Readers,

I don’t want to do a 2018 Retrospective. Sorry. I was going to go back and reread every article I wrote in 2018 and select my best picks but, nah. You want to do that? That’s a pretty good idea. I was very insightful this year. I predicted a lot of things not because I am especially smart but because I spent 7 years of trial and error honing a strategy for predicting things and it’s working out because I use an analytical, data-driven approach. You are smart enough to have done it. You easily could have. You didn’t because it’s easier to pay me to do it for you. I don’t change my own oil. I know how. I think I learned in the Cub Scouts or something. The Boy Scouts you learn to do stuff but the Cub Scouts are when you’re like 9 and you get an award for watching your Dad change the oil or your grandfather or your Mom or whoever taught you to do man stuff. I feel like I changed my own oil a few times after that and said “I don’t want to do this myself” so I don’t. I pay some dude at Uncle Ed’s to change my oil. I’m not better than him, I just don’t want to do a dirty job in my garage when I can pay a dude in dirty clothes in a dirty garage to do it. So that’s my approach to finance- I’m just a dude changing your oil. You want to change your own oil? Go look it up on Youtube and then go buy the pan and the oil and rags and lava soap for when your hands are all oily afterward and junk and, oh, look at that, you spent as much as an oil change costs and your wife is pissed off that there’s oil residue on her guest towels.

What was I even talking about? 2018 has been incredibly taxing on me and we’re about to have another kid in the middle of 2019 and I will probably never sleep again. That’s good, though, because any inefficiencies in my method are about to get ironed out because I won’t have like 4 hours to blow writing an article, I’ll be dealing with a 3 year old and an infant. With 2018 officially over, why not look to 2019? Go read my old articles from 2018 if you want – there’s good stuff in there. but let’s talk about something else from 2018 instead. Let’s talk about a set that’s basically peaking right now.

B A T T L E B O N D

Battlebond was a smashing success and married everything I want in Magic. I write about EDH, 2HG is my favorite format and I dabble in finance and Battlebond checks all of those boxes, making the Conspiracy set the first 2 Conspiracy sets wish they were. So what’s peaking right now? Let’s take a look.

With very few exceptions, EDH is where these cards are being played, which is a huge plus for EDH players since no one is fighting them for the cards to a large extent. Other EDH players are, though, so it’s time to get some of the stuff that’s showing signs of twitching. When you sort by most-used on EDHREC, it’s predictable at first. I bet you can guess the first 5 cards. Also, saying it’s 5 cards is a hint. Also, your peripheral vision is probably picking up the answer because I’m displaying the pic below. I’ll just link it now, you know the answer, it’s the lands, I didn’t trick you at any point.

Blue, White, Green, Black, Red, in that order. Of course the two Blue lands are played the most, that’s obvious. What wasn’t obvious was how much play Spellseeker was seeing.

At 1,174 decks, this isn’t EXACTLY a staple but if you compare that to the number of copies of Luxury Suite, 1,344, and you realize that all of the numbers are pretty low. Remember, the numbers in ratio to each other is more important than a raw number. A raw number can’t tell you much but the fact that Spellseeker is in half as many decks as Morphic Pool and almost as many as Luxury Suite tells you all you need to know. This is $4 on TCG Player which is high for a rare, except not the highest it could be. Besides the 5 Battlebond lands, Seedborn Muse and Diabolic Intent are worth more. Spellseeker has strong EDH metrics, has a non-zero amount of Legacy play (3 results on MTGTop8, which isn’t nothing. There were 89 results for it in Competitive EDH events). This is half the price of Morphic Pools and played half as much. Do you think the price of Luxury Suite will stay the same? If it goes up, I expect this to go up just as much. I’d peg its price to .5x Morphic Pools or 1x Bountiful Promenade and buy accordingly. Oh, and this is a $32 foil, so it’s pretty clear people are aware of how powerful this is. It’s not going to spike as easily as, say, Archfiend of Despair, but considering that already happened, this a better play considering there is still time to buy in. Also, Archfiend is played less – half as much per EDHREC.

