All posts by Jason Alt

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
Jason Alt, ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Tier Two Space Marines

Readers!

Warhammer continues to give and give and today it’s giving us enough data to drill down into the 5-10 spots. Our top 5 is pretty much covered, but the extent to which those decks overlap could be very significant. I’m going to do that thing again where I use the list comparison tool to see which Black cards, if any, can be used in all three decks and therefore have a significant impact despite their being in separate decks. I feel like I understand what I’m talking about but I don’t know if I’m explaining myself enough so I’ll Illustrate. 

Here we have the top 5 Commanders in the set. A card that’s a staple in Ghryson Starn is in more decks than a card in an Imotekh deck. However, a card that’s in Imotekh, Trazyn and Szarek will be in 564 decks, more than Abbadon, Be’lakor, Marneus Calgar and Magus Lucea Kane. A “black commanders” staple represents as many decks as any other commander except for the insanely popular space cowboy that turns every Tim into a Kahaml, Pit Fighter. Sound exciting? I think Grey Popupon looks like a cool commander and I’ll likely build the deck.

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

To learn more about being a ProTrader, click here to see all the benefits.

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

So a Black staple likely encompasses a lot of deck, and maybe more than just these three commanders condidering we have a Grixis deck and an Esper deck. Black cards are super hot and the necrons, I’m told, bring themselves and others back to life? I think? If they’re doing something that uses a card that most decks don’t use and they’re all using it, it’s worth a look.

If you didn’t catch it the last few times I did it, I use a list comparison tool and copy and paste the EDHREC “average deck” into the tool to see if any cards are in all 3 lists and if any are in two but are played quite a bit. It’s quick and dirty but so much of MTG Finance is just bothering to do tedious stuff or paying me to do it for you.

A whopping 26 shared cards! I’m sure there are a lot of lands on the list and maybe some mana rocks, but with a full quarter of the deck shared between the three, there are bound to be one or two overlaps, and that’s all we need to feel good about a card.

1 Arcane Signet
1 Biotransference
1 Cabal Coffers
1 Caged Sun
1 Chronomancer
1 Cryptothrall
1 Darkness
1 Defile
1 Endless Atlas
1 Foundry Inspector
1 Gilded Lotus
1 Go for the Throat
1 Illuminor Szeras
1 Mind Stone
1 Mutilate
1 Myriad Landscape
1 Mystic Forge
1 Out of the Tombs
1 Reanimate
1 Reliquary Tower
1 Sceptre of Eternal Glory
1 Sol Ring
1 Their Name Is Death
1 Thought Vessel
1 Tomb Fortress
1 Vault of Whispers

Getting rid of format staples, mana rocks and common removal, we have a pretty nice list, honestly.


1 Biotransference
1 Chronomancer
1 Cryptothrall
1 Darkness
1 Defile
1 Endless Atlas
1 Foundry Inspector
1 Illuminor Szeras
1 Mystic Forge
1 Out of the Tombs
1 Reanimate
1 Sceptre of Eternal Glory
1 Their Name Is Death
1 Tomb Fortress

There are a few cards that are interesting in the 2 deck list, especially the 35 shared cards between Izzle and Sizzle (I gave up on these dumb names), which would seem to select out Black format staples since those cards would also be in Tizzle but aren’t. Trazyn only shares 3 non-staples (Bolas’ Citadel, Feed the Swarm and KCI) with Izzle and 1 card (Convergence of Dominion) with Sizzle.

We can safely ignore those 4 cards, I think, because these decks won’t make a big enough splash to move the needle on something like Bolas Citadel that’s in 100k decks and Convergence is a bulk rare. I’m also kind of suspicious of anything that comes in the precon – it likely get used alongside any of these three decks but also, I think people tend to over-represent cards in precons when they first register their decks to Archidekt or Moxfield (anyone but TappedOut, really). I think there are some cards on this list worth a look, though.

This is cool in this deck specifically but I can’t recommend a $7 buy-in on a precon card that isn’t already identified as totally bonkers. If this keeps plummeting, give it another look, maybe, but I’m out at $7, especially as the buylist value tanks. I mean, if I’m interpreting a trend from 2 data points and calling myself a scientist, that is, and I’m not.

