Readers!

As Obeka begins to wane (though not out of the top spot), naturally something else must wax for the balance to be maintained (I don’t know what the balance is, forget I even said that, stupid STUPID, focus Jason) and today what the waxer is became clear. It’s someone who clearly knows a lot about waxing.

Look at this smooth-chested, Glenn Danzig-looking rejected Manowar album cover. If you’re not impressed by the time he spends every morning, shaving the part of his body not covered by his leather karate gi, you’ll be impressed by how he’s climbing the leader board.

Shoving decks aside like he’s actually Glenn Danzig and the other decks are a fan who wants an autograph, Jared is making a big splash in the format, and a few (viking, on fire) ships have sailed already on the basis of this cartoonish 80s throwback of a Magic card. I’m sorry, I know you want me to get to the specs part of the article, but read his flavor text. “I’m here for what’s mine” like he’s Glenn Danzig in the promoter’s office asking for his check before the last note from “Long Way Back From Hell” has finished reverberating in the speakers onstage. Man, I do NOT like Danzig, apparently.

Unlike Danzig who coasted on the success of the Misfits (last one, promise), Jared Carthalion is out here doing real work.

Jared doubled the price on this card just like Glenn Danzig doubles as a poor man’s Henry Rollins. Don’t expect to get these for under a 10-spot on CFB, either, folks.

So with the “Carthalion effect” (that would be a sweet name for a band) moving prices, why are we even bothering to dig through at this point? Hasn’t every ship sailed? Hasn’t ever boat been launched? Hasn’t every mother told her children not to hear Danzig’s words by now?

I don’t think so, I think there’s still plenty of meat on the bone. I think Jared is the Nikya to Obeka’s Vannifar and since it’s a non-obvious commander, I think there are some non-obvious specs. Pariah’s Shield was some low-hanging fruit but I think there is more fruit, higher up, but I’m mixing my metaphors now. Let’s do the spec part of the article now.

The Fruit Still On The Bone

I like this for a lot of reasons. I spiked hard because of a deck in Modern with Hardened Scales and while that wasn’t sustainable, we have a second spike incoming. When a second spike happens, there is no more opportunity for people to pull loose copies out of the binders at the LGS because those all evaporated the first time the card spiked. Copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers, meaning players have to pay whatever those dealers want for the copies. When that supply sells out, there is no way to get more supply in the hands of dealers without them raising the buylist price, so they do that. That’s how we get back out of them, usually. It’s a fun cycle of people paying each other to hold onto copies of cards.

Are we close to the card selling out?

With Card Kingdom out of NM copies and about to sell out of damaged and Coolstuff (where we have about 8 people who write about EDH every week) and CFB being sold out means that the card is about to pop. It’s not just Jared, by the way.

Neyith was printed this year and Marath was just reprinted in etched foil in Commander Legends. That’s quite a bit of interest just this year and the finite copies that were in the hands of dealers who probably paid like $2 to get these when they were selling for $5 are running out. With lots of people vying for the copies at once, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jared finish what Neyith started. If people could actually get Jumpstart to build decks with it, Neyith might have been even more popular. Oh well, still plenty of fruit on the bone. Let’s move on.

This keeps flirting with $14 on Card Kingdom and when it goes back down, it never stays there for long. This is tough to reprint and does a lot of work. It also just wins the game, which is cool. I am looking forward to CFB figuring out whatever is wrong with their Crystal Commerce page – this is not $6 on CFB.

This is about to sell out at $11. If you find these for… you know, not $11, that’s a deal. Card Kingdom has 8 of these at $11, and the other number we care about doesn’t suck, either.

The non-foil caught up to the foil. I don’t think that makes the foil more attractive, but I do think it shows that this is a card that casual players like and which may have underpriced foils in the future. I don’t like EDH foils, you all know that, but once they become the same price, the foil looks better and those have a higher ceiling.

I don’t think Jared has enough juice to move the needle on a card like Pariah with 4 printings (it was also in a Saga precon that I bought a bunch of because there wasn’t a better way to get copies of Worship when you don’t have a credit card). That said, there is a tiiiny bit of movement in the price that is outside the typical noise, so it’s trending up, for what it’s worth. 4 printings means less when those sets are Saga, 7th, 10th and Conspiracy. It was basically printed in Conspiracy. I don’t love this, but they exist. It’s also a 7th Edition foil, which probably will see a bump just because it’s due one.