Speaking of cards whose prices will likely rise and fall together, let’s look at another pair of cards.

I don’t think there is a 10:1 ratio between mythics and non-mythics and as little play as both seem to be seeing in an absolute sense, Pir’s Whim sees play in half as many decks as Spellseeker and made a lot of EDH writers’ Top 10 lists this year. Pir’s Whim is under the radar and like it or not, short of it getting played on The Command Zone, it likely will be for a while. That’s too bad because the card is actually bananas. It says land card, not basic land card. You could blow up 3 Sol Rings and go get a Gaea’s Cradle with this. Bramble Sovereign is good but it’s demonstrably not much more popular than Whim but it’s perceived to be more popular. Another great thing about Pir’s Whim is that at $7 or so for foil, there is room for growth. It debuted at around $15 and has been sinking since, but if it ever starts to rebound, it’s going places. We got less Battlebond than we wanted and it’s unlikely a card called Pir’s Whim will get a reprint anytime soon, so that $7 foil could be $15 again before you know it.

Even more popular than the Lannister twins, these foils are $10 each and not as common as you may think. The buylist market price on Pir is the same as the retail price, which may be a fluke but may also indicate a price change is incoming.

Interestingly enough, these are actually cheaper on Card Kingdom than on TCG Player, which means the market is moving the price faster than a retailer can keep up with. It also means their buylist, usually the gold standard, is only about $4. I don’t know what the disparity means, but I do know that most people tend to get their signals from TCG Player so you may be able to get a near arbitrage going with the $7 foils on Card Kingdom. The price of these toofy bois is going up, I can feel it deep in my molars.

Last Pair

These are both pretty underrated cards in terms of what people say they like from the set but when you look at what people are actually playing versus what they say they would play, you get cards like this, cards I called in past set reviews and took heat for, overperforming expectations. At 550ish, these are just below Archfiend and above Bramble Sovereign. Should these be worth more than a buck or two right now? Hard to say they should given that they see a 5th as much play as Morphic Pool.  Would it surprise you to know Bonus Round is sold out at $8 in foil and Stolen Strategy is almost sold out at $12? Bonus Round has been flat around $8 for a minute but if it’s beginning to sell out, take notice. Strategy is on the downswing and $12 might not be the floor, but considering the demand here is identical almost except for the possibility of play in other formats (couldn’t find any evidence of that on Top8) I think these prices will eventually be the same. Whether they’re the same at $6 or the same at $15, that’s your call. I will say after Najeela and the lands, Bonus Round is the 5th-most-played card and Strategy 6th and it’s tough to argue with data and apologize to me for telling me I was dumb to say a do-nothing red Enchantment was worth playing at the same time.

That does it for me this week. Battlebond is beginning to ripen and with no supply on the horizon, those lands are prime to hit the $10 I know they can be. Buy the other stuff accordingly and keep reading my dumb ideas in 2019. A blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. Until next time!

Readers,

I was going to do my 2018 wrap-up today but I think I’ll do that next week. Next Tuesday is the first day of 2019 and that will be a good time to look back at all the calls I made over the past year and if any of them are poised to do something big in 2019, I want to remind everyone it’s time to have the copies to move when they pop. I think there are a quite a few long-to-medium-term picks I’ve made that are going to make us all some money. Today, though, I have to figure out what to talk about and I thought I’d mention something I found while exploring other sites, something I do sometimes.

MTG Price’s tools are coming back with a vengeance next year and while peak MTG Price is my favorite go-to source for data, I do like to use other sites and encourage everyone to cast a wide net. Something that MTG Stocks does well is to flag things that have gone up a bit and could go up more and also flag big jumps you probably missed if they’re outside your wheelhouse or if a minor event pushed some amount of supply over a virtual cliff and triggered and avalanche. One such avalanche happened this week and it got me thinking about similar cards. As much as I like to deride people who only seem to talk about cards after they go up, that information isn’t always useless if you can apply it to similar cards that are waiting for a similar event to push them. Specifically, how much play does a card need to get in EDH to push its price if supply, if low (like for a foil or promo, for example) enough to trigger a precipitous increase in price? What card am I even talking about, for starters?