I looked at all of the rest of the precon cards and I don’t like any of them. Anyone who builds the deck will need the commander and a lot of the singles and it’s easier to just shell out $90 or whatever they want to charge for one of these at their LGS. I don’t think the Biotransference Demand will outstrip the supply is what I’m saying.

This barely went 18 months before it got a reprint and tanked to a buck but it’s pretty precipitously climbing back to its early $5 before this new reprinting, and if it’s left alone, this hits $10 and keeps going up. It’s a shoo-in for future mono-color EDH precons, so maybe out these to a buylist if they announce something like that, but I think if these are $1 on TCG Player and the ceiling is $8, I’m still good with it. I’d love to see this card hit $10, and I think it has the juice.

This is limited by only really going in mono-color decks, but there are a lot of those and people like them. This is a good card and I like it even more at the $1 we already watched it quintuple from.

There has never been a period of time where I observed the price graph of this card and said it was a bad time to buy, and I’m not going to start now that the ugly, ugly reprint in this precon is going to make the value super cheap. this is an $8 card, I’m OK paying like $2 right now.

If the TCG Player price graph is to be believed, we have hit the floor already. The precon art is ugly, but that just makes older copies more desirable. This will bounce, scoop some free money.

Finally, I wonder if the list of cards shared between Imotekh and S-dog are interesting – there are 35 of them after all.

1 Anrakyr the Traveller
1 Barren Moor
1 Beacon of Unrest
1 Buried Ruin
1 Canoptek Scarab Swarm
1 Canoptek Spyder
1 Canoptek Tomb Sentinel
1 Canoptek Wraith
1 Commander’s Sphere
1 Cranial Plating
1 Cryptek
1 Desert of the Glorified
1 Dread Return
1 Flayed One
1 Ghost Ark
1 Hedron Archive
1 Living Death
1 Lokhust Heavy Destroyer
1 Lychguard
1 Mask of Memory
1 Necron Deathmark
1 Necron Overlord
1 Psychomancer
1 Resurrection Orb
1 Royal Warden
1 Sculpting Steel
1 Shard of the Void Dragon
1 Skorpekh Lord
1 Technomancer
1 The War in Heaven
1 Their Number Is Legion
1 Trazyn the Infinite
1 Triarch Praetorian
1 Triarch Stalker
1 Wayfarer’s Bauble

I’m not going to do that Searching for Bobby Fischer thing where I smack all of the pieces off of the chess board to make you see what I want, I’ll literally just go through and pick them out myself, it’s cool.

There are very few non-precon cards here. I feel like increasingly people are just leaving the decks together, but we’re seeing some high synergy cards in all of these decks that aren’t format staples or in the precon, so while there is a lot of noise caused by the homogenization from the precons, there is still a signal, we just have to find it. Of the reprints here, I’m very interested in Living Death and Beacon of Unrest.

If this card is impacted by the reprint, it will be the first time since late 2017 that it happened and that was a period over which the price tripled. I think this still has the juice to get back up to $10, but I wouldn’t buy the precon version of any of these cards, personally.

Whereas Beacon has never shrugged off a reprint in its life.

This is too cheap by half.

This card is too cheap, specifically on TCG Player.

That’s all for today. I think there are some cards that overlap between the decks, but even if you do this and don’t find anything, it’s less than 60 seconds worth of cutting and pasting to do it. I encourage you all to let tools do the sorting for you and you’ll discover some budding demand you would have missed otherwise. Thanks for reading. Until next time!

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Out With The New

Readers! A lot can change in 7 days. From last week’s article, here is a graphic of the 5 most recent sets in the EDHREC dropdown menu.

And here is, and I’m definitely padding the word count to create somewhat of a buffer between the two images in case you’re on, like, mobile, I guess? And you have big old Kind Charles fingers and can’t select one without the other? I feel like I did it, and not a second too soon because you have to get a lot of this BS. This is that same menu 7 days later.

Superlative. No notes. Is there a reason for this glut of products apart from 40k being delayed?

Super duper. OK, then. Since we’re all whales, now and Ol’ Cap’n Ahabsbro seems to want to see us all dead. If Magic goes away, I need to get a real big boy job and I have 0 skills. I’m like an indoor cat who ended up outside with a dog whose internal monologue is voiced by… I want to say Scoot McNairy. Actually that sounds pretty chill. I’m like a 38 year old with no relevant experience in the last decade who can’t pass a drug test. That’s what I’m like. And I’m scared.