I like Bear Umbra a lot. We saw a nice dip and we’re starting to see the very beginning of that reverse-J shape that is the start of a nice U shape. I think this goes above $10 pretty easily and I could see CK going from selling for $7 to buying at $7 within a year.

Whenever a card costs more on TCG Player than it does on Card Kingdom, I investigate.

Well, THAT is good to know. I wouldn’t have thought to check every card to see if they’re all in-stock, but I was alerted by the TCG Player price being higher. That’s a big red flag to me. Sometimes it’s legit, but with Card Kingdom being an established Seattle store that charges more but has a super generous buylist and which, to my mind, is the flagship EDH price site, CK can usually get away with charging more than a marketplace like TCG Player. When CK is cheaper, I take 2 seconds and check. Card Kingdom sells a lot of EDH cards, if they’re sold out of all conditions, TCG Player could be the next domino to fall. We’re about to see some movement. It won’t go to $10, but it could go to $5.

That does it for me this week. Next week we may be out of commanders to talk about and with there being a lull between now and Kaldheim, I might write a treatise on why I trust Card Kingdom so much. Until then, stay safe and don’t build anything I wouldn’t build. Until next time!

Readers!

We have gotten our system mostly down to a science by now. New commanders come out and as the data trickles in, we start to see trends in what people are playing and anticipate their needs accordingly. EDHREC data is easy enough to parse for the most part. Hopefully we have enough of a grip on what to do that when we’re thrown a curveball, we can adapt. Why do I bring that up? Were we thrown a curveball? INDEED WE WERE.

*I don’t know if I mentioned it here yet, but ignore Negan. When EDHREC set up the scraper for the Secret Lair stuff, it associated all of the Secret Lair cards with their existing versions. The problem was, the Walking Dead stuff didn’t have existing versions and the cards got shunted into a subfolder. All of the data was collected and catalogued but there was no pathway for that data to make it to the front page. There were 77 Negan decks made so far on all 5 websites EDHREC scrapes total between today and when they were previewed. With demand that low, we didn’t notice that the data wasn’t showing up because we assumed it was under our minimum threshold. The decks aren’t that popular, so it’s safe to ignore them for finance purposes.*

What you’re meant to notice is Sakashima jumping up from “not in the running” to 2nd place and Obeka falling to third. This is news, and it presented some interesting challenges to us from a data parsing perspective. That is to say, what will we see when we click on that Sakashima card image and go to a webpage?

Something is wrong here. Do you see what it is yet?

How about now?

It took me a second for it to register, also. That’s namely because nothing looks wrong because nothing IS wrong, exactly. Something IS missing, though. The other half of the deck, basically. Sure, there are some people running Sakashima as a solo commander, but not too many. There’s also no real way to figure out which is which without tracking down individual decks. I am not going to do that and that’s because I don’t think that matters. Here’s why.

Remember the exercise we did last week where we used the list comparison tool to try and glean cards that were played in multiple decks? The cards that were only in one of the two or three decks seemed like they’d be less impactful than the ones played across all of the decks so we focused on the common ones because they seemed to have more demand and more chances for a deck they were in to really pop off. It was sound logic and I stand by it. Might I suggest we apply the same logic here? If Sakashima as a partner is that popular, it doesn’t matter if it’s played as a solo deck or partnered with Kydele or Krark (Sakashima is paired with Krark a lot – more on that in a minute) or whomever. Is there a difference between Sakashima as a solo commander and Sakashima paired with Vial Smasher for the purposes of figuring out Sakashima staples? No, not really. If the data were organized differently, we would do the work of putting all of it in our comparison tool to see which cards were common across Sakashima solo, Sakashima/Tymna, Sakashima/Krark ad nauseam anyway, right? The way this data is presented, that work is done for us. We’re seeing that list.

Looking at the cards that are common whenever Sakashima is in the command zone of a deck, we’ll see the cards that are common across all decks built with the most popular partner commander. What looked like it might be a problematic, incomplete data-set is actually a pre-sorted set ready for our consumption.

That being the case, what’s good across all types of Sakashima deck?

