Readers,

Spoiler season is reminding me a lot of this time last year, although the cards that are going nuts aren’t all EDH this time around. Last year we got a lot of data to use for scenarios like now where we have cards that are going to spike on the basis of potential interaction to compare to the two different kinds of spikes last year. I will call one kind of spike “Vannifar” and the other “Teysa” and we can look at what’s what. First, though, a few brief looks at what’s going on.

This card was spoiled, and it’s pretty good with this.

No one could figure out what happened with Hermit Druid last week-

Until we had the reason for it spoiled today.

Escape is an interesting mechanic and devotion is also back. Could a card that puts cards in the graveyard and gives you a few pips be in play? Some say yes.

We could list a whole bunch of cards that combo with Thassa’s Oracle like Tainted Pact and Demonic Consultation, but since Laboratory Maniac was legal last week, I don’t think those prices stick. Today, we’re going to talk about Vannifar, Teysa, and stickiness.

History Repeating

Last year, everyone in the finance world was going nuts for Vannifar specs. Intruder Alarm, Thornbite Staff, you name it. After all, it was a pod chain that could tear through the deck and get you all the way up to Craterhoof (my favorite is Avenger of Zendikar into Craterhoof) and get there quickly. It’s easier to deal 20 damage like that than it is 60 damage, though, and you could tell who played a lot of 60 card Magic and who played a lot of 100 card Magic. I waded into the Vannifar stuff but noted it was more cEDH players hyped for Vannifar and wasn’t sure it would be the most popular commander of the set. It wasn’t.

Nor is it close. Vannifar is currently, a year on, ranked 4th after Lavinia, a commander that BARELY does what it actually is supposed to do in EDH. It makes mana rocks worse, though, and if you want to ‘Geddon people on a casual format, cool? Still, Vannifar is underperforming a bit, so why don’t we revisit the specs from that deck a year on and compare them to the ones from Teysa?

This is what Vannifar did to Intruder Alarm then.

Even with cards that pair well with Alarm printed since, it’s down to about halfway between its pre-spike and post-spike price, which is unfortunately what happens to cards that have lowish stock and decent play in other decks. Cards that are unused by other decks have problems, too, because they got from one dollar to unsutainable numbers like $10, but this was around $10 and that’s what it is on TCG Player, now, so while you had time in the short term to make money, I prefer cards that keep their value. Something with a lot more stock may behave differently, so let’s look at something like that.

Thorny WAS looking like the poster child for “Vannifar” specs – cards that crash after the deck is less popular than we thought, but it spiked again later for an unrelated reason so it threw us off. You might assume it maintained its value if we didn’t have a graph of historical prices to note the shape of – this went down and back up.

Wamp wommmmmp. You know what sounds I’m making when I say that, right? Atla came along and threw off our data, but I’m sure Staff was going to end up halfway between pre- and post-spike, if not lower.

Our data can get thrown off the other way, too.

Yeah! Check out THAT decline! More like VanniFART amirite?

Ah. I see.

Keep digging, though, and you’ll find plenty of examples. Vannifar just couldn’t maintain the level of insanity that surrounded the initial feeding frenzy because it’s built 75% less than Teysa. Last year I wrote an article called “Karlov the Magnificent” and another called “Data > Not Data” that explored Teysa specs. Did they fare better in terms of sustainability a year on? Go read the article and pick out the cards I called in it so you can verify I’m not cherry-picking.

2019

2020

2019

2020

2019

2020

The latter article, Data > Not Data was one where I looked at cards that had a good ratio of inclusion rate and synergy rate which meant not only was it in a lot of Teysa decks, it was MOSTLY in Teysa decks. Those are the cards that would be pushed up by Terysa, and the cheaper cards could be more sustainable that way since Teysa is built 4 times as much as Vannifar.

Here is foil Pitless Plunderer a year on.

CRASH.

We can draw a couple of conclusions.

• Cards that are in a lot of decks like Dictate of Erebos and Intruder Alarm tend to settle about halfway between the pre- and post-spike price.
• Foils of Teysa cards do better than foils of Vannifar cards.
• Even Teysa can’t sustain bulk rares with multiple printings.
• Sometimes you get lucky and another card comes along and re-spikes the card. That’s more likely to happen with a card with lots of axes of utility like Thornbite Staff (untapping, damage, tribal affinity) than cards that are more specific like Requiem Angel (most EDH non-token spirits are bad)
• You have more time to buy Teysa specs and more time to sell them

I think a lot of the spikes we’re seeing right now are very Vannifar. Ballista and Heliod is more for Pioneer. Oracle of Thassa isn’t great in EDH and the cards good with it are already known and already expensive, but I’m sure people will buy Paradigm Shift and the guy who messaged me to say “Paradigm Shift is one the Reserved List, should we buy it out because it’s on the Reserved List and hope it goes up someday” and I said “No” to is going to message me calling me an idiot for not being an oracle myself. Buy Tainted Pact? Don’t really, but maybe. If Tainted Pact goes up, I’m going to claim I called it. But don’t buy it. But if it goes up, remember I said to. But I’m saying not to. Unless you do, and if you do and it goes up, tweet that I called it.

That does it for me this week. Next week we’ll try to decide if Shielded by Faith is Teysa or Vannifar. I bet you can already guess what I think.