The cure for the “I wasted my life on a children’s card game that doesn’t love me back” blues is more hot specs. With new sets every week comes new specs every week. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Looks like the community is spoiling to build around this creature all the Vorthos people recognize from the Ice Age comic book that came with a free pack of Fallen Empires but I’ve never heard of. The only way to get a deck built is to build it before the set’s out because by the time you have the physical cardboard, they’ve spoiled 2 more sets and 8 more secret lairs. Let’s look at these specs, shall we?

No real shock here. Kayla likely gets built as a mean, stax style deck that you can sac your own pieces to get them back. Everything that makes her better at doing what she does is 2 or 3 mana and an Artifact or Creature. This is basically a Tiny Leaders deck, but like a mean, antisocial one. If people figure out how to build this deck like not a complete sociopath, I’ll report on those specs, too, I guess, but for now, feast your eyes upon my pics.

This card is under $10 and should not be. Every time it goes under $10, it goes back over $10. Is this going to get reprinted again? Perhaps. But what you should really be asking yourself is how many times does it need to get reprinted not to trend towards $15? At least one more, so make this one count.

I could type more because of that thing I said earlier about a buffer between images, but this graph is 1,000 words and I don’t want this piece to turn into a snooze to read if we’re at 1,500 words already.

This is $1 above its recent floor an $20 below its historical high. I don’t know where it will equilibrate, but it’s not going to be $8.

There are basically very few wrong answers here, honestly. Half of these are cards I liked a long time ago. Some of them are way underpriced. WAY underpriced.

I thought this was a $5 last year and nothing has happened since then to make me feel otherwise. Unfortunately, nothing has happened since then.

I don’t know, this just doesn’t seem like a bulk rare to me. It’s in a lot of decks, it’s about to be in more, and it’s good. Illusionists’ Bracers were cheap forever, I stand by this pick and I’ll either be vindicated or out of a job because the game collapsed under the weight of the products they release because no one wants to buy Monopoly or Nerf guns right before a recession.

Speaking of bracers,

This is in a lot of decks. This should be $10 everywhere, maybe more, so sniping cheap copies seems like a good play. They somehow have never reprinted this, which makes me a bit nervous considering they have a chance to reprint it every set, now.

I think this commander actually has a ton of potential. I really like the idea of a Boros type of Birthing Pod, and with it as your commander, you’ll get a ton of value. For reference, here is the rest of Kayla’s page. Thanks for reading, nerds. Until next time!

Jason Alt, ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: How to Make 40k Decks

Readers!
It’s that time again, the time where we have Warhammer 40K data but it doesn’t matter because they have announced Unfinity, Brother’s War, 5 new secret lairs and a $250 booster pack that very much violates the spirit of the Reserved List. We’d better look at 40k stuff now – it’s about to be pushed off of the “recent sets list” on EDHREC and it hasn’t even come out yet. 

Last week we didn’t have enough data but we seem to be all set this week, so let’s do that thing I always do but also always feel the need to introduce like you don’t already know what it is from me always doing it. That thing. Let’s do that.

Abbadon is still in the lead by quite a bit, still, which was to be expected. He’s been spoiled the longest and he was the only one we had data on for a while. Nothing has really changed with Abbadon, but let’s take a quick look at High Synergy cards.

Still suspend stuff and pingers. Pingers are also going to be useful for the next commander, too.

I talked about Abbadon and Starnzy 2 weeks ago, and if you didn’t read that article, I go into a bit more depth about why I like older foils. Ophidian Eye, for example, has 0 reprints and a $10 foil that’s pretty scarce. I think someone knew about these 40K cards a long time ago based on how all of the ping foils disappeared like 2 years after they printed Torbran. I like a lot of stuff that deals exactly 1 damage but at the rate they release new commanders, no one can really agree on a deck because by the time you get cards, they have announced 3 new sets. I prefer more stable stonks since Magic seems determined to jump the shark and I don’t know if I’ll have a job in a year.

Exhibit A

Every Demon is like $4 right now, similar to Dragons. If a good Demon tribal commander is printed, they all go up, even the OK ones and with 70 new Legendary creatures in every set, they’re going to have to resort to demon tribal sooner or later.

