Jason is the hardest working MTG Finance writer in the business. With a column appearing on Coolstufff Inc. in addition to MTG Price, he is also a member of the Brainstorm Brewery finance podcast and a writer and administrator for EDHREC's content website. Follow him on twitter @JasonEAlt
Last week, I said I was going to spend this week talking about specs from Gavi. It seemed like a no-brainer.
Zaxama was Number 1 but didn’t have a ton by way of solid specs, so moving on to Gavi seemed like the play.
Seemed.
Gavi has plummeted all the way to 5th place and all of the shiny, new Commander 2020 commanders have been supplanted by a generic “best commander of the month” pick in Golos. A cursory glance at Golos’ page tells me that this is likely people updating their lists.
I don’t think a Triome is a reason to build a Golos deck you didn’t have before, but a Gold Commander who ramps mana getting access to 5 new Ultimatums, sick new lands and the Mythos cycle and we may have a reason to at least pop over to archidekt and register a new list.
I think Golos is just as popular as it was last week, but it seems like Gavi isn’t. The question is whether I stick to my guns or whether I take a look at Kalamax instead. How about I take a look to see if it’s worth taking an actual look?
You can take a look for yourself, but it seems like Kalamax is about as unexciting as Zaxara was last week. Also, can we talk about these names? They’re killing me. I got Lurrus and Lutri mixed up last week and now I’m expected to differentiate Kalamax and Zaxara? Who named these characters, George RR Martin? I guess that would explain why he still hasn’t finished The Winds of Winter 2 years after the show went off the air. You know what? I’m just going to give all of these stupid commanders nicknames to make my articles easier to read. OK, we did Hydraboi last week and we can either do Doublesaurus Rex or Mac and Me, so let’s look at old Dubby bones first and see if it’s worth exploring, shall we?
Dinosauriku is kind of a fun-looking commander and while a little linear, he may stay more popular than Dragonsnake due to a larger volume of cards that feel necessary in Dragonsnake. I think Terrible Double Lizard could be fun, but looking at the page, every card is like $0.25 or it’s already played so much in other formats that this shouldn’t make a difference. This deck can’t make Manamorphose go back to where it was or make Comet Storm erase a few of its 8-too-many printings, but perhaps it CAN make people finally realize Thousand-Year Storm is an absurd Magic card. I think Storm is about to go, personally.
Not every site was as hip to its absurdity as Card Kingdom who keeps raising their buylist price accordingly, but other sites will catch up. If you have a way to scoop these from MKM, they’re like a solitary Euro and if this hits $10 USD on Card Kingdom, maybe you figure out how to arb that. We’re already at $3 cash on Card Kingdom’s bulisyt, you can basically buy $4 in credit per Euro right now, but that buylist price won’t stay where it is for long. Get on it! The rest of that deck, though, I’m not too enthusiastic about.
With that said, let’s look at ET and Elliot over here and see if we can snag anything before everyone gets wise.
Most of the Cycling payoffs like Drake Haven, Astral Drift, New Perspective and Lightning Rift (WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE!) are reprinted in the deck, but there are some cards with cycling on them that are interesting.
Decree of Silence, which already popped when Solemnity was printed and is experiencing one of those second spikes we all know and love and profit from, is through the roof. It’s not a $20 card, but with the markets effectively shut down due to Covid, no one is racing to the bottom so copies are hard to come by. I have a ton left over from last time and I’m happy to sell these for $15 on Facebook and if you find these around their pre-spike price, scoop them because they’ll settle higher than that. With shops shut down, no one is trolling through the smaller stores with a few copies or snapping everything up on Crystal Commerce so it’s possible there are random copies on “Hobby Monkey” on the 7th page of google or something. If Decree of Silence was obvious, here’s one that wasn’t.
Decree of Annihilation is drying up a little bit but you should still be able to find some copies. Here is a way to get $60 worth of cards provided Decree never goes above $10, and more than $60 if it does. The Decree in there is foil, but nobody’s perfect.
Solemnity is a card that’s currently on a huge upward track as well given the combination with Decree of Silence and, I’m assuming, cards with Cumulative Upkeep? I’ll be honest, I’m not sure why it’s showing up in the Gavi deck so much, but it is, and it’s getting expensive so yank these out of bulk if you have bulk to yank from.
