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
Throne of Eldraine is almost upon us, but fortunately we have had knowledge about the Brawl decks and some of their contents for weeks and weeks and it still hasn’t been enough time to get over what a gigantic bummer Arcane Signet is. It’s not even a Signet, a Signet taps for 2 mana if you pay 1 colorless to activate it. It’s Felwarcane Stonegnet.
The card isn’t just not a Signet, it’s a problem. It’s the Command Tower of mana rocks which means there’s no good reason not to jam it in every 2+ color EDH deck. The problem? It’s only being printed so far in the (let’s be honest, terrible) Brawl precons which means the only way to get an Arcane Signet right now is buy a $30 precon or buy it from someone who did. How much is this dumb card going to cost? They’re $30 on TCG Player right now, so enjoy that. Super cool lazy card, Wizards.
The Brawl precons aren’t a TOTAL disaster because they also gave us a really obvious Commander that I wrote about a while back before we had any data. Well, now we have data, so I’m going to revisit it because I’m nothing if not thorough.
Call it a coincidence, but Chulane, the Throne of Eldraine card we’ve known about the longest, has the most decks on EDHREC. It’s why I’m going to write about it instead of another commander with less data. I take this job very seriously, you guys.
One aspect we shouldn’t overlook is that Wizards is foisting Brawl upon us whether we like it or not. This means Chulane has some appeal in both formats since it’s in a precon and that could give it and the cards that are currently legal in Standard a bit of a boost. However, most of the cards that are good in Chulane aren’t legal in Standard or they’re good on their own (think Smothering Tithe) so Chulane won’t help or hurt their prices. I want to look at the cards that Chulane effects directly, because they’re making themselves known.
Notice anything? Astute readers of this column will already have noticed that the price on TCG Player is quite a bit higher than the price on Card Kingdom. The first thing I like to do in that instance is click on the Card Kingdom link to make sure that price is live and it’s not merely the price at which the card sold out.
Well, then. There are probably a lot more than 20 copies, but 20 is the most they will list at a time so…. well, so people like me can’t buy them out. Is $0.79 a pre-spike or post-spike price? If it’s post-spike, does the $2 they are getting on TCG Player indicate there is room to grow or is it a result of one of the weekly changes to their fee structure TCG Player has made lately?
Clearly Chulane has made an impact. If Chulane isn’t the most popular deck ever, it’s tough to see an uncommon being propped up enough for you to be glad you paid $2, and I don’t think buying Card Kingdom out at $0.79 means you can turn a profit, but I like that this card went way up on the basis of Chulane because it shows the deck has juice, at least in the short term. I wonder what else has upside that I didn’t talk about last time (Aluren is still pretty hot).
I’m going to be real honest, I didn’t see this recovering this much this soon. It’s a testament to how well Ultimate Masters managed to balance needed reprints with not tanking prices forever. They threaded that needle perfectly, which I’m sure was an accident, but I’ll take it. Perhaps there is some upside with the rest of this list
Could there be cards on this list about to go up? It’s possible. The main takeaway here is that even a reprinting at a lower rarity on a nuts card like Lab Man wasn’t enough to keep it down and that’s worth knowing about.
Those $7 copies on Troll and Toad don’t look half bad right now. Even without Chulane coming along and being a very good fit for this card in EDH, this is still a card that’s going places. I like Karametra very much in Chulane decks and while there were better times to snap this up, it’s gettable for 30% lower than its current max price which means there is money to be made.
Ugh, I’m going to build this stupid, boring deck, aren’t I? I am.
They haven’t demonstrated they are going to stop printing this and another printing could really ding you, but I like this at its current price quite a bit. You have to weigh reprint risk – even foils aren’t safe from that at this point.
As always, check out the full page for the deck. There are a lot of cards in here and I omitted some because I don’t think they are a good spec for various reasons so if I omitted something you think is strong, let’s debate it in the comments section. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time!
You know what I don’t talk much about? The prices of commanders themselves. If you go back through all 3 or 4 years I’ve been doing this column, one thing that sticks out right away is that I duck that issue a lot. On one hand, I think the price of the commander is a little tougher to figure out and I like to do easy things. Am I doing a disservice to people by pointing out easier and more likely specs? From the standpoint of you wanting to hear about specs, I am not. If that’s what you’re after, a spec is a spec regardless of the type of cards it’s on. However, I’m sure a non-zero number of my readers (and most of my podcast listeners) are also looking for advice about how to play the game cheaper, and knowing if and when to buy commanders is a useful part of that, so I’m going to crunch some numbers today.
