Normally I have a few weeks’ worth of article ideas written out ahead of time but this time of year when there is a stretch between sets and nothing really has impacted EDH or other formats I pay attention to, the well starts to dry up. I’m not going to NOT write an article, so today we’re going to do a bit of housekeeping and get to a few smaller ideas that don’t warrant an entire article but will be nonetheless valuable to you. “Damn.” you’ll say as you finish reading this article. “That was mad valuable.” That’s the kind of thing you say. When you read an article such as this. A valuable one. Let’s get down to it, shall we? First of all, let’s do some pure number crunching with no analysis so I can look smarter than I am.

It’s The Remix To Ignition, Ravnica Mythic Edition

I have heard a lot of people say qualitative things about the planeswalkers from Mythic Edition but I haven’t seen much quantification. With that in mind, I am going to rank the 8 Mythic Edition Planeswalkers, first by the number of decks they are in on EDHREC and then by MTG Top 8. It’s too late to get a set of Mythic Edition but it’s not too late to buy single planeswalkers and you likely haven’t though about the amount of EDH play they get or you guessed at that amount. Here’s some fact action.

EDHREC Rankings

1. Tamiyo, the Moon Sage (8,350)
2. Sorin Markov (7,923)
3. Dack Fayden (6,696)
4. Ajani, Mentor of Heroes (5,519)
5. Karn, Scion of Urza (1,238)
6. Jaya Ballard (971)
7. Domri, Chaos Bringer (123)
8. Kaya, Orzhov Usurper (62)

MTG Top 8 Rankings

1. Dack Fayden (2,647)
2. Karn, Scion of Urza (1,302)
3. Tamiyo, the Moon Sage (797)
4. Ajani, Mentor of Heroes (471)
5. Sorin Markov (96)
6. Kaya, Orzhov Usurper (21)
7. Jaya Ballard (15)
8. Domri, Chaos Bringer (literally 3)

Average Ranking

1. Tamiyo, the Moon Sage (2) (tie)
2. Dack Fayden (2) (tie)
3. Karn, Scion of Urza (3.5) (tie)
4. Sorin Markov (3.5) (tie)
5. Ajani, Mentor of Heroes (4)
6. Kaya, Orzhov Usurper (7) (tie)
7. Jaya Ballard (7) (tie)
8. Domri, Chaos Bringer (7.5)

There are some very clear winners and losers here. It makes sense that two of the bottom-dwellers are the newest walkers – not only have they had the least amount of time to get used in EDHREC decks, Standard players haven’t even had that many events recorded by Top 8. Jaya Ballard is a very clear stinker here with much more time to get her act together.

The clear winners are probably surprising to everyone who assumed Karn would be a clear favorite. He’s used a lot in 60 card formats but his EDH appeal lags behind Sorin Markov, a planeswalker who tied him in the (unweighted, because how even would I begin to figure out how?) average ranking. Tamiyo and Dack are pretty clear favorites across formats and it seems like the 8 cards arranged themselves into tiers of sorts. Strong overall (Tamiyo and Dack), format-specific but quite strong (Karn, Sorin), average af (Ajani), not that useful (Kaya, Domri, Jaya). With 2 great walkers and 2 good ones, I would say it wasn’t a great buy although even with them flooding out copies, people got as many as they wanted people managed to resell later for more and boosters are still a thing. Next year, Hasbro will be avoiding the fustercluck that is their online store and using a special portal for stuff like this so expect it to be smoother. I don’t know if the Mythic Edition will be a buy next set but I do know that I like Dack Fayden’s metrics but not his art and I like Tamiyo’s both. One last thing – here they are ranked by TCG Player price.

1. Tamiyo ($63.64)
2. Karn ($56.16)
3. Dack ($43.43)
4. Kaya ($39.38)
5. Sorin ($36.32)
6. Domri ($31.60)
7. Ajani ($25.60)
8. Jaya ($15.39)

Jaya seems correct, Tamiyo seems correct, Karn seems OK, Sorin seems very wrong, Ajani seems pretty wrong, Dack seems pretty wrong, Kaya seems pretty wrong. Those prices are bound to shift some more so do with that info what you will. Tamiyo is also the best-looking card, don’t @ me.

Picks, Kinda

A twitter user who follows me (that helps me feel like answering a finance question) inquired today about Mana Maze – a card that’s in fewer than 500 decks on EDHREC. Don’t know what it does? You probably don’t.

So hey, that’s a pretty punishing card. It likely gets slotted into multicolored decks since you can’t play two Blue spells if you play this so that makes Blue angry, but this has uses. Zedruu, Blind Seer and Zur decks are the primary users of this card. The metrics aren’t great, but this is a hell of a hoser. It made me want to look at a few other cards that I think are underutilized and are in a set where a rare card used in EDH goes for upwards of $5 the way EDH cards from Invasion do if they haven’t been reprinted. These are one appearance on Game Knights away from popping off.