This deck is so narrow that they basically reprinted anything that could go with it and still needed to cough up 15 new cards to fill out a deck. Cycling is really fair, slow without Gavi and Fluctuator, a terrible way to make tokens with Gavi and The Locust God and if you don’t draw a payoff spell, you’re literally spinning your wheels. I think other decks are more exciting and I’ll find a more exciting one to get into next week, with cards that haven’t all started to go up, if we’re lucky. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy and remember we have so much time to buy these cards that Commander 2021 may be out before anyone even gets to play these cards. Until next time!
There are a lot of places you could invest your Covid bucks and I appreciate you choosing to invest with us. If you’re not familiar with our Pro Trader program, we offer access to a private Discord server and early access to all of our articles which could give you a jump on the competition. Discord too impersonal? Message a writer directly on Twitter or Facebook and ask them a question, day or night. Call the house, you know they’re home, or they should be. Leave them a voicemail asking why they’re not home. You don’t want to make a financial decision like whether or not you should buy Collector’s Boosters from Ikoria without talking it over. Got a non-Magic problem? We’re here to help. Lots of people are annoyed at having to call the unemployment office, let one of our writers sit on hold for you. The point is, the sooner you get that sweet unemployment money rolling in, the sooner you can blow it investing in a card game that may or may not recover.
If any paper format DOES come back, it will be EDH, so let’s look at some EDH picks. We were going to do that anyway, but now we’re going to do it even more.
Captivity hasn’t stopped people from theorycrafting and despite uncertainty regarding when they’ll be able to get these cards, people have their decklists ready to go. Since they’ll likely put off buying the rest of the decks until they get their new cards, we have more time than normal to stock up and stock up we shall. Zaxara is number one here and despite me being more excited about Xyris and its linearity, the most popular deck usually stays the most popular deck. Commander players like X spells and so do I because when it’s time to make money, X gonna give it to ya.
You know, like the DMX song.
You can say whatever you want to about DMX, he has no idea how to use google so it’s not like he can search his own name and see who is talking smack. We have a comment section on these articles and they barely get used, so feel free to say something about DMX in the comments like about how it’s pretty cartoonish to bark all the time or about how the only Cradle to Grave worse than that card from Planar Chaos was that goofy-ass movie he made with Jet Li. He’ll never find out.
Let’s look at some Zaxara picks, shall we?
It’s hard to believe this card flirted with $3, but since Modern Horizons was a Modern-focused set and so many ridiculous cards were in it, people busted box after box trying to get $100 Planeswalkers so the stuff that wasn’t immediately impacftful in Modern sort of fell by the wayside. The wayside is where I hang out, scooping EDH staples people forgot about. If you didn’t get in at $3 because I never said anything about it at the time, you can still get in around $9 on TCG Player. It’s sold out everywhere else unless you’re clever and find smaller sites people forgot about. A smaller store is more likely to be run by one or two people and therefore less likely to be closed and therefore more likely to ship. Without anyone at bigger stores making arbitrage buys of those smaller sites, you can go looking yourself. Try page 5 of google, etc.
Torment tanked when it was reprinted in Mystery Boosters, but don’t expect it to stay cheap. This was a $10+ card before Zaxara and it doesn’t need any of Zaxara’s help approaching $10 again. That said, it’s going to get Zaxara’s help, making this a solid pickup. I don’t know if it can get cheaper.
Speaking of temporarily embarrassed cards, check out this gem that flirted with an actual Jacksonback at one point. This is a $12 card selling for $4, figger it oot.
Strike Zone is currently selling this for like a dollar more than the cheapest this card ever got when it was reprinted. Genesis Wave is an absurd Magic card, it occasionally shows up in Modern and it’s tailor-made for Zaxara yet shows up in many, many decks. This is a very solid price for a very solid card. Reprint risk is moderate, especially with this year being touted as the year of EDH and everyone replying with a list of Green cards when Gavin asked on Twitter what needed a reprint.
Brief aside here, if you aren’t following members of the CAG, Rules Committee and set design teams within Wizards on Twitter, you’re missing out. I predicted a Flash ban in EDH because of how little it mattered to most people but how every time Sheldon tweeted about ANYTHING someone would say “Oh, your delivery driver forgot to include your ranch and that’s bad but Flash Hulk is ok?’ and if that had been me, I would have snapped and banned the card to be left alone. Every time Gavin Verhey does an informal poll, I get to scroll through the replies. Companies pay a lot of money for the kind of research you can get for free on Twitter, and I recommend taking advantage. Follow me @jasonealt while you’re at it, it don’t cost nothin.