I’m supposed to write 2,000 words, though, so I’m only half done. What could this mean for us financially?

The Card

Persistent Petitioners is a card that has its rules text printed on it and since I posted a pic of the card, you can read all of the rules text. If you’re using a screen reader for some reason, that’s cool, thanks for patronizing our website. Persistent Petitioners taps for 1 to mill a player for 1, you can tap 4 untapped advisers to mill someone for 12 and, most importantly, there is no cap on the number of petitioners you can play in a deck. That rule has extended to EDH so you can play more than one copy, and lots of players do. The plan is to get a lot of these in play and mill everyone out, which can happen quickly. You only need 7 or 8 activations per player, fewer if they’re drawing greedily, and it’s easy to untap your side (though it was easier with Paradox Engine – R.I.P. in Peace, Doxy Boi).

While it makes sense that a card that needs to be purchased 30 cards at a time is selling well, I think it’s significant that no card sold better than this. 60 card casual players are helping this out a lot, it’s not just EDH, but I think it’s worth revisiting this card since I wrote about it when it was first spoiled. I’ll walk you through how I use EDHREC to look at what matters, while I’m at it since I basically show everyone how to do it one time and then never come back to it later and you could get lost if you haven’t read everything I’ve written the last 5 years. Let’s get going.

The $1.50 to $2 block seems a little cheap for this card. There aren’t collector boosters in this set which means everyone needed to come by their foils honestly. Since people foiling the deck would need to buy about 20 or 30 copies at a time, all of TCG Player’s inventory would be gone in about 2 decks’ worth if more people decided to pursue the deck, and at merely double the cost, it’s almost not worth it not to buy foil.

Petitioner is very difficult to reprint, the rest of the decks it’s in are usually pretty cheap and we have foils of similar cards to look at.

Rats has multiple foils printings versus just the one for Petitioners. Petitioners themselves might not be the worst buy right off the bat, especially in foil, which isn’t something I typically advocate. Let’s look at EDHREC for some more clues.

To get started, it’s as easy as typing the name of the card into the search bar.

That takes you to the page with some stats about the card. Since it’s not legendary, there’s no option to toggle between the card viewed as a commander or viewed as part of the 99, so just scroll down.

Below that is a list of all of the commanders that run the card. It’s ranked by percentage of elgibile decks that run it rather than raw number of inclusions, which I think is more instructive. 0.005% of Atraxa decks could run a card and have 10 instances of a card that’s in 100% of 9 decks. Sorting by percentage tells you the likelihood a deck runs a card, not which commander has more decks in the database. Both numbers matter, though, so note that while a higher percentage of Arcum Dagson decks run the card, it occurs more often in Grand Arbiter decks. Let’s look at both of those and Kami of the Crescent Moon for ideas.

Kami used to be much more expensive than it is and thanks to a Conspiracy printing, it’s more affordable. The advantages to Kami for your Petitioners deck is you draw more fodder and you subtly mill them by depleting their library in a way they don’t mind at first. Giving them stuff to beat you with isn’t terribly competitive, but this deck isn’t that.

Looking at Kami of the Crescent Moon first (as a commander, not as a card), we see that it got some new cards that pertain to milling. Folio is one of the best mill cards ever created and if that made someone look into how to mill in EDH, that would bring them to the same pages we’re on and working backwards, we can figure out what else they might buy.

One last trick – Let’s take another look at the top part of the page.

There are so many Petitioners builds of this deck, it’s listed under themes. Clicking that link takes you to a different page with cards specific to Petitioners builds. That’s going to be where we’ll find our specs.

Finally, let’s use our trick from a few weeks ago where we click the “layout button” on the right side,

change the lists to text and import the lists into a program to compare all 3 to see if there are common themes.

Paradox Engine is banned and some of these are staples, but some of these cards bear looking into.

Vannifar hype from a year ago is dying down but I am 100% a buyer on these when they bottom out and it appears they have. The overall trend is down but the price is fluctuating pretty rapidly. I like the other art better but as a spec, you can’t go wrong with this card.

Stone’s decline is another trend to watch. Petitioners made it spike last year and it’s unlikely the same card does it again but this spikes a lot as a result of a new card with the unlimited inclusion ability and it never goes back down to where it was. This is also a reprint candidate in a way Petitioners is not, not to mention Intruder Alarm.

Looking at cards in 2 of the 3 lists gives me more hits.

This is not a bulk rare and Standard clearly has nothing to do with it. Looping Petitioners or just playing every one you draw is an excellent source of “chip” mill.

This tanked after Petitioner hype died down but I think it could go back up as the result of something else. I doubt Petitioner makes this go up again, though, but it’s worth keeping track of unique, powerful, tribal effects.

Petitioner didn’t even cause the biggest spike in this card’s history so there’s no reason to think other cards couldn’t do it again. As this tanks, I’m ready to pounce.

All in all I think this analysis took me 15 minutes. Once you get better and don’t have to follow a guide to do it, you’ll be able to check quickly when you see an interesting tweet. I saw some cards that are likely to spike again as the result of a card with an ability like Petitioners’ being printed and having a gameplan ready for that rather than trying to figure out a whole decklist on the fly when you should be buying cards is what separates the quick from the dead. Be quick because you did the figuring out work ahead of time. That’s it for me. Until next year!