The precipitation of this topic was a well-known member of the community messaging me privately to ask about Morophon as a spec. This is the type of question I typically try and duck but I’ve been writing about EDH finance for quite a long time and it’s probably a question I should be able to answer. Some commanders are worth a lot of money. Some are not. They are printed in Commander sets, supplemental sets, as foils only, as box-topper promos only, reprinted in Commander anthologies or regular sets or as judge promos. There are a lot of variables, but isn’t that true of anything? Don’t we know which cards (like Eternal Witness) will shrug off a reprint and which cards (like Gilded Lotus) won’t? We should be able to figure out whether Morophon is a good spec at its current price, even if it means talking about a LOT of variables.
The Card Itself
The number of total eligible commanders keeps changing so I will just say that at the time I wrote this, there were about 1,000 commanders on EDHREC and that puts this just outside the top 10%. It’s early – Morophon has only been legal for about 3 months, so climbing to the 90th percentile for commanders in that period of time is pretty impressive. It’s around $5 as a mythic, which means it has a higher upside than some other commanders which are non-mythic rare. $5 is a fairly reasonable buy-in.
This is a catch-all commander for tribes without a tribe, which helps it considerably. As new tribes get added without commanders, a certain number of new players will pick up Morophon to helm those decks. Morophon is also more reprintable than some set-specific commanders, and that’s a factor as well. Finally, Morophon has foils and non-foils, which isn’t always the case for commanders. There’s a reason for this.
Stats
How many of the top commanders have both a foil and non-foil option? It’s fewer than you think because a lot of the top commanders of all time per EDHREC are from the commander precons and only have a foil copy.
This is a little hard to see, but it’s a snapshot of the top commanders over the last 2 years. Of these 21, 13 are from a commander precon and of those 13, only 2 (Animar and Kess) have a non-foil option. So far, the commander in 21st has 3 times as many decks as Morophon.
Is $5 too cheap for Morophon? Of these 21 top all-time commanders, 9 are worth $5 or less. Of those 9, 6 have been reprinted outside of a Commander Anthology (I’m not convinced Commander Anthology affects prices a ton). The remaining 3 at $5 and under with no reprints are Nekusar, Lord Windgrace and Gishath. Nekusar has a judge promo, Lord Windgrace is a year old in the least valuable Commander 2018 deck and Gishath is basically hanging on with only EDH demand. I think Gishath is the only interesting card on that list. There aren’t too many cards like Morophon in the Top 21, which is fine.
Gishath’s Gishgraph looks like the card is going to grow a bit. It hasn’t rotated yet but it is also not really being buoyed much by Standard and looks to be picking up. Casual players love big, dumb dinosaurs and while I am really shocked to see Gishath in the Top 20, the numbers appear to be telling the truth.
With the most popular commanders not having a lot in common with Morophon, maybe we should look at commanders with about as many decks.
5 Color
Is Morophon the second coming of Sliver Overlord or is it a placeholder commander in 5 color decks? People building 5 color decks now have a lot of options for their placeholder – it’s not all Karona and Cromat. Najeela is perfect for aggressive builds and Golos has actual good abilities. Jodah can cast your spells. Morophon is incerasingly going to get sidelined by better and better 5 color commanders and every tribe that never had a commander and gets one chips away at his utility. The two cards closest to how much use Morophon sees now are Niv-Mizzet and Horde of Notions.
Kinda too soon to tell, here. People are still drafting WAR and every card in that set is $3, even the uncommons.
Horde of Notions is from a much “better” set in terms of value since boxes of Lorwyn are a mortgage payment and it was trash before its 2015 reprinting. Pre-dating the mythic era and still being dirt tells a sad tale about Morophon if it continues to hover in the same number of decks as Horde. One thing I will say about Horde is that a lot of Horde decks were built before EDHREC can scrape them and Morophon has been built a lot more, lately. Another thing I will say is that Elementals just got a ton of sick new cards and no one is building Horde, so it means once people sort of forget about Morophon, he likely stays forgotten. It’s cool to be able to give your Squirrels +1/+1 and make them G cheaper, but I think once you compare Morophon to cards with similar demand, the picture is pretty bleak.