As I was writing, I procrastinated for a few minutes on Twitter and found this tweet. That said, some of the presale prices on the singles that seemed high may stay high and that means it could take longer for them to get reasonable. I don’t know if there is any money to be made with those cards under the circumstances, so I’m staying well away. If you are busting decks for singles, this is very good news for you, though, provided you aren’t the one getting hit with the allocation shortage.
I find these in bulk all the time. This might not be $10 ever again, but it’s probably not getting reprinted ever again, either. Remember this is money when you dig through bulk. The whole set is money, but this is, too.
That does it for me this week. Zaxara is making a whole lot of $0.33 cards playable and they won’t go up enough to bother imo so this was a bit of a bust. Next week when I look at Gavi, Nest Warden, we’ll be much happier, I bet. Until next time!
Is it cool if I spend some of my opening paragraph talking about something that bothers me a little?
You got snakey boi over here, and he has flying, and that’s cool. He hangs out in a place called Bespin, which is a city that flies for some reason. There are a bunch of spires hanging down for people to pop out of if they happen to fall off of one Bespin’s many catwalks with no handrails and slide down a giant tube full of trap doors. That’s fine, but when your opponent draws extra cards, something that happens ALL THE TIME in commander, Xyris births a snake. This snake is Green, it’s 1/1 and it does NOT have flying. So Xyris farts the token out and I guess it falls out of the sky, accelerates at about 15 meters per second per second and impacts the earth? Kinda messed up. This is why I don’t get into Vorthos, there’s too much that’s implied by the art that I find disturbing. What I DON’T find disturbing is the amount of value this card generates.
Hitting them with a dragon is fairly easy to do since it costs 5 which is a turn 3 play in a Temur deck. You draw cards, make them draw cards, make snakes and make the snakes make mana. It’s dirty but that’s how the card is designed and I am not inclined to argue. Making them draw cards is also fairly easy, and Commander 2020 has a copy of Windfall (In the Jeskai deck) and The Locust God (In the Jeskai deck) and Magus of the Wheel (In the Mardu deck) so you can do really silly shenanigans right out of the box if the box is three boxes. I think people are going to quickly figure out how to make this deck brutal and since we already have EDHREC data, we don’t have to guess.
This deck is actually sort of boring to me already. I’m going to build it, but it’s so linear it’s going to bore me, so I might as well make it the deck I play when I want the pod to be miserable. We know how to make people miserable, so how do we make money?
FF over here dropped from about $20 to about $10 with no change in supply. This won’t be a second spike but it will be a case where there are no cheap, loose copies in LGS bargain binders – prior spikes concentrated copies in the hands of dealers. The supply is the same, the demand is back up and these $10 copies likely become $20 in the near term, letting you get out if you got in early enough. TCG Player is mostly shut down and everyone with these at $10 has 1 copy which means you pay a lot of shipping costs. I had to buy on Card Shark, that’s how few copies there are easily accessible with so many retailers shut down. Check Amazon, eBay and other, smaller stores for cheap copies and be ready to sell these when people finally get their hands on the precons. This is a slam dunk.
Now, will cards in Xyris be good at all? Last week Xyris was the most expensive card in the set and it’s currently on par with the other most popular commanders built on the sites we scrape.
Kalamax may be currently more popular but Xyris is more linear and it’s going to spike more cards that spiked before so it’s worth doing first since you have weeks to pick the stuff up.
In addition to Forced Fruition, which goes up often, here’s another card I used to pull out of bulk boxes and which keeps making me money like clockwork.
This was buylisting for $15 a year ago so enjoy the free value. This likely goes up again from Xyris, and if it doesn’t, it will again someday. There are just too many ways to make a card that makes everyone draw a ton of cards go up in price.
COVID sort of nerfed the effect they expected from Mystery Boosters since supply is out there but no one that didn’t buy packs can access it. It’s going to spread out the effect of the new supply, but the price is already down to $12. I don’t know if it will go much lower since people won’t be competing with each other that effectively to race to the bottom, so the price may settle around $12. If it goes even lower, just buy twice as many copies again to bring the average price down enough that you aren’t mad at me for saying to buy around $12 and watch it go back to $20+.
Are you into penny stocks? Here’s one for you. This has already flirted with $2, I think this could hit $3 fairly easily and is gettable for far less, although not every Xyris deck is about that snake life. I’ll probably play it in mine but I plan to use the snakes to make mana with Cryptolith Rite so this could dome people pretty good. Xyris is a snake, remember, so this could pretty quickly help deal 21 commander damage. This isn’t in every deck but it could be in enough.