This is a pet card of mine but I think it’s solid. It’s a Bribery half the time and can deprive them of combo pieces or just snag a big mana rock. There are lots of uses for this card and 2,892 is respectable.

Also, this is a thing. The card is like $6 on Card Kingdom and for a promo version, that’s reasonable. The art is better, it’s more rare and it’s a good premium version for people who don’t like foils. It also features Dack Fayden, which people like.

Compare the inclusion numbers on those last two cards to this one. This isn’t played in 60 card formats at all, unless it gets play I haven’t seen in casual Magic but this isn’t a very casual card. For whatever reason, this card is “known” price-wise but cards with similar metrics haven’t popped price-wise yet. It’s a puzzle.

Another card I hadn’t check in on in a few years is Painful Quandary, which is a really brutal card. Since it’s possible to sort by set and inclusion numbers in EDHREC, why not look at the cards next to Mana Maze, Acquire, Overburden and Painful Quandary in their respective sets and see if anything looks “off.”

These are both used less than Mana Maze but are worth more. Also, Tectonic Instability is DIRTY and no one uses it. People don’t like when people mess with mana but the people who mess with mana aren’t really using the tools available to them, which is odd. Anyway, that seemed noteworthy.

Used less than Acquire, has inflated inclusion numbers due to the precon effect and has a reprint. Funny what the Travis Woo effect can do to stupid cards.

The only non-Mythic rare used less than Painful Quandary but worth more in Semblance Anvil and that’s because of Modern. Also, no non-reprinted card used more is worth less. Nothing seems confusing in Scars.

This set sucks, lol. No surprises here, although if you didn’t know Keldon Firebombers was real money and Citadel of Pain is in bulk that gets shipped to you, that’s worth knowing.

You should go through sets on EDHREC yourself and see how many surprises you run across.

That does it for me this week. Join me next week for a complete topic. Until next time!

Readers,

You know by now that good advice can make you and bad advice can break you. I do my best to give the best advice possible and it is in the spirit of advice that I will be advising about advisors. The first advisor I want to discuss is me. I give good advice and you should listen to me. Now that I have established my bona fides as an advisor advisor, I’d like you to step into my office because there are a few more things to discuss and I want you along for the ride.

We’re talking advisors to day because a non-commander is making a splash and there is still time to get into a few of the cards that are headed up in price as a result. It’s too late on some, but on others, there is still time. If you’re wondering which non-Commander I could mean, buckle up because I haven’t even begun to advise on advisors.

Boom, there they are in all of their persistent glory. They would probably be good enough if it said “Tap four untapped Persistent Petitioners” because milling twelve is pretty spicy and if Blue does anything well, it’s untapping creatures. However, it says “Tap four untapped Advisors” which means it would behoove you to fill a few of the non-petitioner creature slots in your EDH deck with some other advisors, when relevant, to get a few additional effects.

I didn’t mention much about this before because I thought it was too late for the most obvious inclusion in the deck, Thrumming Stone.

This is a card I am proud to have called several times in the past and if you have been reading my articles for a while, you had a chance to get these for far below the $50 they’re flirting with today. 6 months ago we saw a nice bump from Rat Colony and even then wasn’t too late to buy in because Persistent Petitioners sent these into the stratosphere. Second bumps are always better. One card I will admit I didn’t see coming per se that went nuts this week, though, is probably the best commander for the deck and wasn’t reprinted as recently as I remembered.

Nearly doubling in price the last few weeks, GAAIV, as he likes the be called, is the latest beneficiary of hype surrounding Persistent Petitioners decks. If you’re worried about the efficacy of milling a ton of opponents for hundreds of cards at a time, let me remind you that EDH need not work this way. The power of the phrase “target player” is very relevant with this deck for this reason.

The UMA reprinting basically destroyed this card’s price for life but I hope you made some decent money on this when I said it was nuts around $2. I have been high on this card for so long I probably wrote about it on Quiet Speculation or talked about it on a podcast that doesn’t even exist anymore. Maniac may be dead forever, but you won’t be dead when you mill yourself into Bolivian with petitioners and use lab man to win the game. This makes mill fairly viable in EDH and it makes me want to see which other advisors could be about to pop on the basis of inclusion in this deck.

While we’re talking about cards that it’s too late to buy cheaply, Intruder Alarm seems really good in this deck. Move the copy over from the Vannifar deck I’m sure you’re taking apart after playing it twice.

Let’s look at some other advisors that could be ready to pop on the basis of inclusion in the deck. Said advisors would ideally-

• Be in Azorius colors because Grand Arbiter Augustin IV is an advisor and is likely the best commander for the deck, though this point is a bit flexible
• Have a nice static ability that functions when it’s tapped allowing you to get a benefit from having it in play but being able to tap it with abandon

Let’s go to gatherer and look at advisors and see if we find anything worth talking about. Spoiler alert, I know of at least one and that was the whole point of writing the article, but I also think it’s possible I’ll find more so while I know some stuff you don’t know, I also don’t know some stuff we’ll find out together. This will be fun.