Looking at the interests page on MTG Stocks, I found some interesting foil price changes in the past 24 hours. I’d check their site for a minute or two a day just so you don’t miss anything major. So what the heck is going on with Battle Hymn?

I don’t know that fewer than 3,000 inclusions and no discernible new event could have done this. Is it speculation on new Gruul or Rakdos strategies? I’m not really much of an authority on competitive Magic anymore, so I lean on MTG Top8 the way I encourage people who don’t know EDH to use EDHREC. It’s not the be-all, end-all but I can usually figure out 90% of what’s going on just by searching for a card’s name on either or both of the two sites and since there are so many cards with potential, I tend to focus on other cards instead of really drilling down for that last 10%. Maybe someone on salvation or reddit or some secret Discord cabal where people who are bad at MTG Finance decide which terrible Visions card on the Reserved List they’re going to pretend was driven by EDH demand when they buy it out (This week it was Eye of Singularity) said something, but I don’t care. So, striking out on EDHREC, I checked MTG Top8.

I don’t think it was a tournament event that I could find. It could just be a supply issue. The next thing I am going to check is that this price is actually correct.

Looks like a TCG Player Buyout. Who knows why they did it? Check smaller sites to see if they have copies left for the old price since if that $16 doesn’t stick, it will likely stabilize halfway between the peak price and the old pre-spike price even if the spike was induced by some weird buying behavior. You can do that since you need to go to those sites to buy the cards anyway. I’m not about to talk about a card after it goes up then expect credit if you get copies at the old price, but I can hope to use this weird spike to help you find the next insane price bump. To do that, let’s look at cards from the same set and see if anything is getting more play in EDH and could see a similar bump if the same thing that happened to Battle Hymn happens. Back to EDHREC.

Using the “sets” tab, I am going to look at the commons and uncommons in Avacyn Restored and maybe a few older sets to see if there are any of those cards in more decks than Battle Hymn that need less of a nudge from an event outside of EDH and only have one printing to see if we can get ahead of the next weird buyout. If I’m missing an event and you know what it was that made Battle Hymn pop, leave it in the comments section. However, I’m operating under the assumption that what it was is immaterial if we can reasonably rely on it happening again to a card of similar or greater scarcity with similar or more demand. This will be fun.

At just under the number of decks Battle Hymn is played in, Seraph Sanctuary is worth looking at. It has a reprinting but in a duel deck with no foil printing meaning it has only been printed in foil once. I think reprint risk is pretty low, this card has some utility and I think this could reasonably double. If you’re hoping to buylist after the spike, stay away, but if you have a retail out, this seems safe and low-supply.

Every card in Avacyn Resored played more than Battle Hymn is rare, is Blood Artist or is Ghostly Flicker with multiple foil printings. That’s OK, I’m going to keep digging.

This was an interesting find. at 4,023 decks and no foil reprinting, Mask of Avacyn was curiously sold out on Card Kingdom. Off to TCG Player to look at price and supply over there. Here are the results.  In summary, there are 26 listings, Near Mint foils start at $2.50 and $5 seems like a reasonable out. If Battle Hymn can mysteriously hit $15 as the result of a buyout, this card could climb near there and stay there on what appears to be organic demand. Some people still ship me non-foils in bulk do it’s worth discussing this card at least once this year so people know it’s a pick. Keep shipping them to me in bulk if you have been, though. I’m having another kid and college is expensive.

Speaking of Innistrad equipment, here’s a card in more decks than Battle Hymn. If it was mere EDH demand that drove Hymn, this could get above $5. I think this will be a slow, organic gainer, but I also think this is unlikely to get reprinted soon and I like it though less than mask.

If Battle Hymn can maintain above $8, so can this. With Afterlife coming and introducing a bunch of Sprouting Thrinax variants into white EDH Aristocrats decks, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this go up sooner rather than later. We’re not looking at cards that much older than Hymn, but we’re finding stuff that is already “known” though is maybe undervalued. I expect Absorb to pop this week based on Ravnica Allegiance so why not this? For reference, Phyrexia’s Core, in fewer decks, is $10 on Card Kingdom.