This has gone about as low as it’s likely to, the buylist price is not decreasing and I think less Modern Horizons was purchased than people think. I don’t know if Xyris is enough to double this up, but I bet time, other formats, the copies starting to dry up on platforms where only a small portion of the usual sellers are operating and other factors can conspire to help this hit $10.
Barring a reprint, this is a $20 foil eventually. Yank the non-foils out of your bulk while you’re at it.
A second spike on this could potentially beat the previous high score of $12. This is in low supply, dealers have all of the copies, it’s sort of absurd in this deck especially, 6 mana isn’t a huge deal for Temur and this even pumps Xyris. Commanders that are encouraged to attack getting passive buffs is way more powerful than people imagine – this turns your 7 turn clock into a 5 turn clock on its own. Add Kaseto and it’s even faster.
The rest of the page is worth looking at, also, but these are the cards my gut tells me are the easiest to make money off of. If you’re interested, here is my list from Coolstuff this week which goes in depth into the cards I’d use to make the deck run. If you don’t have the time, I like using Earthcraft, Cryptolith Rite, Opposition and other enchantments to make the most of my snakes. Next week I’ll be back with specs from whichever deck is the most popular on EDHREC because boring works, turns out. Until next time!
Commander 2020 is fully spoiled and the search is on for this year’s “one card to bother speculating on” because the last two years of commander precons have been so bad, people just assume that’s how this works, now. People seem to have entirely lost confidence in WotC’s ability to make precons we care about, and based on the last two years, it’s sort of easy to see why.
Here is everything worth more than $2 from Commander 2019.
Here is the list from Commander 2018.
These are both pretty short lists. Both times, the second-most-expensive card is a generic Green staple with multiple other printings. Both times the list is roughly half reprints despite each deck containing 15 new cards. Obviously, the sets have been opened to death and they’re very available so it would be difficult to have another situation like in the past. Commander 2017 has 7 cards worth more than $10 and the Commander 2016 Atraxa precon sells for $150, even if it’s just the shrinkwrapped deck from the Commander Anthology set. Is it just a matter of time for Commander 2018 and 2019 or do those decks just suck so bad that no amount of waiting will improve things? I have a feeling that it’s more the latter than the former.
Let’s figure out if that hypothesis is correct before we move on to Commander 2020, though. We need to figure out if there is an appreciable supply difference between Commander 2017 and Commander 2018 that could explain the price discrepancies. One limitation to EDHREC in its current form is that we only go back 2 years in our data. The reason for this is to make it more useful as a deck recommendation website – if you don’t want every card in an Oloro or Meren deck (or Atraxa at this point) deck to throw off every metric and bury some useful signal in all the noise, it’s nice to chop off some of the older decks at a certain point. That reduces its usefulness in cases where I want to compare 2017 to 2018, but it does help me prove certain points very conclusively. If we’re getting more use of Commander 2017 cards, that means more people built with cards from Commander 2017 IN THE YEAR 2018 than they did with cards from Commander 2018. That’s pretty significant. Also, EDHREC goes back to April 2018 when Commander 2017 had only been out for 7 months, which means people were still building decks with the cards, especially since new, relevant cards were printed in sets that came out in early 2018 and that was the newest Commander set at that point (Commander 2018 didn’t come out until August of 2018). I guess what I’m saying is that we can’t compare apples to oranges, but if we go in expecting apples to be smaller because they’re a year older and they end up being the same size as the oranges, that means the apples are overperforming, and that’s all we really needed to know. We don’t have quantitative data but we do have qualitative data, in other words. That will do fine.
Just taking a rough look at usage metrics, we’re seeing the story of Dockside Extortionist pan out. Extortionist is played more than twice as much as the next-most-played card from Commander 2019 whereas the most expensive card from Commander 2018, Arixmethes, is the 14thj-most-played card. The most-played card is played twice as much as the second-most played deck, but it’s in 8% of decks rather than 17%. The distribution is much flatter – there are 5 cards in more than 2,000 decks in the Top 16 of Commander 2019 whereas there are 8 in Commander 2018 and 13 for Commander 2017. Commander 2017 had tribal staples that got played in following years, Commander 2018 had good removal, Planeswalkers and good cards like Estrid’s Invocation and Commander 2019 had creatures that were good in very specific archetypes built around bad abilities like Morph, generic Naya beaters and only 4 non-creatures in the Top 16, none of which were removal spells.
