Readers!

The very second a new commander from Kamigawa: “I’m out of cyberpunk references because I am not that familiar with the genre except the stuff everyone has read like Neuromancer” was spoiled, everyone rushed to buy out a dumb rare from Apocalypse and while that’s cool and also a good thing and also I had a bunch of them but I also sold more as bulk rares 8 years ago.

Older rares are going to pop more, but what is really going on here is that a card will get latched onto by Twitter or reddit and it’s very easy to buy it out because it’s old. That life is stressful to me – you’re competing with a ton of people for a small number of cards and by the time your copies come in, there is no guarantee you didn’t miss the sell window. I’d much rather let people show me what they’re actually playing and decide that way. So what Apocalypse bulk rare am I talking about? Only this guy.

At first it was like

but then it was like

And who is the card that made this card do the thing? Why, General Obi Won Kenobi, of course.

Isshin triggers Fervent Charge twice when he attacks, giving your attacking creatures +4/+4 which sounds amazing if you have literally never played a game of EDH in your life. Seriously, imagine paying $30 for a bad version of Beastmaster Ascension that only works when your commander is out.

I think there are better specs for this deck. Why this deck? Surely it’s not because I’m bent out of shape about Fervent Charge (don’t check to see if I tweeted about it, I absolutely did, and while I should have been finishing this column). Rather, it’s because I decided to check which commander was the most built on EDHREC in the last week. Atraxa? Sythis? Marchea? Nay, it is none of these, it’s a most surprising result.

It would have bee surprising if I hadn’t told you what it was beforehand. You, if you’re like me, likely expected Go Shintai, Tatsunari, Hinata or not Isshin to be #1, but people can’t get enough of this nutty jedi. Let’s look at the not Fervent Charge cards people aren’t going nuts over but maybe should.

Fervent Charge is in the 4th highest percentage of decks, but I like a few of the cards that are in more. Etali will get reprinted again, but Brutal Hordechief? I’m not so sure.

The reprint hurt this badly, but it can absolutely flirt with $5 again. A ton of use in Isshin is important because Mardu cards are hard to slot into decks because they go in Mardu decks and Mardu sucks, or they go in 4 and 5 color decks and 4 and 5 color decks don’t attack with creatures. This isn’t exactly doing a ton in other decks, but this is a high synergy card not a top card.

If you want a high synergy card played elsewhere that’s already on the up-swing, look no further. Basically impossible to reprint because it has meld, this is useful in Legacy, a format that used to exist, as well as some fringe Modern decks. The foil doubled this month, owing to Isshin, so the non-foils will be slower but we have every reason to believe they’re going to go. The wall was just higher – no one building a durdly Mardu combat deck is foiling it out. Not with foil Fervent Charge going for $75.00.

The “not Isshin staples but in a lot of Isshin decks” cards are predictable but there is some food for thought here.

This has spent the last year slowly doubling. I’ve mentioned it in at least 2 articles since then, but if you missed it, I like this card a lot. It’s not fair. If someone cast this against me, I would key their car. Is this easy to reprint? Maybe, but with them printing 10,000 new cards a year, where is the pressure to reprint a $5 card even coming from?

This is the part of the article where I have to divorce my training as a builder from my training as a financier. If you asked me to pick 5 cards that would see a ton of play from Isshin, I would have said Lightmine Field, Crown of Doom, Ilharg the Rage Boar, Grave Titan and Adriana, Captain of the Guard. Those cards are seeing play (except Crown of Doom which isn’t played enough to show up on Isshin’s EDHREC page because no one held the community’s hand and played Crown of Doom on Game Knights). I THINK Lightmine Field is a great pickup, and I’d play it if I built Isshin (I won’t – my current project is using Helm of the Host and Double Major to make non-Legendary copies of Tatsunari’s Frog so I can make lots of copies and endanger everyone’s lives) but no one cares so I have to not care.

What people ARE actually playing is kind of boring compared with the stuff I like to do, but there is money in doing what people are doing. I’ll save reinventing the wheel for my coolstuff column and do boring old finance here, I guess.

Magic players love doggies and kitties, and being a kitty matters 1,000 times more than being good in Isshin matters, but that doesn’t mean being in Isshin doesn’t matter. I get these in bulk sometimes because no one thinks this is worth anything. It is.

Didn’t have this pegged as a massive gainer when it was spoiled but people love to draw cards. Every EDH artifact says “draw a card on it” now but people love this one. We used to play Mind’s Eye for the love of God, I’m grateful for the upgrade and part of why I never bought in was that I expected this to be obsolete by now.