If Priest could go up based on Orzhov, guess what could go up based on Simic?

Another $6 card that seems like it should be worth more. I’m comparing Priest and Drake to Phyrexia’s Core, which sees play outside of EDH a little bit but not double. I think Drake and Priest are sort of high buy-ins but supply is low and if 4 copies disappear, Card Kingdom activates their famous buylist and people take notice. I think the 34 listings on TCG Player vanish and then some jackass (me?) lists on for $25 on TCG Player, MTG Stocks gets triggered and some other me comes along and can’t figure out why Drake popped and writes an article about other cards in the same set that could be next to hit $15 and did I just become the kind of lazy financier I like to deride? I’m not telling you to do a buyout on Viral Drake. I’m not even pointing out it would be really easy to do it. I’m stating I think Drake’s days are numbered as it is considering how it interacts with Simic Ascendency and other cards and I think 34 people wanting a foil in the next 3 months is reasonable and you’d rather be in at $6 ready to sell than in at $16 hoping to sell before they’re $12.

There are more cards like the ones I found and you can use EDHREC to find them easily. Click the “sets” tab then click on a set and it will organize them from most EDH play to least and you can click on the individual card from that list to be taken to its EDHREC page where you can see the decks it goes in and click links to go to the price page on Card Kingdom and TCG player. If you’re going to buy, follow those links because EDHREC gets a cut and you were going to buy the card anyway.

One last card I’ll mention because I like it and not because data supports it is this bad boy.

It’s probably too late to affordably buy the foil and I am so bad at foil finance I didn’t even check when I tried to buy all of the non-foils a few months ago. However, they’re half as much on Card Kingdom as they are on TCG Player and I expect both prices on the non-foils are incorrect if this is a $15 foil. I like non-foils at a buck each quite a bit. I think this card is going places and I got a foil in bulk because people love to not have to look up prices on bad cards. Do it for them and let $15 foil uncommons make it worth doing.

That does it for me. Check back in a week for my Best of 2018 pickstravaganza. Until next time!

If you’re like me and you’re always looking for an excuse to reference Duran Duran tunes from the 80s, you’ll love the title to this article. If you’re like also me and love Magic cards that are new and are about to evolve their own brand new archetypes, or at least make people think they’re going to. I can delve more into the Simic later because I think it will matter but I think there’s a ton of hype surrounding a certain card that was spoiled today (Monday) and I think whether or not the deck amounts to anything, there is a ton of hype. The card, of course, not just because it’s the only commander spoiled so far this week but also because it’s the only Azorius card spoiled so far, is this bundle of joy.

Blue Gaddock Teeg, as she likes to be called, is about to make life pretty miserable. If you just leave her on the battlefield, she’s going to shut down Etali, Intet, Narset, Maelstrom Wanderer and a host of decks that use mana rocks to ramp. If you play with Armageddon and other white Land Destruction, you’ll make it so they can’t recover quickly enough to catch you. If you go even farther, well, you can make sure you’re the only one who plays a game of Magic and IO think that’s pretty nifty. Let’s take a look at all the ways we can do that.

Building This Weird Deck

People are brainstorming a ton right now, and none of what they’re discussing is at all kind. I don’t know how inclined everyone is to build such an antisocial deck and whether they’ll keep playing it for long, so let’s prepare to buy and sell into hype rather than hoping for long-term prospects.

As I said earlier, left to its own devices, Lavinia isn’t really an EDH card that much.

It’s a good point he’s making – a lot of the times, just Lavinia is like a tenth as effective as Gaddock Teeg. In order for Lavinia to be worth it, you’re going to need to really steer into building around her and you’re going to do some things that prevent other people from playing Magic. Add to that the fact that these sort of combos were already doable before Lavinia was printed, and I think the window on this stuff is pretty narrow, so let’s get in and get out. However, you never had a major combo piece in the command zone before and being able to play a combo piece without having to tutor for it, so that’s new. Also, the theorycrafting is all over reddit and twitter in a way it wasn’t before, so let’s look at what people would have to buy.