Commander 2017 cards are played more because they go in decks built in 2017, 2018, 2019 and probably 2020 (Teferi’s Protection, Herald’s Horn, Path of Ancestry, Kindred Dominance, Disrupt Decorum, Fractured Identity and even Mathas seem good with cards from Commander 2020) but also, they’re better cards.
The second thing we need to try and ferret out is whether the price is dilluted by a higher supply in Commander 2019. If a card in Commander 2018 has a relatively flat price graph over the last 2 years, is in as many decks as a card from Commander 2017 and costs a tenth as much, you can reasonably conclude there are just more copies of that card out there. Commander 2019 sold incredibly well despite being really bad, and so did Commander 2018 despite being better than 2019 but so much worse than 2017 that everyone complained and WotC vowed to make the decks better (then didn’t). I suspect the prices in Commander 2019 will be lower than 2018 for cards played a similar amount despite equal play and less time for the price to go up. Let’s compare some apples to some slightly older apples.
For the cards in the 3,000 or so deck range, we aren’t seeing a huge difference between Commander 2018 and Commander 2019. Compare that to a card in the same number of decks that’s more restricted due to color identity.
The only question is whether Fractured Identity was $2 in 2017, $3 in 2018 and $5 in 2019.
Basically, it was. It seems like cards just sort of trend up over time from these decks. How about cards in more decks?
It’s tough to find cards to compare because nothing from Commander 2018 was in 10,000 decks, nothing from Commander 2019 was in 10,000 decks and nothing from either was in 20,000 decks.
Here is one year from Commander 2017 to Commander 2018. Wrath of Goad was in most popular deck, which should bring its price down but didn’t. Estrid’s Invocation was in the deck with 2 of the most expensive cards but there is no clear “buy this” deck yet so it’s hard to tell which was the most popular. Could Estrid’s Invocation be $8 in a year? Are we seeing peculiarites associated with TCG Player taking their stores offline for the ‘Rona since these cards are basically the same price on Card Kingdom, the site where EDH player buy their cards? Hard to say. It sure makes me think Estrid’s Invocation could be a buy if you sell on TCG Player, though.
From what I have seen, it doesn’t appear that prices from 2019 are depressed due to a ton of supply but are likely subject to the same growth curve as older cards.
I even found some odd cases where the Commander 2019 cards was worth more than a Commander 2018 card played roughly as much.
Is it possible Commander 2020 will sell a ton more than Commander 2019 did because it’s much better? Maybe, but Commander 2019 mostly sucked and only had one card anyone cares about and it sold the most ever, so I think it’s more likely we’ll see depressed sales from the virus situation, people’s unstable financial situation and the coming recession about to slam into us than we’ll see lower prices from too much supply. This set is dropping at a terrible time for it to sell more than Commander 2019 did.
So, what’s this set’s Dockside Extortionist?
Well, if you ask me, there isn’t one.
This set is quite good and there are bound to be multiple cards that spread the love out. Furthermore, despite there being fairly strong themes like an entire deck devoted to cycling, we’re seeing a lot of cards that will be EDH staples for years to come rather than deck-specific cards. Compare an artifact from Commander 2019 to one from Commander 2020.
One of them is a durdle card for a durdle deck, the other is insanely powerful and is bound to get played forever. So what’s stopping Manascape Refractor, in all of its insane glory, from being the Dockside Extortionist of the set? Simple – the rest of the set.
This is too much money for all of these and none of them will be above $10 in a year.
This was barely $15 before the reprinting and as good as it is, and not just in Commander, it’s in a precon and it’s going to be one that is bought a lot, if you ask me. Xyris is nutty, the deck has a 0 mana Deflect, Etali, Lightning Greaves, Chaos Warp and Dualcaster Mage. It’s not the best deck in terms of reprint value but we won’t expect Locust God to soak up almost a third of the deck’s value on its own.
Xyris is nutty, but commanders don’t tend to stay above $10. Since 2017, only Edgar Markov has gone above $15 and that took a decent amount of time.
Signet seems good here. It’s going to be a Sol Ring or better card since it has fewer printings. Refractor at $8 is high but not overly high – I don’t expect it to end up in the $3, especially since it’s a card that goes in decks going forward but also retroactively goes in decks already built, meaning people need more than one copy. You only need your one Scroll of Fate to put in your own Kadena deck you’ll play 3 times and tear apart but every tribal deck you built before Commander 2017 needed a Path of Ancestry all of a sudden, and future ones would need one, too. Refractor and Signet aren’t tribal but they are that ubiquitous. Nothing in Commander 2019 compares to the utility of either one of these cards.