The first thing I noticed was “Wow, this card went up like 2 weeks after I bought like 20 of them to play with but didn’t say anything to anyone about it.” The second thing I noticed was that it cost more on TCG than on Card Kingdom. That’s a red flag. Let’s investigate.

Ok, that checks out…

This is partially something both Zareth San and Anowon got started. Thada being a Rogue and a Merfolk was relevant and then it turned out that it’s a very good card everyone slept on despite me mentioning it twice a month on Coolstuff (I know you don’t read those articles, it’s cool). Thada is $9 NM on TCG Player. Those played copies getting mopped up moves the average and then it’s a $10+ card on its way up. $9 is high, certainly, but it’s not done.

Channel Fireball sold out of these so quickly, our scraper hasn’t had time to adjust. They have one $8 copy left. This was $6 a year ago, expecting it to be any less than $10 right now is folly. I recommend mopping up anything NM under $9 on smaller sites before anyone messes with TCG Player stock since that’s the one site people notice when something sells out. This is a $15 card that’s going to be tough to reprint, it’s about time we acted like it.

These are legit a buck in Europe*.

Arbitrage opportunities are rarely as pronounced as this. Europe has a real disdain for EDH that results in ridiculous price discrepancies like this, so when people complain about Americans “invading” their market, remind them they could just… you know, start caring about EDH and then all of their cards would be worth money, not just the 30 that are good in Modern. If you live in Europe, buy these and send them to me, I have 4 Omnath decks and at least 2 of them want to run a copy of this.

*As many of you have mentioned, it is $1 for Italian copies but English copies have already climbed to nearly $6. In order to properly arbitrage, you’ll need to exchange these for an English copy currently in use and sell the English one. That’s fine for someone like me who will play with any language in EDH because I have way too many decks to care, but doesn’t scale well enough to be considered advice. MKM is getting more and more efficient at matching the US market on cards used in EDH so you’ll need to be more nimble at buying than I was at advising this time.

“The Year Of Commander” spit out about 900 new cards that are competing with this for a very finite number of reprint spots. This keeps flirting with $12 on Card Kingdom, something giving it a shot of hard, sustained usage would keep the price from cycling and make Card Kingdom raise their buylist price. If this hits $15 on Card Kingdom, paying $8 on TCG Player looks pretty attractive. This is 4 years old and hard to reprint and I think it can, bare minimum, hit $12 on CK again.

One more thing – you can click on the list of partners to get an expanded view and see what Sakashima is most often paired with. Clicking on any of these cards will take you to the combined partner page where you can see the cards in decks with both commanders.

Damn, I kind of want to build a Krarkashima deck now. Check out the page, it looks sweet. Storm shenanigans all day. Make as many copies of Krark as you can and then flip like 4 coins to dome someone for 12 with a Lightning Bolt. Brilliant! If you already have a Zndrsplt/Okaun deck, it’s now way better.

I didn’t see anything specific to any of the partner decks that wasn’t just generic goodstuff, but you’re free to peruse each list at your leisure. You’re smart people, you have excellent tastes in columns after all. There is one card I want to discuss before I forget, though.

Your homework for this week is to think about how many copies of a Saviors of Kamigawa rare there are in existence. Applying the amount of demand for this effect to that number of cards gave us a peak price of $45. Think about how many copies, reaslistically, Mystery Booster introduced to the market. Think about the number “$45” and think about how the demand is actually higher now. Do you like these at $12? Write why or why not in the comments section.

That does it for me this week! I’ll be back next week with more surprises, more thrills and chills and more Eurobitrageortunities as I call them. If your delicate frame can sustain that much value, meet me here in a week. Until then, happy brewing! Until next time.

Readers,

I have talked a lot in the past about how cards that are spread over multiple new decks are more attractive picks to me than “obvious” cards in just one deck. Sure, Final Fortune spiking to $20 makes headlines when the MTG Stocks twitter account posts it for everyone to see, but the stuff that spikes slower attenuates more slowly, also. I have made it clear that I don’t feel bad when we miss “obvious” cards because obvious cards are sometimes wrong despite being obvious. I hate to keep harping on my “Vannifar or Teysa” comparison but it’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in evaluating cards when they’re spoiled and you can read all about those lessons here and in a few other articles you could probably find by googling my name. The takeaway is that no one expected Teysa to be the most popular commander in a set with Vannifar spiking cards from Intruder Alarm to Thornbite Staff, but here we are, almost 2 years later and Vannifar was a dud and Teysa is the 12th-most-built deck in the last 2 years. Could some Vannifar specs have had a better chance of paying off if they had multiple decks they belonged to? Let’s test our hypothesis, shall we?