I have long been bullish on both versions of this, and it seems the markets are finally in accord. The fact that I said to buy it before it went up would suggest I sometimes know what the market will do, or every card goes up eventually. Either way, I urged people to pay $2 for the showcase version in the past and now Card Kingdom is asking $5. This card is profoundly good and people are finally noticing, though it may have taken a Demon that cares about Demons to get there.

That pic looks weird, it’s because it’s an NFC and I’m kind of in the zone typing right now so I’m not going to fix it, you’re just going to have to be OK with my miscut pic.

Too late to get these for $8 but you can get them before they’re $20. It’s on “The List” so that has helped, but not enough. I’m serious about paying $12-$15 for these if you’re quick.

This held fairly steady at $15 before it was reprinted. I’m perfectly OK snatching some $4 copies of this and watching the reverse J turn into a U like we like.

CK is just straight up getting $40 for this card and TCG is like $6 more than I paid. I am hodling on for dear life on these and I’d rather they see more play than not if I want to recoup on these. I bought at basically buylist at the time but that doesn’t help me much. I really expected these to go lower, but The List doesn’t add as many copies as you think it will.

This is kind of a boring deck if I’m being honest – it’s being built as Esper goodstuff control for the most part which means another Thoracle deck. Fun.

Kind of a steep drop with the number of decks, but the Stormlord is built 3 times as much as the Swarmlord, which no one saw coming. Not that anyone has touched this product yet.

Another problem with the product being obsolete is that people don’t have physical cards in their hands, so they don’t construct the decks with the physical cards they have, they construct using the precon list as a guide. This almost always results in them adding way more cards from the precon to their decklists than they’ll actually add when they build the deck for real, but by then no one is going to look at the EDHREC page for 20 sets ago. Stuff comes out too fast to go back for anything.

This could go up even more with people building Zur as a Saga deck, but honestly, if someone hasn’t built Zur yet, they’re not going to. Dominaria United feels forgotten already. This pace of products is entirely unsustainable and I think it will make or break Magic as a game and Magic as a career, but maybe I’m an old man yelling at clouds. We’ll find out sooner or later. Until next time.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: While You Slept

Readers!

Something I haven’t done in a long time is look at the data for Top 100 most-included cards on EDHREC. And why would I? The top card is Sol Ring, there are a bunch of Signets, tutors, removal spells, Rampant Growths and a few spicy creatures like Dockside Extortionist. Everyone who has played even a single game of Commander can probably name all 100 cards, right. Right? Well, what if I told you that there are a lot of cards on the list that have been printed for the first time in the last two years, some of them that I have mentioned before and some I haven’t? Do I need to sell you on this concept, really? I got your click already, you’re hooked, I just need to not blow it by losing your interest. I’d prefer you got something out of this article, so I’m going to look at the EDHREC top 100 cards of the last week and show you which cards from 2021 and 2022 are heating up and whether or not I like them as specs. It’s happening, so be prepared to be surprised by a few of these – it wouldn’t be a whole entire article without a few curveballs, otherwise I’d just list all 100 cards and call it a day. Instead, I’m digging in the content mines without a circle of protection: black lung anywhere in sight. I do it for you, readers, so let’s see what I unearthed, shall we? That was rhetorical; we shall.

#25 – Ignoble Hierarch

There will come a certain point where a rare that is unlikely to get reprinted soon given its price trajectory over the year that’s in tens of thousands of decks will officially become so cheap that it’s absurd not to buy them. Silly me, I thought that point was $5. I bought some, not a ton, but some. The showcase versions is trash, but the old border version is very good-looking. If this is like $1 or $2 and it’s in a quarter of Jund decks moving forward, which seems ow considering it was in more than a quarter of jund decks this week.

28% isn’t a ton more than %25, but $3.39 is a hell of a lot cheaper than $10 so the popularity by way of discovered demand when the card becomes too cheap not to play should help that number increase beyond 28% as people build more Jund. This is in a ton of decks, it’s cheap, it’s getting help from Modern and it’s tough to reprint. At some point the fact that Modern Horizons two was absolutely bonkers and every pack was a winner will be outweighed by the sheer demand, provided people don’t abandon EDH in droves. It’s a fun format, it’s hard to see that happening.