This is the most obvious card here and reddit is full of people saying “Well, just ordered a Well” which means someone made $0.35 on TCG Player (well, they made $2 because of the minimum, so that’s cool) but it will take quite a bit to move the needle on this. I think if a lot of people buy hard, people will have to pay a buck or two and the new price may stick. We’ve seen non-mythic rares from Mirrodin Besieged spike on less, but this is an expensive card that’s good in this one new deck and is also a horrible, antisocial card in similar combos in other decks and that made it $0.35, so bear all that in mind.

On a similar note, Omen Machine reduces their total playables to the cards that were in their hand when you cast Omen Machine. That can be a big problem for them but not for you, which is delightful. This is in the same boat as Knowledge Pool though maybe it’s 25% less obvious and that’s a problem for it since the supply is probably a little higher. These are both bulk rares and sometimes it takes more than the inkling of maybe making an EDH deck that people may or may not actually build to make it go anywhere, but I’m just giving you the information, you can decide what to do with it yourself.

Here is a card with a much better chance of doing something, in my opinion. It’s got a non-zero amount of play, is older and is just as dirty in the Lavinia deck because if they do play anything into the eye, they can’t play copies but you can. It’s not only a hoser, it makes all of your spells go crazy. It’s expensive, but your mana rocks work even if theirs don’t. I mean, their rocks work, but they can’t use them as ramp and if you start blowing their lands up, they won’t work anymore. You can add some cards like Null Rod or Stony Silence if you really want to hose them.  Is hosing them with Eye of the Storm not enough? There are lots more asymmetrical effects.

A real card with real other prospects about to get a bump from this dumb combo? Delightful! It’s down from its historic peak and could hit that amount again, this is honestly probably just a reminder to get Dream Halls because it’s on the Reserved List and isn’t coming off. You can cheat, they can’t cheat, it’s great. Keep Lavinia around and you can be the only one playing spells for cheap with Dream Halls, which could help you Enter the Infinite for the win while they can’t Force of Will, which happens sometimes in EDH. This is poised to do stuff and I think this is a good choice whether you’re looking at things to buy based on Lavinia or not.

It’s not just EDH

Other formats are getting in on the Lavinia fun, too, so why not at least look at what they’re saying?

The Spikes subreddit post was way less helpful than I had anticipated. It was mostly full of memes about how this hurts Tron, just like every card that comes out in every set that never really stops Tron.

Discouraged by not finding anything in the subreddit for serious players, I did my due diligence anyway and checked the general Magic sub, which is a lot like stumping your doctor with a health question and asking an actor who played a chiropractor in a commercial. Surprisingly, the tv bone crackers were onto something – a delightful synergy I missed.

Hey, if your Queller dies with Lavinia out, they don’t get their spell back. Fun. I am not sure which crazy hybrid of humans and spirits will run this doofy combo, but it’s a thing in EDH potentially but Modern-minded people cracked the code rather than EDH people and I read every dumb comment on that dumb thread in the EDH sub. It pays to read around – Magic players find combos in 6 minutes that playtesters couldn’t find in 6 months because of the sheer number of people all taking a whack at a problem.

They also found some synergy with other card I’m less impressed by.

Cute combo involving a very recent bulk rare? Meh. But if the deck is a deck, this is in that deck. I don’t think this can move the needle but I do think that it’s not worth keeping data from you. Make up your own mind.

Ultimately there will be some new archetypes based on new commanders, probably ones better than this card which seems optimized for 60 card formats. However, a non-zero number of people will at least buy a few cards intended to build this and we should be ready. They recorded it 4 months ago, but if someone played this on Game Knights, watch out. Based on Josh’s tweet, it probably wasn’t him, but you never know.

That’s all for me this week. I’ll write more when we know more. Until next time!