I use a multiple list comparison tool to quickly input the average decks from EDHREC and see which cards overlap. It’s quick and dirty but it helps us sift through a lot of noise very fast and uncover some cards that aren’t as sexy but which will not fall off a cliff when no one actually builds the deck. Obeka is top dog right now, but is it another Vannifar? What if we had cards both Vannifar and Teysa played – you don’t have to pick a winner at that point, you can just buy cards both decks need. Wouldn’t that be something?

Does it matter if Obeka or Araumi is the winner here? I don’t think so – I contend there are cards common between the lists and that not all of them are UB staples. Let’s prove it with a very quick and easy test that you can do yourself whenever you feel like it.

I don’t feel like finding the article where I showed you how I do this so I’ll show you again.

On a commander’s page, there is a place to select the average deck for that commander. It’s not all-inclusive, it’s an average, but the odds aren’t great you’ll miss something because it’s simultaneously played enough to go up in price but little enough not to make the average list. This isn’t perfect but we don’t need perfect, we just want some ideas.

Drop the list in the comparison tool.

Do the same for the other commander you want to compare it to. Click the big plus sign if you want to add a 3rd or 4th commander to compare.

We have 25 overlapping cards. Obviously a lot will be land, mana rocks and other deck staples, but we only need 1 or 2 hits.

1 Araumi of the Dead Tide 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Arcane Signet 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Buried Alive 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Command Tower 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Counterspell 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Cyclonic Rift 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Dimir Signet 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Drowned Catacomb 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Fact or Fiction 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Feed the Swarm 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Frantic Search 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Hullbreacher 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Lightning Greaves 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Morphic Pool 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Rakshasa Debaser 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Rhystic Study 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Sol Ring 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Solemn Simulacrum 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Sundial of the Infinite 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Swan Song 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Talisman of Dominance 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Toxic Deluge 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Underground River 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Watery Grave 2 Araumi, Obeka
1 Windfall 2 Araumi, Obeka

BINGO. Do You see it?

We discussed sunnyboi already when we talked about how it was a little redundancy insurance in Obeka but it turns out Araumi likes the idea of keeping those encore tokens around for repeat performances. Sundial has two printings and the price was deflated more than I think was necessary due to a supply of Mystery Boosters that was smaller than people realize. Sundial is a $5-$7 card waiting to happen on the basis of being used in both of the two most popular Commander Legends decks and if you didn’t buy them when I wrote my Obeka article, it’s not too late. Imagine if Vannifar and Teysa both played the same card – except you don’t have to imagine it, it’s real and the card is quite good and quite underpriced. As soon as this sells out on Card Kingdom the next price won’t be below $5, I’m sure of it.

Let’s do some more decks, shall we?

Yarlok and Jared are #3 and #4 respectively, which doesn’t make them Vannifar and Teysa, but it does make them Nikya and whatever is 4th place in that set, I’m not looking it up. Lavinia?

1 Arcane Signet 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Beast Within 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Birds of Paradise 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Blasphemous Act 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Cinder Glade 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Command Tower 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Cultivate 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Eternal Witness 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Exotic Orchard 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Farseek 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Heroic Intervention 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Kodama’s Reach 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Lightning Greaves 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Rampant Growth 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Rootbound Crag 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Sol Ring 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Spire Garden 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Stomping Ground 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Swiftfoot Boots 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Three Visits 2 Yarlok, Jared
1 Wooded Foothills 2 Yarlok, Jared

This IS at its floor, how interesting. Like I said, we’re not going to get a ton of hits – there will be 20 cards that overlap if the decks share at least 2 colors and a lot of those will be lands and mana rocks. However, you’ll also likely get a hit or two.