That does it for me this week. I feel very good about these pickups and I urge you to watch Game Knights to find out which terrible bulk rare is going to hit $30, or do what I do and stay out of it. Plenty of meat still on the bone. Until next time!

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Readers!

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, this is an article about specs that I think could come out of people building with the Secret Lair Street Fighter cards. I usually like the have some more copy “above the fold” so to speak but there isn’t much to say here. They made a Secret Lair that has Street Fighter 2 characters and it’s going to be pretty popular and we should get the stuff that goes in the decks now. It’s going to be… I actually don’t know how long until we get our sets in the mail and people will wait until then to build. That said, we don’t have EDHREC data because no one has built yet but, and I don’t think I’m out of line saying this, as someone who has written a column about building EDH decks for 8 years, I think I understand how the format works to an extent and I’d be delighted to make some predictions based on the cards and how they work. I’m going to show each Street Fighter and a couple of cards I like in that deck and call it an article. This is for you, guy who always asks “Did this need to be a whole hour” in the comment section of every Brainstorm Brewery episode. It does NOT need to be an hour.

Zangief is a beast, as you might expect of a guy who wrestles bears. Unfortunately for spec purposes, a creature with Lure on it isn’t super new, but making them sac stuff when you kill a creature they were forced to block with is pretty new and I have some ideas about how I’d build.

This is basically the floor on Augmenter, a card with a very clear corollary.

I don’t think Augmenter hits the dizzying heights Protector got to, nor is Hexproof quite as good as Indestructible, but I think we are still good buying in at $2.

A lot of the other stuff I like for Zangief is uncommon – pull Nemesis Mask and Tempting Licid out of your bulk, I guess? I don’t know, we have spent too much time here.

The big butt Doran decks have a decent amount of tech for this, but Reach tribal is a new one.

This guy seems way too fair to me.

Of the 104 cards that reference Charge Counters, only Coretapper can put them on Guile and only if he’s an Artifact creature at the time. I bet this gets built like a really dumb “attack with creatures” deck. You can’t even combo off by removing a lot of charge counters at once – it’s only when they’re removed the slow, one-at-a-time way. I hate this card. That doesn’t mean one of the most popular Street Fighter 2 characters won’t get played at all.

TCG Market is literally half of what they’re charging on Card Kingdom, this is already a good spec.

Samesies.

Ryu seems really weak and being stuck in Boros is not ideal. That said, if you want a Training-based deck, there are ways to make it OK.

‘member these were $10 and I wondered what was taking so long for it to go up? It went up. It took 2 and a half years, but it got there.

Stacking a lot of counters on him is sort of boring, but the deck is sort of boring, honestly. They don’t all have to be gems, I’m sure someone will build a very good version of this despite my evaluation and I’m sure I am OK with that.

We have a second toughness-based deck. I think this goes in the 99 of Dhalsim, making it potentially a bit more playable but not much.

This card is worse than you think – all of the stuff from the Doran toughness deck like Assault Formation is Green and you can’t play it in a Honda deck. It also doesn’t let creatures with defender, your best big-butt creatures, attack, something a real toughness commander would do. This is just a really bad Arcades with less than 1/3 of the relevant cards. You don’t have to spec on this.

This card is money, but it also lends itself to a really generic goodcombostuff build. That’s fine, but it really makes it tough to narrow down what to speculate on. I also think Chun Li is likely… basically exactly the stock Taigam list.

When this is what the High Synergy section looks like, you know you’re in for a bad time. Dovescape and Seek the Truth are the only remotely synergistic cards and I don’t think they’re as good in Chun Li. Yikes. You’re not on your own, but you’re going to find it’s tough to spec on a card that is just basically “control deck.” The real question is do you play Snap alongside Frantic Search or just Frantic Search? Riveting stuff.

I’ll keep an eye on this because the most popular deck (and this will be) can drive stuff the lesser decks can’t, but I don’t see anything unique to Chun Li online yet and I can’t think of anything. Can you?

Ken is better than Ryu, I guess, but it’s also a Boros Commander and it doesn’t partner with Ryu which is basically the only way I’d play either. Ken is an extra turn spells commander that seems clunky to use until you realize he doesn’t need to hit the opponent, just deal damage. That’s pretty useful and the spell you cast for free may change depending on how they block. I’d build a Sunforger deck, personally, but I write articles rather than make YouTube videos so no one knows any of my opinions.

Other than extra turns cards, it’s all pretty standard stuff. Here is an example list. I don’t see much here, but you might.

Now THIS I can get into. Of the cards in the set, Blanka is the one I have the most potential specs for. “Target yourself tribal” is a mechanic that can give us a ton of cards from the old Infect days, starting with this one.