Readers! I am on a bit of a roll lately, writing what are at least my best-received articles if not my best-written and I would like to keep that streak alive and offer some real value this week. Continuing a bit from what we established last week in an article that if you haven’t read yet, you should and then come back and read this one. We established that artifacts and other colorless cards that have the potential to go in any deck tend to go in twice as many decks as similar “tier” staples that are limited to going into only decks of a certain color. The math is a little fuzzy, but we’re coming to a conclusion that “an artifact is basically twice as playable” which isn’t that exact and doesn’t need to be. That rule can be a rule we use every set we evaluate moving forward and as long as you check my math and, you know, agree with me, that factor of 2x can be something that helps you make assessments moving forward.

Armed both with that (vague, but so what?) factor and also the same process we used to come to those conclusions, we can therefore take a look at cards in Ultimate Masters and determine whether they are more or less likely than a card we consider a baseline “likely to recover in price” and make our buys with that knowledge in mind. It needn’t be the only factor we use to determine whether a card is worth buying now (prices have dipped and some are already showing signs of a brief recovery which might not hold, but people are already saying now is a good time to start buying in) but it can inform some of your future buying decisions when weighed against other factors. Or not, just ignore other factors and buy what I say to because you’re not paying for article access to have to think afterward, you’re paying me to think. Well, here’s what I think.

Ace or Base?

The first thing we need to do in order to figure out if something is above or below our “likely/not likely to recover in price” line is to figure out where it is. I am remaining relatively agnostic to cards used outside of EDH unless they’re used in EDH also. I can’t ignore the effects of other formats but I can mainly stick to cards that are largely used in EDH and to that end, I decided to use the handy feature of EDHREC where you can click on a full set and it will list the cards in order of EDH inclusion. The number one EDH card in terms of total EDHREC deck inclusions from Ultimate Masters? You guessed it. Terramorphic Expanse (You thought it was Eternal Witness, didn’t you? Me too.) I lucked out a bit in that prices hadn’t been updated in a few days so I got to look at the price of the cards before people started cracking packs for the most part which helps me figure out how much certain cards tanked which is a factor in determining how much they’re likely to rebound.

I think, personally, the line should be at Gamble. I think Gamble isn’t likely to recover a ton but I think cards used more than Gamble (and reprinted less) are more likely to recover and cards used less are less likely.

At 10k decks, Gamble is 28th on the list of cards in Ultimate Masters ranked by inclusion. Gamble has had a little play outside of EDH but that was basically inclusion in the Lands deck in Legacy and I hate to say it, but Legacy isn’t really driving prices like it used to. Gamble probably stays the same-ish and with the Eternal Masters version of the card down to $12 on Card Kingdom before the reprint and the Ultimate Masters version currently selling for $3.50, I don’t know if Gamble has the chops to make up for lost ground. If it does, that just means we have a higher degree of confidence in the cards we pick above Gamble and could see opportunity in sub-Gamble picks like Balefire Dragon, Phyrexian Altar and Glen Elendra Archamage.

Bubble Cards (Immediately Sub-Gamble)

I think if we don’t expect Gamble to regain more than like 50% of the $6 it lost, these cards are even less likely. Phyrexian Altar’s price was largely predicated on scarcity and as much as I loved to harp on how much it needed a reprint, that wasn’t because I thought it was a good investment post-reprint. I think Altar is used in only one format, is in fewer than 10,000 decks and doesn’t quite have the chops to get there. Phyrexian Tower and Gamble get played in Legacy and Karn and All is Dust get played in Modern to the extent that the EDH play may be an after thought but they’re still in the top 40 cards in the set in terms of play. I think we can safely ignore Modern cards and focus on EDH cards. Balefire Dragon’s price seems largely predicated on scarcity even though it’s relatively recent but I think it’s still less likely than Gamble to recover. These cards could go either way, but since there are much juicier targets, why worry about them? If you want them to play with, you can safely buy in at the current price and not feel too bad about it.

Relatively Certain Gainers (Immediately Super-Gamble)

The 13 cards immediately above Gamble look good. I think we can all agree Life From The Loam is likely to rebound just as a gut feeling so drawing the line above it didn’t make sense and even if we’re wrong about Gamble being our baseline, we can agree Loam probably goes up. Now we’re not sorting by EDH+other formats so the order the cards are in can be misleading when sorted solely by EDH demand, but all this does is tell us which cards we should zoom in on and take a second look at. Let’s look at Loam.