It’s so quick and easy to do this, you can pick any two commanders that share a couple of colors or at least have tangentially-related strategies. Remember, commanders in this set will overlap an co operate a bit more than in an average set because they were designed to be played in Limited. Blim can go in a Ghen deck. This set has partner commanders that can be used in any combination. This is the set to plug in two wacky decks, hit compare…

1 Arcane Signet 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Blasphemous Act 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Blood Crypt 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Captive Audience 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Command Tower 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Court of Ambition 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Court of Ire 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Curse of Opulence 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Demonic Lore 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Demonic Pact 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Dragonskull Summit 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Luxury Suite 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Rakdos Signet 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Sol Ring 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Talisman of Indulgence 2 Ghen, Blim
1 Treacherous Blessing 2 Ghen, Blim

…and see what happens. Predictably, we got some hits.

Good ones.

This flirted with $10 when it was in Standard and while it’s going to take some work to get there again, 2 decks that make use of pernicious Enchantments like this – Ghen to draw the cards then bin the Pact before it bites and Blim to give it away while cackling like an idiot, help out a ton.

Do we love bulk foils? Probably not. I think Collector Boosters have completely murdered set foils and that’s another article for another day. I don’t like any recent set foils, but it only took a few seconds to pull up the graph so why not just do it?

This is only going to get you non-partner commanders. Partner commanders are a much trickier situation to parse, but with some work you can figure it out.

1 Amphin Mutineer 2 Zara, dargo
1 Arcane Signet 2 Zara, dargo
1 Azure Fleet Admiral 2 Zara, dargo
1 Blasphemous Act 2 Zara, dargo
1 Brainstorm 2 Zara, dargo
1 Breeches 2 Zara, dargo
1 Captain Lannery Storm 2 Zara, dargo
1 Captain Vargus Wrath 2 Zara, dargo
1 Captivating Crew 2 Zara, dargo
1 Cascade Bluffs 2 Zara, dargo
1 Chaos Warp 2 Zara, dargo
1 Coastal Piracy 2 Zara, dargo
1 Coercive Recruiter 2 Zara, dargo
1 Command Tower 2 Zara, dargo
1 Corsair Captain 2 Zara, dargo
1 Counterspell 2 Zara, dargo
1 Cyclonic Rift 2 Zara, dargo
1 Dockside Extortionist 2 Zara, dargo
1 Evolving Wilds 2 Zara, dargo
1 Hullbreacher 2 Zara, dargo
1 Impulsive Pilferer 2 Zara, dargo
1 Izzet Signet 2 Zara, dargo
1 Merchant Raiders 2 Zara, dargo
1 Myriad Landscape 2 Zara, dargo
1 Pongify 2 Zara, dargo
1 Port Razer 2 Zara, dargo
1 Protean Raider 2 Zara, dargo
1 Reconnaissance Mission 2 Zara, dargo
1 Shivan Reef 2 Zara, dargo
1 Sol Ring 2 Zara, dargo
1 Spell Swindle 2 Zara, dargo
1 Spirebluff Canal 2 Zara, dargo
1 Steam Vents 2 Zara, dargo
1 Storm the Vault 2 Zara, dargo
1 Sulfur Falls 2 Zara, dargo
1 Swiftfoot Boots 2 Zara, dargo
1 Talisman of Creativity 2 Zara, dargo
1 Temple of Epiphany 2 Zara, dargo
1 Training Center 2 Zara, dargo
Brazen Plunderer 2 Zara, dargo
Keen-Eyed Navigator 2 Zara, dargo

Sometimes you get hits, sometimes you get a lot of noise an no signal. The important thing to remember is that you will spend a half hour at this and find 10 potential specs and it’s some of the best time you can spend scouring a set. Don’t try and figure out the whole format, let a few simple techniques maximize the time you spend.

That does it for me this week, everyone. Thanks for reading and thanks for the good discussions we’ve been having in the Pro Trader Discord channel. Until next time!

I publicly judge Magic cards on their ability to drive prices. If they can start cheap and get more expensive later, and if my expertise allows me to see that before other people, cool, I guess. But if they drive a bunch of other prices, even better. Publicly, that’s what I’m all about. Silently and internally, I judge Magic cards by how stupid their names are. Cards like Vorel of the Hull Clade sound like someone put a bunch of words through google translate. Is a hull a thing? Yeah, and so is a clade. Do those words in that order sound like Ra’s al Ghul got his Babel machine working and pointed it right at WotC headquarters? Also yes.