#42 – Esper Sentinel

Esper Sentinel has 4 times the demand (OK, 3.72) of Ignoble Hierarch and commands 10 times the price. As the price for Hierarch sinks, the price for Sentinel really went nuts, peaking at twice what it is now. I still think this card is overpriced at $20 but it’s a little tough to reprint, also. I think rather than look at this card as a spec, I want to use it as a stick to measure what the ceiling for Ignoble likely is. If Esper Sentinel is $20 in 4x as many decks and can hold $20 (if this approaches $10 it becomes so buyable it immediately goes back above $15 in the frenzy) we can expect to get $5 minimum for Hierarch. The showcases are ugly and they’re everywhere but no product is perfect. I think Sentinel is a buy under $20 for any reason other than a reprint and cEDH ubiquity also plays a huge part in Sentinel’s inflated price, something Ignoble can’t quite claim. Neither can this next card, but being in a weird set is a big boost.

#46 Esika, God of the Tree

Coming in just a few spots behind Esper Sentinel this week is Esika, a mana fixing maven. With the multicolored decks coming out hard and fast and showing no signs of stopping, Esika is in under 10% of the 5 color decks released in the past two years, however…

This week she is in twice that ratio, meaning her use over time is trending up. This is a $15 card masquerading as an $8 card and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Except this will be $15 on Card Kingdom in a few months and we’ll all wonder when it happened. Soon, I think.

This is also available in a very good-looking showcase version, which is kind of rare, really.

I love the showcase art, and while it’s not for everyone, it’s trending up sharply in price, which will happen because it’s the preferred version and the less-preferred version will lag behind. There is time to get in on both, though there’s more time for the plain jane version. I love both, honestly- these shake out to $15 and $20+ respectively fairly trivially in my opinion. I also like a few of the other Legendary creatures from Kaldheim because they bothered to make creatures that could go in the 99. At the time I thought they made too many Legendary creatures in Kaldheim but I’d give anything to go back to before we got literally 70 of them every 2 months.

#50 Damn

This is almost the same price as Ignoble Hierarch and is in twice as many decks. Which card is mispriced? I think perhaps Damn looks good given this comparison, especially given that it goes in more decks.

Both versions of this card look so slick it’s tough to choose a clear winner here. I don’t think you need to – this is played a ton – in 20% of all Orzhov-containing decks over both time periods, and I think it’s a little tougher to reprint than you might think. I like this a ton, especially the $4 EA copies on TCG Player given how they’re already 150% of that on CK.

#72 – An Offer You Can’t Refuse

Not a ton to say here. It’s so easy to get treasure tokens and so hard to get a 2/2 flier that everyone seems to just want to jam this over Swan Song because it’s a $1 uncommon. I don’t rally have an issue with this. Will its price go up? Yep. I don’t know how much, but this is becoming a bit of a staple and I’m all for it.

I doubt you regret snagging these under $2, there are way worse uncommons worth way more, recent ones, too. One problem with this is that it’s a “quiet” and unsexy staple and people tend to buy those one at a time for decks rather than in swaths for speculation purposes. It’s a them card, not an us card. But maybe we make it an us card and just buy the things, I don’t know. Could work.

#74 Void Rend

Speaking of quiet an unsexy, this little guy is chugging along at the $2 mark which is about where the Uncommon we just mentioned is. This is played the same proportion in absolute terms although the mono-Blue An Offer You Can’t Refuse is nearing the 40k mark already. Rares are a third as abundant as Uncommons and this is played a third as much. Will the prices go up together? It’s interesting, but also, good rare removal doesn’t stay under $2 for long and while this is held out of a lot of decks by its Esper color identity, it goes in quite a few by virtue of it being hard to think of an Esper deck that doesn’t want to point and belete a permanent, and being uncounterable matters quite a bit, too. In a head-to-head match, this beats An Offer You Can’t Refuse, and I’ll break the tie that way and you can’t stop me.

#92 Timeless Lotus

This is lava hot right now and, despite being a new card, is showing up in a lot of the 5 color decks. There was a 5 color precon and we’re in the middle of the mania surrounding that and I sort of feel like this is a clunky rock. I’ve advocated for Crystal Quarry before, however, so who knows who’s right? You don’t have to take my word for it, just look at how many people are playing the card. Check the percentage of usage for a few weeks – 35% is entirely unsustainable, and this card’s color identity keeps it out of a lot of decks, but we like Esika so why not like this, too? Morophon is a card, after all.

That does it for me this week! I’m running really close to the automatic cap where wordpress automatically cuts the article off, but before I go I just want to thank