Before the reprinting, the last reprinting of Loam (Izzet Vs Golgari) were $24 on Card Kingdom. Today, the Ultimate Masters version is $14 and could probably go down a bit more – it’s $11 on TCG Player and players are racing each other to the bottom. Either way, it lost about $10. It has recovered exactly that amount before.

The Lord Windgrace deck didn’t suck for Loam and neither did people toying with Dredge in Modern, but between April 2017 and October 2018, the value recovered and then some, and that’s with a duel deck printing and a Masters set printing. Eventually this will stop recovering, but I don’t think this will be the printing that does it.

So what about a card that’s not getting any help from other formats? $23 or so and bafflingly more on TCG Player before the reprinting, today you can grab an Ultimate Masters copy of Mikaeus for $14 on Card Kingdom or $12 on TCG Player. If you’re going to do that, you may as well grab the $35 box-topper, which is significantly less than the set foil price. I think Mikaeus, despite only being an EDH card, could see a rebound. It’s in more than 10k decks which is a bit of an arbitrary cut-off and only really means something relative to the other cards current for the number of decks listed but we do tend to see stronger rebounds for cards above that cut-off so I’m going to use it (with caution).

I think given its EDH-only play, Mikaeus is less likely to regain 100% of what it lost than Loam but it’s a mythic whereas Loam is a rare and that should help tremendously. All in all, I’d say Mikaeus is a good pickup right now.

This is worth mentioning because I have a penchant for blue commons in foil and this is the first and only printing of this art in foil. It’s currently significantly cheaper than the much more rare set foil. Card Kingdom is sold out of Urza’s Legacy foils at $33 and you can currently snag UMA foils for $5 on Card Kingdom or a $3 listed median/$1 market price on TCG Player. $1 is very incorrect for a cube, pauper and EDH card like this. Cheap foils of this seem like a Dramatic Reversal or Arcane Denial waiting to happen.

With solid EDH play, this card seems poised to recover a pretty decent chunk of the $18 or so it just lost. A card losing half of its value can be pretty brutal and while Loam seems poised to recover all of its value, copies of Loam go out 4 at a time in non-EDH formats whereas copies of Kozilek don’t. I think this is less likely than Loam to recover all of the value it lost. The one saving grace is that this was always reprinted at mythic and that’s a huge help.

This is a graph showing the recovery last time which was pretty robust considering the peak of nearly $70 was pretty nutty.  I think the mythic printing can help this pull out of the spin and recover roughly half of what it lost.

Basically the cards above this tier seem fairly certain to recover and I’m not sure they bear much discussion.

If you were to somehow list the cards by EDH+all other formats’ demand, I think some of the cards from this tier would be lower and lower-tier cards would be higher, but for the most part, I think the stuff in this tier will recover well, provided there is something to recover. I think Thespians’ Stage is probably crushed forever except in foil and commons and uncommons are likely going to lose so little value that it won’t be hard to make it back up, but this tier has a lot of strong cards. Eternal Witness is the poster child for shrugging off reprints, Demonic Tutor hasn’t been printed in like 5 years and even then it was Duel Deck Anthologies so it’s basically been out of print since 2008, Kodama’s Reach has new art which should help it out and Urborg is Urborg. I think the cards in this tier with the obvious exceptions of Rogue’s Passage and Terramorphic Expanse which have both been printed into powder, we should see some strong recovery here. My favorites here are foil Eternal Witness, both Demonic Tutor in foil and not, and Mana Vault.

I think just sorting cards in terms of EDH inclusion can help you think about what has a chance of recovering by seeing the cards “ranked” and while there are some cards over- or under-represented in the tiers due to their play outside of EDH and whether they’re a 4-of in those formats, but for the most part, I think the cards are grouped appropriately. Agree? Disagree? Nitpick in the comments. Thanks for reading, readers. Until next time!