Here’s another name that sounds like complete word salad.

This is not fun to say and I don’t know why they name Magic cards like this. Is the card fun in all the ways that count? Yes, and now it’s time to count those ways.

It is not important that you be able to see exactly what is going on in this picture. In fact, let’s focus a bit more.

Here are the top 3 decks this week. Yes, there are more Araumi decks than Yurlok. I think the financial opportunities are a lot like the tide – dead. I think there is more unexplored territory in the Yurlok deck and I’m going to focus on it. You’re free to scour Araumi yourself but I think there is more set to pop that hasn’t yet in Yurlok and it’s my article so get off my back already and let me do my job, rhetorical device I’ve employed to explain why I’m skipping the #2 deck.

Torbran and Obosh spent the last year doing for this card already but in case you didn’t find out that these were cash money, they’re probably not done going up. I would have preferred that we had a blank slate coming in and we could pluck these out of bulk boxes but with so much of 2020 having been spent indoors, it’s possible any LGS with un-inventoried boxes has these for like a quarter. I think this can hit $7 but I wouldn’t pay more than $4. Find these in your bulk, I know you have a bunch, we all do.

We used to have more time on bulk rares like this. This has largely been discovered by the finance community and the fact that this was $4 yesterday and is $8 today shows that we can’t wait like we used to be able to. I think these are findable and I also think they won’t maintain $10 or above because it’s only good in this deck, but smoke ’em if you got ’em.

I included Overabundance to sort of contrast with this next card a bit. Someone who doesn’t play EDH but understands the finance game will see a card like Overabundance, realize it was practically made to go into Yurlok decks and buy a bunch. That person doesn’t need EDHREC data to do that. But EDHREC doesn’t make the news, it reports the news, and nearly as many people are putting Tectonic Instability in their decks as are putting Overabundance.

However, Overabundance is a card that’s obvious to people who don’t play EDH and Tec Instability is a card that people who are building the deck will eventually figure out when they sit down and start to try and come up with 100 cards to play. I’m not saying any one card is better than another, but one of them is a cheaper buy-in right now and still has copies lying around despite the cards having nearly identical demand profiles.

I guess what I am saying is don’t get discouraged by missing the boat on cards like Overabundance when less obvious cards that are basically an identical spec are still left on the table. This is why I wait for EDHREC data rather than trying to guess what people are going to play the second a card is spoiled. Why fight everyone for cards that are going to peak then drop when you can fight no one for a slow gainer and sell at its peak?

Yurlok is here to finish what Kydele started and I’m about it. Sword and Umbral Mantle as both in play here because they generate infinite mana in other people’s mana pools if you have something like Heartstone and that’s hilarious. Even if you pay 1 mana to deal 3 damage over and over, it’s still a really solid pairing. Any 2-card combo where one of the cards is your commander is strong.

Mantle is already halfway through shaking off that Mystery Booster printing – what a beast of a card. This is solid with Yurlok and will be in like 80% of the Yurlok decks built, which could be a lot.

Good thing Yurlok deals the damage and it doesn’t count as mana burn. Just when you thought you were safe to let your opponent resolve Eladamri’s Vineyard with feet.

Speaking of which…

Maybe a bit too late for this one, but it’s good to know it’s a thing. Luckily CK’s buylist is climbing along with retail in case you want to get out quickly and easily and leave CK to try and offload the copies you got back in 1997.

In case you were thinking, “This is playable now AND on the Reserved List? How much could it possibly fall if the deck doesn’t catch on? It’s not like they’re printing more copies of this” I present to you the following

That plummet accounts for about $4.35 of its peak of $5, or about 87% of the card’s “Well it’s on the Reserve [sic] List” perceived value. Just saying. Not saying it hits $0.65 again, I’m saying I’m staying away. If I thought it was a good idea to invest in RL garbage that might go up because of a deck, I’d advocate better cards than this. Could this be the deck that does it? Maybe, but if so, it’s already back up to $5 so no sense lamenting that you don’t get the chance to go hunt for greater fools, there’s money to be made elsewhere.

That does it for me this week. There are probably more cards you can pick up and I would keep going if they let me, but it’s time to call it an article. Thanks for reading me for all these years. Join me next week where we’ll find even more stuff the Overabundance-buyers missed. Until next time!