Readers!
I would have liked to have talked about Orvar before stupid junk like this happened, but there was a lot going on over at EDHREC.
Don’t let the prices fool you – Whim is sold out everywhere, even when relisted at $8 or $9. It was a bulk rare last week, but Orvar, the All-Form made it pop off. Did we miss the opportunity to pick these up cheap? Sure, but we shouldn’t look at it as if we lost money. We missed an opportunity to get some money, but as always, the less obvious stuff in a deck like this takes longer to get scooped up and gives us ample time to plan our moves. So why didn’t I write about Orvar beforevar? Simply put, there were some doings happening at EDHREC.
Pardon Our Dust
EDHREC got a UI facelift and I think it will work even better as an analytical tool. Nothing we used before is gone but there are some new features that I’m sure I’ll go into at length in future articles. Focusing on launching a lot of new features sapped a lot of the site’s mental bandwidth and the scrapers weren’t working optimally for about a week. That’s normally not a huge deal, but during that week, we weren’t getting updates about how much Orvar was being played. Now that it’s fixed, we know.
It’s played a lot.
Sometimes people tell me that I make these pictures too wide so that the individual cards are too hard to read. You don’t need to read the individual cards, readers. I’ll zoom in if that needs to happen. What I want you to see is where Orvar is.
It’s the 5th-most-built deck in the set, right after Toski and right before Fynn (the poison guy). Orvar is popular and since that’s the case, the Whim of Volrath spike matters even less because if the deck has legs, there are other cards people missed. I found ’em.
Check out the Orvar page. A video should automatically play that tells you about the new features, and it’s worth learning about what they are. Once it’s done, you’ll see that Orvar is sort of boring. A lot of the cards are going in every single build, which bores me as an EDH player but makes me feel better about my investments as a financier. Usually when one part of my job makes me unhappy, the other half makes me happy to compensate. The money I made finding Necrogen Mists at an LGS for $2 makes me feel better about how stupid a deck Tergrid is and how much I hate that they made it. Let’s look at the obvious cards in a linear deck and marvel at how they’re still cheap.
Literally 24 hours ago, Card Kingdom had a bunch of copies, and they were cheaper than TCG Player. When a price is “wrong” like that, as we discussed last week, it’s worth noting. The “cheap” CK copies are gone, but TCG Player is still reasonable, and other sites haven’t quite figured out that this is in as many decks as Whim of Volrath and is just as reusable give its retrace ability. I don’t expect this to stay under $5 for long, and it probably goes higher.
Scepter bottoms out from reprintings, but always manages to rebound strong. This deck, in particular, makes use of a lot of cheap cantrips that have a lot of impact with Orvar out. Anything you imprint on Scepter is good in this deck, meaning there’s no reason not to run it because you don’t have to build around it. It’s always good, and with its price at a 7-year-low, it’s time to get serious about the scepter.
Can someone who knows about foils tell me if this is a good buy at $30? It seems like it is to me. I don’t love foils, as we all know, but this is a rare promo with unique art and the card is going to be played more than usual soon. With Scepter getting a lot of reprints in sets that have foils with its classic art, this is the better foil – I don’t care for the FTV one bit. If you like FTV foils, though, here’s that graph.
$13 for a foil that has flirted with $30 in the recent past. If you buy the premise that Scepter can see more play on the back of decks like Orvar, this seems like it has a lot of potential. It likely never gets cheaper than it is now.
This was on a rocket to the moon already, but in case you weren’t sure if the literal Sakashima deck was enough to help this recover from its Mystery Booster crater, here’s another deck that can’t get enough copies.
Tidespout stock is incredibly low everywhere. This is about to hit a tipping point and you’ll want to have some copies in hand when it does.
The copies from Battlebond are good, too. If I had one card I could buy this week, and I couldn’t find cheap copies of Glamerdye (my Pick of the Week last night) I really like Tidespout Tyrant. There are a lot of cards you can copy with Orvar, and a lot of them are either bulk rares like Scourge of Fleets or already the correct price like Torrential Gearhulk (unless you think it’s on its way up, in which case call it a bonus pick) but Tidespout is about to sell out and it’s nutterbutters in this deck.
When everyone decides there is exactly one way to build a deck, and it’s a popular deck, I have to push past the revulsion I feel as a self-proclaimed steward of the format and make myself feel better by stacking cabbage. Join me in buying obvious cards before they’re obvious to everyone else. Glamerdye is the exact same spec as Whim of Volrath, but one was obvious and easy to buy out and one wasn’t, so let’s do what we always do and make some money. That does it for me, until next time!