More Generally
So how do we evaluate new commanders? I think we should run down a list of questions to find the cards to compare the new commander to and test it out.
Are there both foils and non-foils?
How many decks is it in? (Better for older cards)
Is it rare, mythic or uncommon?
Is it only in a precon?
Is it reprintable?
Is it likely to become obsolete?
Once you find the right card to look at, just check price trajectory and you should get a sense for what’s up. Let’s look at an old commander and a new one.
Are there both foils and non-foils?
Just non-foils – only the face card got a foil that year.
How many decks is it in? (Better for older cards)
414, but the raw number matters less than its rank – 201 out of 1,000, so 80th percentile.
Is it rare, mythic or uncommon?
Mythic, but that matters less for precon cards
Is it only in a precon?
Yes, but there was a commander anthology (didn’t do much to Meren’s price so probably didn’t here, either).
Is it reprintable?
Not especially
Is it likely to become obsolete?
Not especially.
We have a lot of graphical data for Mazirek and while there was some interest around the time they printed a bunch of new Golgari cards in the new Ravnica sets, ultimately interest has tapered back down. This is likely $5ish forever while its deckmate, Meren, flirted with $20. If I didn’t have the graph to look at, I’d likely conclude that $5 was appropriate for this card. If I had to pick a card to compare Mazirek to, I’d go with Taigam.
Taigam is in about as many decks, is overshadowed by better commanders in its precon and is the same price now. Could we predict Taigam’s price trajectory based on Mazirek?
It’s damn close.
Would this seeming to work out on a card I selected fairly randomly work on a newer card whose graph won’t help us out much, which is our situation with Morophon? What about a card that’s new enough to be standard legal?
Are there both foils and non-foils?
Yep
How many decks is it in? (Better for older cards)
1143 so far, 90th percentile
Is it rare, mythic or uncommon?
Mythic
Is it only in a precon?
No
Is it reprintable?
Eh, it has a set-specific mechanic and isn’t used enough to be a judge promo. This would be tough.
Is it likely to become obsolete?
Not to people who like her for flavor reasons and anything that draws this many cards in the colors artifact players want would likely be a mistake to print (not that they won’t – look at Chulane).
Before I cheat and peak at her graph, I imagine her price was around $3-$5 then dipped and is pretty flat right now. I also think the foils are roughly the same graph shape.
Except for the part about the price being flat now, I was pretty close. The price is in flux but it’s all within a buck so who knows? The foils are a different story.
I would not have guessed $8-$10 on the 55th-most-built commander on the site. I personally think EDH foil demand is overstated and that large volumes are tough to move (which is why I think they’re fine for one person but not an entire readership so I don’t recommend them) but I am also a little surprised. I think it goes up from $10 over the next year or two but I also don’t want to run out and snipe all of the $8 copies on TCG Player. This is sort of confounding, which is why I stick to cards that Jhoira decks made go up in price and ignored Jhoira herself.
If we want to pick out a historical card to compare Jhoira to, we can try to estimate what the price trajectory will look like over a longer timeframe. I have a good pick for this.
That’s a hot price-tag for a card a few years older. What were the past few years like?
Could we expect Jhoira to shoot up in a year or two like Xenagos? Let’s check one more thing, first.
Xenagod isn’t the perfect comparison for Jhoira because it’s in 3 times as many decks (for now) as an inclusion. If you’re dealing with a commander, don’t just check the number of decks it’s helming, you have to check how many copies are in use.
That’s better. What does the future potentially have in store for Jhoira?
Are we right, here? We might be, we might not be. But we at least have some criteria to narrow our search to cards that are good corollaries and checking their price trajectory.
I likely continue to ignore commanders in favor of the cards they make go up, but now if someone asks me the question, I have a method for trying to answer them, and now you do, too. That does it for me this week, tune in next week where I’ll have actual specs. Until next time!
I don’t have any specific specs I am dying to go over this week. Instead, I think I should address a topic that people ask me about a lot and which seems to be changing while my advice stays the same. It’ no good to give outdated advice to people and if my worldview has to change a bit, it’s going to come as the result of some data analysis. Let’s do that analysis today and update how we handle something that keeps happening whether we want it to or not – rotation.