Ok, so this card was already pretty busted to begin with and the fact that Kamigawa cards are a little tougher than most to reprint coupled with the fact that this card is quite good lead to the shallow climb, punctuated by a steeper one lately. However, this card went somewhat unnoticed before because, with the exception of the graph shape, the underlying metrics weren’t that great.

This is basically a card I would only have found accidentally. You can see in this picture that Card Kingdom has already jacked the price up, but there are still copies to be found for a more reasonable amount elsewhere.

Time appears to be running out, but there are still sub-$12 copies floating around and while there is a lot of hype surrounding Petitioners that may or may not, well, persist, the graph shape of Michiko Konda tells you that the price is unlikely to go anywhere but up. Remember, sudden spikes settle and have a tendency to settle between the pre-spike price and the post-spike price, usually right in the middle. She flirted with $13 already, so if she goes to $20 she still ends up around $17 so there’s money to be made, especially if EDH players around you trade. More people are going to notice this card once it officially starts to sell out on various sites and you want to be ready to sell when it hits $20 and people are looking to buy.

This card is so hard to work in EDH, just like Luminarch Ascension. I used to run Luminarch Ascension in Standard in a control deck with a lot of Planeswalkers. It was fairly easy to go a turn cycle without taking damage with one opponent, but it’s nearly impossible to get it going in EDH. No one is going to let you go 5 turns without getting hit by anyone at all, even if you’re fogging a ton and proliferating. I don’t think you’re likely to win via Elecutors, but I think the foils are under $2, are showing signs of life, especially vis-a-vis the buylist (shown as a blue line) price moving and there’s little downside here with advisors being relevant.

I like to shy away from P3K stuff because there’s nothing saying they can’t reprint it and it would make this a $0.02 card overnight, but you can’t argue with that graph shape. Besides, they reprint one P3K card a year, on average. Sorry about your “Borrowing 100,000 Arrows” but 3 Visits continues to be an astounding amount and will be until they print it in a commander set or something.

It takes a lot to perk up a bulk mythic from a recent (ish) set, especially when the graph is trending in the wrong direction, but this is a penny stock you could scoop up by the armload and potentially offload for like $0.50 to $1 each to a buylist in a while. Either Advisors are so good that Arbiter Augustin’s price doubled in under a month and Michiko is ready to pop or it can’t move a bulk mythic at all. I think the answer could be in the middle depending how much the deck gets built, but attacking with creatures in EDH is dumb and frustrating so a whole new class of player who didn’t want to trifle with Ripple Rats suddenly has a combo deck to play and that’s exciting.

The graph of the foil is similarly-discouraging, although it’s under $2 and that’s attractive (if I were to buy any foil under $2, it would be Arcane Denial, but that’s just me – I’ll beat that drum until it’s $10). This card is good in the deck if the deck is a deck, and its abilities still work if you tap it to mill.

This card kind of doesn’t suck. It’s a bulk foil from a very long time ago and the graph is showing slight, slight, slight signs of life with respect to a convergence of retail and buylist price. This isn’t quite War Tax but it’s worth having in a deck and has a big butt, which is useful sometimes.

Lol wut?

Oh. Yeah, this basically means the buyout is underway, but if you can ferret out a cheaper copy from somewhere, just know that you can list a NM copy for under $500 and be the cheapest TCG Player listing. Most likely this goes to $50 or so and ends up at $35, so bear that in mind. Here’s a better look at the graph before Action Adventure got involved.

There are so few copies of this card that any seller can have a profound effect on data, so be careful when you see graphs and other scrapers reporting prices. The obscure corners of the internet might have some affordable copies of this so get sleuthing.

P3K is risky because a reprint pantses you, but Bad Archivist over here look like it has decent underlying metrics and is a probably a low reprint risk.

I liked how this card played already. It fits both of our criteria that I outlined before we looked at the list. The one strike against this is that it’s in 2 different Commander 2016 precons including the Atraxa deck and that means it’s twice as common as say, Deepglow Skate. That said, it’s ONLY twice as common as Deepglow Skate. This could be a thing and the price is already sloping toward money town.

I have to mill myself to avoid damage? Throw me in the briar patch!

Look, you likely can’t make money buying this but if you have Alliances bulk, you have these. Yank them and I bet someone buys them on TCG Player because it goes in the deck.

There are a few more Azorius-colored advisors like Sram that I didn’t mention and a few other bad P3K ones, but I think these cards go in the deck and have a chance at seeing play. That’s what I advise, anyway.

Thanks for reading. Join me next week where we potentially have the fallout of a major announcement affecting Modern and therefore maybe us, to parse. If not, EDH is the gift that keeps on giving and we’ll have plenty to discuss. Your homework for the week is go to EDHREC and figure out how to use the filters at the top to find decks of Augustin that are going to be specific to petitioners builds. Do you see anything juicy on that page you didn’t see before you filtered?

Until next time!