Readers!

It’s clear that Urza is the favorite deck to emerge from the new EDH Masters set called “Modern Horizons” and it’s not hard to see why. Him plus Paradox Engine plus a few other artifacts means you cast your whole deck pretty reliably and that’s pretty good. Artifacts are good, blue is good, both together is good. Urza is the Vannifar of the set but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Teysa of the set, and I think I’ve found it.

EDHREC is on top of their game this go-around and since all of the cards are in Scryfall and people are building decks already, EDHREC is scraping data already. The integration with sites like Archidekt which let people make decks almost as soon as card are spoiled means we have data earlier, which is apparently something we need because people are jumping on EDH stuff way earlier than they used to. That’s fine, once we get over the feeling of missing out, it turns out those people miss a lot of stuff because they don’t know what they’re doing. Still plenty of money to be made by listening to people telling us what they’re actually doing. Let’s listen.

Behold! 26 decks – hardly a huge sample size but since we’re getting ideas and nothing else, it’s enough. We want to see if any tech is emerging and these early decks also have the benefit of informing later deckbuilders so actually these cards that may be erroneously over-represented now may actually make people more likely to play them and therefore fulfill their own prophecy. Archidekt integration with EDHREC means people can now build their deck with the suggestions from other decks right in front of them more easily than ever. It’s not that these suggestions are bad, but it does have a snowball effect as the first to get their ideas down on paper have an influence over every subsequent builder.

That said, enough editorializing about problems I personally helped create. Let’s make some money.

Not on the Reserved List but not exactly easy to reprint, either, this card is one the move and $3 is not where it’s going to stop, either. If you can still get these around the $1 they were for basically ever, you should be able to get out above $4 soon. The tipping point on these are coming and being an uncommon from Saga means there are fewer copies than there are copies of uncommons from recent sets with similar trajectories.

Ogre is more explosive, true, but Skirge Familiar is the only card like this in Black and with Yawgmoth’s ability to keep your hand full, you should have no shortage of garbage to pitch to turn into a spell, perhaps a big Exsanguinate. I think if a small number of people discovered Skirge Familiar, it’s going to go. In at $2, out at $5 seems reasonable to me.

Foils of this are falling but considering a foil is currently cheaper than a non-foil Masques copy, we could see some movement back up. This can go off constantly given your ability to proliferate a ton, and unlike a lot of Time Walk artifacts, you don’t have to “bank” a turn to make it work, so if there are 9 counters on it, just take 4 turns in a row and laugh. If you can’t manage to put 3 counters on it during those extra turns with Yawgmoth as your commander, you don’t deserve to win, anyway. I think Masques copies and m19 foils are both pretty good bets, especially since it spiked already on the basis of different cards and copies are more scarce in the wild.

You like this graph shape? I know that you do. I like it, also. This is the “reverse-J” shape that precedes the “U-shaped” graph that is a card recovering from a reprinting. This is obviously a battlebond reprinting based on the time the card’s price plummeted. Why no recovery yet? Was it rarity-shifted? Does it see less play? Was the set overprinted? No, no and no. This seems like an opportunity to me!

Here’s the culprit. I think Revenant is due for a slow climb back to maybe 2/3 of its pre-reprinting price if it’s not reprinted again given how powerful it is. Although people are latching on to the budget version, Crypt Ghast, Ghast is making a case for a higher price tag itself and anyone who is serious about building like redundancy more than they like budget alternatives to non-RL cards. They will buy both and so should you.

Ready for another guess?

Here is a card I have raised the alarum about on several occasions but never really bought into myself, which was foolish because I was right, this card is the truth and it’s only going to get better now that Yawgmoth is a sac outlet for the ages. You’ll like this reveal a lot.

This card is honestly probably not done growing despite having grown quite a bit. I feel like it should have gotten a commander deck reprint by now and it’s strange that it hasn’t, but when they finalized last year’s decks, like 18-24 months ago, this card was steady at $8 for a while. Can it grow more? Is it getting reprinted this year (I doubt it)? Time will tell. I like this card, though.

One last thing – Ultimate Masters didn’t really inject as many copies into the market as anyone expected and prices are really holding up. I wouldn’t wait to buy anything that got reprinted in that set, and this deck has quite a few.

Tower and Urborg are staples in any deck like this so grab them now. They’ll shrug off another reprint and they’re not going to get cheaper so it’s a real low risk buy.

That does it for me. Next week we will have more data so be sure to tune in. Until next time!

Readers!

What do we do when there’s no EDHREC data yet? Whatever I want, this is my column. Today I am going to look at a bunch of new cards and try to find a card that could be poised to move on the basis of the new card. Sound good? This will be a fun one.

Second spikes are usually pretty hard and this one is poised. Already on the upswing following a crash when people didn’t quite build as many Hapatra decks as people thought they might, Skitter is a perfect target. I think Yawgmoth is likely to spike 10-20 cards on his own but this is the most obvious so it’s going to go first. We’ll talk about him in depth in his own article when it’s warranted.

You could find 20 targets on just this one commander’s page but I think one I want to highlight today is this one.

If you have Flourishing out, this is Boundless Realms for cards like Gaea’s Cradle and Nykthos. You may not get the exact lands you want and putting 7 mana into it doesn’t guarantee you as many lands and Realms does, but this also puts non-basics into play untapped and I think that makes this a very different card. When X=6 you look at 12 cards and statistically get 4 lands, untapped. That’s a 2-card combo with Flourishing, but so is Realms and Amulet of Vigor. I dunno, this is on an upswing and it’s going in every Flourishing deck if people are smart.

I have seen people talk about cards ranging from Tibalt to Witch Hunt to Leyline of Punishment, but here’s a funny one.

This puts you in black but it’s also pretty hilarious to dome everyone for 10 and then burn them out with spells. This also gives you access to spells like Exsanguinate which get better when you have a ton of verse counters. Of all the cards to pair with Aria, which may or may not be a thing, this is the most hilarious and is already trending up, albeit minimally.

Kidding.

Check out which decks run Stony Silence, I guess. I’m not sure what this does, besides make Lattice more desirable than it already is, which is lots. A Karn, Ouphe, Silence, Null Rod deck could be nasty.

This has already spiked a few cards, including Deranged Hermit, but if people are going deep on Squirrels, there are things they have missed.

People aren’t going super deep on Squirrel stuff, but they should. Pretend they’re nuts and collect them.

A lot of these effects are good paired with Wrenn which isn’t going to be a new EDH deck, but could be in Modern and also could get people to dust off Mina and Denn or Angry Omnath. 2 mana ‘walkers are historically bad but this doesn’t appear to be in that camp. I also like Strip Mine and Wasteland right now.

This peaked hard and high on the basis of the Commander deck and now that all the copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers, this could have some real growth potential. We aren’t done talking about this sicko card, though, it’s going to be great!

Sorry this week felt like a bit of a hodgepodge but I didn’t want to go too deep on anything in particular. Feel free to do that yourself! If there are cards like it that exist, see which decks play them on EDHREC and which cards have high synergy scores from getting played alongside them. I’ll be back next week to go way in depth on a commander and scoop up all the picks people forgot when they bought out all the obvious cards. Until next time!