By rotation, I refer specifically to the time of year when Standard loses a bunch of sets at once and prices are impacted. Cards that are very strong in Standard but not strong enough for Modern or Legacy play lose a lot of value and cards that were $2-$3 on maybe one deck worth of Standard play go to bulk rares where they join cards that were bulk all along. It’s a sad time for binders but a happy time for the finance community. We can pick up good cards for dirt cheap and watch their prices rebound.
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You know that article I write every week? Well I’m back with it, and this week I’m doing the this week version of it because, and I promise this is true, THINGS ARE DIFFERENT. Specifically, people are moving on to different top decks on EDHREC.
Over the past week, these decks have emerged. If you don’t remember what it looked like last week, maybe the monthly trends will be instructive.
Elshe is getting more popular, as is Kadena. Ghired got very popular, too, and it stands to reason that the kind of try-hards who would make a K’rrik deck will add their list to EDHREC immediately for theorycrafting purposes and the kinds of players who make durdle decks like Ghired wait until they physically have cards. Laugh all you want, Godsire is $30 and nothing from K’rrik has even moved. Well, nothing much, anyway.
This has likely hit its immediate ceiling, but it’s not $5 everywhere, so snap those cheap copies while you can, amigos and amigas (a kind of computer, I think). I think the fact that this is a non-mythic from a recent core set and hasn’t impacted Standard yet may put its ceiling right around 6 or 7 bucks but what do I know? I also think if this drops near rotation, it might rebound a bit, but I think the days of EDH cards tanking at rotation are basically over. That’s a whole different article I’ll write someday soon.
I think K’rrik might be responsible for some other moves, if Coolstuff Inc (a website that employs me) is to be believed (I think they are).
Gray Merchant in their Top 10 doesn’t feel like an accident. I think Both K’rrik and Chainer decks want Gary. You can loop Gary very easily in Chainer and I’d share my Chainer picks if he were making more of an impact. Read my article from Coolstuff (a website that employs me) this week and check out my list. Probably nothing financially relevant, but I use Chainer with a Goblins theme and it’s pretty strong. Chainer likely overtakes some Core 2020 decks next week so we can talk about it then.
While we’re on the topic of K’rrik, a topic I didn’t want to get much into, there’s a $6 price gap between Card Kingdom and Strike Zone/TCG Player/Troll and Toad
This is not an $11 card, so act accordingly.
I wanted to talk about Elsha this week, but it’s probably fine that we spent some ink on K’rrik because what it was moving wasn’t as clear before. Elsha seems… solved.
The high synergy cards from the deck show it’s a pretty basic spellcaster deck, but I think there are undervalued cards.
I mention these and cards like them quite a bit but I think there’s something to be said about all of them. I like Helm of Awakening a lot more than most people both as a spec and as a card. I really don’t care if they get a spell reduction in a deck not built to take advantage of it if it means I go off with my deck. My spells costing 1 or 0 is all that matters, I don’t care if they cast a big, dumb blocker a turn earlier. Cloud Key is getting into that “ripe for a reprint” range, but since they don’t seem inclined to print anything that costs more than $7, I am thinking it could just never get touched. Future Sight is a weird set and it has expensive cards in it because of course it does.
People are all done opening these packs, it’s time to buy a card that’s $2.25 on a buylist and on sale on Coolstuff and Miniature Market for $3. I don’t have much else to say about this card other than that I love it and it rules and it’s the kind of thing I want to be doing in Magic and if I could justify this and Swarm Intelligence and Sunbirds’ Invocation in a deck, I’d play them all. Maybe I can if I play junk like Seething Song… I digress.
This is legitimately $37 on ABU Games. I don’t think it will stay in the “half of that price” range for long. Usually it’s Card Kingdom who charges the most (they can, it’s fine) but ABU sending a strong signal. In general, stores with very generous buylists will charge more than other sites that pay peanuts and a trade-in bonus can make your hotlist cards essentially the same as cash even with a markup, so watch for deals. $37 isn’t a deal, but you may find yourself in a year wishing you’d paid $22.
That’s all the news that’s fit to print. We’re in Throne of Eldraine spoiler season already, so check this space for info about that. Until next time!
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