The only card that seems underpriced for the near- and medium-term is Fierce Guardianship. It’s getting a lot more hype than Deflecting Swat and it’s in the Jeskai deck with The Locust God and Trilobite which already has reasons to buy it. The cycling theme means that the cards in the deck are likely to be played with each other so people buying the deck to put the cards in other decks seems less likely which means the market will have fewer loose copies of Guardianship and it could be a situation where this is the most-bought precon at first. I don’t expect Atraxa-esque levels, though and the value seems spread better than last year.
The Top 10 most played cards in Commander 2019 not named Dockside Extortionist are Marisi, Chainer, Ohran Frostfang, Pramkikon, Eisha, Bone Miser, Atla Palani, K’rrik and Apex Altisaur. Verge Rangers is better than all 10 of those cards except maybe Frostfang. White desperately needs what Rangers does and it’s going to go in a lot of decks. Altar is pretty narrow but it lets people with dumb decks like Phage try to build that dumb deck again, which is fun. If this were Commander 2019, where the second-most-expensive card was a $6 reprinted Seedborn Muse, you might not think that any of these cards were worth preordering at $5, but I think we’ve established that this isn’t the case. I think even with as popular as each deck will be since they’re basically all better than all of the decks last year, we’ll still potentially see between 2 and 5 cards above $7 next year. Ruthless Regiment is basically DLC for the Mardu Knights Brawl deck but even it has Verge Rangers, Flawless Maneuver (underpriced at $0.50 presale, imo), Shared Animosity, Magus of the Wheel (not in the wheel deck why?) and a ton of cards that will go bulkish but bounce back like Knight of the White Orchid, Thalia’s Lieutenant, Zulaport Cutthroat and Crackling Doom. Oh, AND it has a Skullclamp? I’d say all of these decks have a lot of value spread out. Will it make every card $1 instead of $2 in a year? Hard to say.
I mentioned I thought as many as 5 cards could be above $5 in a year, which is ballsy when you look at even Commander 2018’s numbers – 2 years later, Commander 2018 has 4 and 1 year later Commander 2019 has 2. The cards that have a shot, though, are, in my view the following.
Verge Rangers. The deck has a lot of cards that are going to drop a lot due to their multiple printings and a lot of the cards are pretty cheap already. I think Verge Rangers could be the most expensive card in its deck. This is the least likely of my 5 picks but it’s a stupid good card.
Arcane Signet. I realize it’s in every deck and the Brawl decks, but people need these for every deck they’ve ever built, so unless they’re buying a Commander precon just for the Signet and not building a new deck with the cards in the precon, they didn’t actually help any of their old decks and will need to snag copies from elsewhere for their other decks.
The Locust God. I think this could halve in price, which is fine, and will likely recover some of its value.
Manascape Refractor. This card, if it’s as powerful as I think it is, will be pretty expensive. If it’s as durdly and situational as I fear it may be, we’re looking at the $2.50ish territory Treasure Nabber is at. Which red Goblin that gives you artifacts is this, Nabber or Extortionist? Or somewhere in between? We’ll see when people start to play with it. I’m not buying a ton at $8 since I think it’s a maybe whether it will be $8 in a year, but I like it.
Fierce Guardianship. This is basically a Force of Will for the important spells in Commander. Even not having your commander and paying 2U for Negate is fine, really. I think this could end up being pretty expensive and we could all be saying “Well duh” in hindsight.
Here are a few cards I really like but don’t know about whether they could hit $7.
Dismantling Wave. If you just play this as a 3 mana Sorcery, you basically Windgrace’s Judgment. You can’t get creatures, but you can’t get creatures with Return to Dust and that’s $2 after 5 printings.
Xyris. Arixmethes is like $8 right now, but Xyris is far from the only good Commander in this set. Commander 2018 was a mess and it’s really tough to try to figure out what any of its prices mean.
Slippery Bogbonder. People are really excited about this card. Granting Hexproof at instant speed and moving counters can make for some really dirty moves, and cards like Hardened Scales and Doubling Season love when you move counters because it grows the number again.
Cartographer’s Hawk. People are really polarized by this card. Some call it trash some are calling it a workhorse. I’m not sure which it is but anytime people argue this much, I take notice.
I think Commander 2020 is the best Commander set since Commander 2017 and the value will be spread out much more. I also think there will be more of it. I’ll be back with Xyris specs next week because I cannot WAIT to brew with this deck, but here’s a free one just for Pro Traders – Forced Fruition.
Until next time!
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
