast in EDH out. If you’re playing 5 colors and you have anything big or hard to cast, this is your guy.

Since we had an initial spike, the copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers. We always talk about how second spikes are harder. If this gets any additional play, people are going to have to buy at retail because their LGS and friends’ binders are stripped because this card flirted with $20 briefly. Always pay extra attention to cards that spiked once already. Extra attention is going to drive his up sharply.

Fist pairs nicely with this other card.

This card doesn’t cheat per se but I did run a playset of these back in the day in a mono-black deck that ran four copies of Last Stand. That was a fun deck. I found that deck and its 4 copies of Crystal Quarry and four copies of Cabal Coffers in an old deckbox at my parents’ house not too long ago. Finance genius.

This card is pretty flat so I feel like more 5-color decks could give it a boost. At the very least it’s worth knowing about. I feel like this gets reprinted if they do a 5-color EDH deck, but we’ll know about that before we know what’s in it, giving us time to sell if we need to. I like this as a pickup.

This is a nice, steady gainer and has real upside long-term. The reprint prospects are fairly limited and that is perhaps the best thing this has going for it. Cascade is a very good way to cheat, especially with a passive trigger that will let you benefit from every spell you play. Notice it says “Each Turn” meaning you can really get a lot of advantage the more players are at the table. This is a high buy-in but this could easily be a $20 card with a little more adoption and this is likely to get just that.

This is a little easier to reprint than Maelstrom Nexus but, don’t worry, they didn’t do it in FTV Angels. This has upside from being an Angel and from being a sweet 5-color deck card that lets you cheat your ass off when you hit them with it. This would be more expensive if it were legendary, but we can’t always get what we want. This has plateaued so it’s unlikely to move in the next 12 months without some help, but I feel like this only needs a little nudge to get moving. If you think you’re going to build 5 colors, you want this.

I feel like this is the first half of a U-shaped graph that will cause some people to say in a few years “When was that ever $1?” Well, it’s $1 right now and it’s likely to be more, later. This card is good in multiple formats and when it’s gone from Standard, I think it has some upside. It’s certainly very good in decks that are four or five colors and that’s kind of the point of the article. Get these as throw-ins to shore up trades and make a big stack in a box, forget about them and then be glad later. Turn a pile of other bulk rares that won’t go up later into these on PucaTrade. Burn a big pile of them. All are legitimate strategies.

Do you see what I mean about there not really being enough 5-color-specific cards to really necessitate its own article? I can go back over the stuff that works in either four or five-color decks that I missed and which bears discussing.

Thesis the Third – There Are Cards I Missed Last Week

Every now and then I get a little bit worried that the price is going down. Every now and then I get a little bit tired of losing to this in EDH games. Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of this card’s years have gone by. Every now and then I get a little bit terrified when I look at this card’s declining price.  I think it will turn around. There’s nothing I can do – I like Defense of the Heart.

Someone (And in under 5 minutes I could get on twitter and scroll back a few days and check but I’m not super inclined, sorry, whoever!) asked about this card on Twitter. I think it’s really cheap for what it does, but I also think that if you’re going to devote a whole card to this effect, it should do more. How many multicolored cards have that much colorless in them that this feels like cheating? It certainly helps us ramp a bit, or buys us one free trip out of the Command Zone, I guess. Four-color decks could use this, theoretically, but five color decks could have all along and aren’t. I never thought this would be cheaper than cards like Tsabo’s Web or Teferi’s Response (Sold out on SCG) but that’s the world we live in.

It’s goofy to see this card on the decline. This was considered a staple at the advent of EDH and its popularity is seriously waning. I think there’s decent risk of a reprint in Commander 2016 but I think more people focusing on multicolored decks that have hard-to-cast creatures should give this a second look. This reminds me of Duplicant in that its usage has really waned compared with how ubiquitous it was at the beginning of EDH as a format, and the recent Duplicant reprinting shows that WotC may be printing based on an outdated paradigm (Duplicant shows up in only 3,000 decks on EDHREC despite being colorless removal and a body) which means they could reprint Arch in a precon. I’m calling this high reprint risk, but so few people seem to care that I doubt the price spikes if they announce the lists and it’s not in it. Risk seems moderate but with a lower upside, moderate may be too much for me. It’s certainly very good, though, so its decline is a bit puzzling. 5 new 4-color decks could be the paradigm shift this needs.

Legacy was big on this plus Conflux for a hot minute. Remember what I said about watching for a second spike? This could certainly get a second spike based on how good it is in multicolored decks and cheating in those decks. It’s underplayed in EDH but I feel like stupider cards from the same era having hit $20 with basically way less justification. A little nudge makes this $20 practically overnight. It’s a highish buy-in but the spread is so low that it makes me think dealers are waiting for something to happen here, too. In fact, outside of when it was spiking, the spread has never been lower. Watch this card for sure.

Are there more cards? Certainly. If we don’t start to get spoilers soon, I may have to dig a little deeper but then we risk hitting cards that see even less play and therefore have even less potential upside. I have a decent amount of confidence in a lot of these cards unless I said otherwise so these were the ones I deemed worth exploring. Got any other ideas? Hit me up in the comments or on Twitter. I may even remember your name (sorry again) if you do. Until next week, where I’ll be discussing a different thing or maybe not or maybe we’ll have previews. Give me something. A conspiracy spoiler, something from a duel deck, anything. I’m getting antsy in my pantsy. On that note, I bid you all a fond farewell.