Lash got so cheap, most sites stopped tracking its price because it was bulk. Even Card Kingdom wants under 50 cents for it. The foils are spicier.

I am so ready for the bottom on this one, which might be now – stock is drying up.

The lack of a blue line means this has never been on a buylist ever. The red Wisps is $5, I’ll let you decide if these are worth pulling out of bulk. Check out Zada’s page for more ideas.

That does it for me, nerds. Thanks for reading and keep your eyes peeled for more Street Fighter tech weeks before the cards sell out. It may be too late for Will Byers (or Deb, yikes) but there is some M Bison money to be had for sure. Until next time!

Readers!

I heard you like data! Well, technically, I heard you heard I like data. Well, technically, I really didn’t hear that. But I heard that I like data, and now you have heard that, too. Data makes my job easier, and while there isn’t a ton of it, there’s enough to start sifting now and keep sifting as decks get added. There are just too many EDH picks for me to track all of them myself, so I’m doing what I typically do and just explaining my thought process so you can decide for yourself. It will be fun, trust me. Let’s look at this set already!

We don’t have decks for every commander, but we have quite a few. I won’t belabor this article with Umezawa picks since he got his own article a while back and nothing there has changed much, but there are some interesting decks being built.

Tatsunari is super interesting because while Grolnok proves there really haven’t been enough Frogs to do a decent Frog tribal deck, a Frog/Enchantmentfall hybrid can work if there is some synergy. The deck looks like fun, and it’s pulling specs out of two different buckets which rules hard. I don’t know if this will stay #2 with the addition of the EDH deck exclusive commanders, but it’s doing well for now.

This is an important aside about EDHREC that I think you will want to not skip over so you can scroll down and see my picks. Some of the Enchantress stuff took a hit, but most of it didn’t. Remember, this first list is the high synergy cards, cards that appear in this deck but not too many other places. I think that the recency of Grolnok decks have obscured how relatively novel Frog-focused cards are. Any Frog tribal card is in Grolnok because there aren’t enough and it needs to play all of them to have an entire deck. Some of the stuff from the High Synergy cards on Grolnok’s page would be here if not for Grolnok, and that’s important to remember. Don’t miss out on checking there.

I don’t love reminding people to pick bulk because it implies I think everyone has bulk, but I wasn’t picking some pretty decent cards that are very much not bulk and should have been. You’ll find Shimmering Wings, Whip Silk, Mourning, Lignify, Oath of the Ancient Wood and some other stuff in bulk. The older stuff likely goes up and stays up – Whip Silk is potentially already a thing and I won’t admit I don’t know why because it will look like I don’t pay attention to pauper (I don’t, but I don’t want you to know that).

Copies of this under $20 basically don’t exist at this point. This would have been an excellent time to reprint this, but I guess they figure since they have Estrid’s Invocation, demand for this is low enough?

It’s not above the fabled 10k mark we all like to pretend is significant, but it gets some play and will get more play as decks from this set are built. This seems like a slam dunk to me, even at a $15 buy-in. Reprint risk seems medium-to-low with cards like this increasingly ending up on The List rather than getting proper reprints.

Blood Funnel is very good here. You sac Keimi to play an Enchantment that has its cost reduced and when that Enchantment resolves, Keimi comes back into play. It is better to sac another creature, but you always have one. This isn’t high synergy but it should be, and at bulk, it’s a 0 risk spec. Stock is pretty low of this, probably because it was bulk and bulk migrates into boxes and binders then spikes hard when the inventory is gone. How much inventory, you ask?

None, that’s how.

Baneful Omen is a slam dunk, imo.

There has never been a better deck for Baneful Omen than Hidetsugu. You didn’t want to be ripping cards off of the top in Yuriko so this card never saw play then. This is a RoE non-mythic which sounds rough, but RoE has some real gems.

If Keening Stone can be $3, so can this. That said, Realms Uncharted crashed back down to $5 so get out fast, imo. A sextuple up is very tasty, and if supply crashes in a chaotic day of trading, you’ll have copies for the people paying $12. I like this.

Supply on this is drying up, and it’s not just Hidetsugu doing it. Remember last time I brought up Draco and said there was a deck in another format using Draco to dome people when they reveal it on top? Remember how I said I’d figure out what deck that was? I didn’t, sorry. Maybe there is no deck. All I know is that there are also no copies of Draco, just about, so go nuts.

These are playable in WAY FEWER decks than Illusionists’ Bracers, I’ll grant you that, but $2 for the extended art version of a card that is similar to one that grows like this deserves a mention.

That does it for me! Next week I’ll be back for more decks and more data. Until next time!