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

Unlocked Pro Trader: Too Many Boats

Nerds,

I can feel the herd getting restless. In fact, people have spent so long waiting for me to address the fungus monster in the room that they took it upon themselves to make a reddit post and tried to do it themselves. Things went… OK.

Magnified 20x, a grocer’s apostrophe looks relatively harmless, but in a sentence it can cause acute migraines in 5% of the population, myself included. ‘Superfluou’s apo’strophe’s a’side, this was a pretty good reddit post and probably should have gotten a good discussion going. It didn’t.

Would it have? Or do we have years and years’ worth of data that says otherwise?

Have they? Or did they just get lucky that Commander 2017 was tribal so they could run out and buy cards like Waiting in the Weeds and then pat each other on the back as they tried to sell them to each other? Also, buyout is a noun.

I feel like eyebrows Goofus is onto something, here. I don’t agree that the sheer number of new commanders will keep anything from spiking, but I do think that the card everyone wants to talk about may suffer from affecting too many cards that could go in the deck. If Muldrotha is basically less popular than Atraxa, there’s a chance nothing goes up at all. When there are too many boats and not enough tide, something about the boats don’t go up? Look, I’ve been trying for awhile to pretend the boat metaphor was an actual sinking boat and abandon it.

I think we should look at the sheer volume of cards that could go up based on Muldrotha decks being a thing, which I think they will. We can evaluate whether or not any of them have a chance of going up or if there are just too many ways to build the deck. Let’s begin.

 

Embarrassment of Riches

I think we should look at Muldrotha before we continue. You cut down on the number of RTFC errors you commit as a writer by R’ing the F’ing C.

I can’t F’ing R this F’ing C. Let’s enlist the help of some type.

 

 

3GUB
Legendary Creature – Elemental Avatar
During each of your turns, you may play up to one permanent card of each permanent type from your graveyard. (If a card has multiple permanent types, choose one as you play it.)

 

The first class of cards I want to look at are the really annoying enchantments. What if, instead of building a board, we just spammed the same one back out every turn, ruining everyone’s lives?

Cards in this class – Hesitation, Standstill, Mystic Remora, Decree of Silence, Lunar Force.

Standstill is at a historic low and while that means it could have upside, it also means Muldrotha is on its own. It would have to pull a lot of weight considering Legacy isn’t really doing Standstill any favors right now and it’s not really an EDH card at the current moment. Pass.

Spikes caused by the previewing of a card are like clockwork. The card goes from x to 8x then falls to 4x barring actual adoption. You don’t really ever eat it if you buy at x but those who buy at 4x hoping to get out at 8x tend to eat it. Don’t hope to sell to greater fools, just get out when you can. The only thing this card has going for it is that everyone ferreted out the cheap copies to avoid paying $7 so if this goes up again, there are no cheap copies squirreled (the opposite of ferreted) away and the only source of copies is the cold, merciless open market.

Hesitation is and will likely stay a dime. Mystic Remora is already good and this won’t likely change much. We’re off to a rough start because while these strategies are annoying, I don’t think they or any other strategy will be universal and they probably need to be.

Contamination

Muldrotha sure isn’t going to make this card cheaper, is it? While this isn’t on the Reserved List, it’s not likely on anyone’s “this needs a printing” list, either. It’s so absurdly anti-social that only the spikiest of decks will consider running it, ruling it out of Commander precons. Usually this card is mitigated by the upkeep cost, but you can let this die and just bring it right back.  Gross.

How about board control?

Cards in this class- Nevinyrral’s Disk, Pernicious Deed, Oblivion Stone.

Nev’s Disk has been printed tooooo many times.

Deed isn’t looking too bad. It has decent ‘REC metrics and adoption in more than just EDH. I expected to poop on almost every pick, but this doesn’t seem too bad. It’s at its floor as are a lot of Conspiracy 2 cards and is beginning to recover. I think this is the time to get in on deed regardless and its utility in Muldrotha could be a good a time as any to make some bucks on a solid card. I didn’t expect to like this as much as I do, but Deed is probably solid right now.

This is no pricing error, you can actually snag a foil Iconic Masters O Stone for the same price as a Mirrodin one. I think that’s bound to look pretty silly in 6 months. I can’t imagine eating it because you bought foil copies but I guess nothing is impossible. People are done drafting Iconic Masters which means new copies enter the market at the speed of people popping $12 booster packs. It seems like we’re basically at peak supply and we have a glut of these foils I don’t mind swooping in on.

Finally, I want to talk about cards that are just really good with Muldrotha and how there aren’t too many cards in this camp for Muldrotha to push up since I expect them to be in 70%+ of all Muldrotha decks if people are smart.

Defense of the Heart

This is not on the Reserved List but it probably should be. This is also going to be in every Muldrotha list ever if people are smart. This is busted as heck and at least one of your opponents is bound to have the requisite number of creatures. Play Forbidden Orchard if they refuse to play along. This is just too good in Muldrotha decks and outside of them, too, I guess. This is a rare from Urza’s Legacy and while it’s not on the Reserved List, it’s not on anyone’s “reprint this ASAP” list, either – not in a world where Phyrexian Altar is still unreprinted.

Command Beacon

I’m betting that Commander 2018 is Planeswalkers. That being the case, the earliest this gets reprinted in a Commander precon is Commander 2019. For those keeping score at home, that’s like 18 months from now. You think you can make some money buying in at $10 and sitting on them for 18 months? I do.

Spike Weaver

This managed to avoid ending up on the Reserved List because it’s not quite as good as Exalted Dragon, you see. That said, it’s been expensive for a while and it doesn’t seem like there is a convenient place to reprint it. Its combo potential is very high making it a tricky EDH deck inclusion and it’s very set-specific making it tricky to print elsewhere. This is also pretty damn good with Muldrotha since you can fog over multiple turns then replay him full of counters and ready to rumble.

Mindslaver

Lol.

LED

Different lol.

I think we will have time between EDHREC filling up with Muldrotha lists and prices actually moving and I plan to revisit the commanders I covered to see if there is anything I missed, but I think you should take a stab at Muldrotha. In my limited dicking around with it, I found the following cards do a lot of work.

Caustic Caterpillar, Vessel of Nascency, Seal of Doom, Seal of Removal, Seal of Primordium, Fleshbag Marauder, Sidisi, Undead Vizier (another reason to look at this card – I think you go deep on Sidisi nowish). Other people are beginning to post lists, so see what they’re on and we’ll revisit when we see stuff posted on the ‘REC.

Thanks for reading, nerds. Next week we’ll wade into the giant pile of potential commanders and look at more opportunities. Until next time!

Unlocked Pro Trader: Speculating on Speculation

Nerds,

I was going to take a look at Jodah or something today and while that’s probably relevant at some point, I think there’s something else that is pretty important and it’s never too early to talk about it. I saw something curious and maybe I’m reading too much into it, but probably not. I mean, maybe. Maybe not. Not probably not, I don’t know the actual probability. That’s a good point, actually. Let’s address that point before I move on.

Have you even made a point yet?

Yes, I sure have. I said I don’t know the probability that I’m right or wrong about this thing I’m speculating about that I’ll tell you about later. We never really know the odds but since I know less than nothing; we’re talking our unknowns are unknown, I’m going to try and make my picks with some caveats, namely that I’m not going to diverge too far from my current speculation ethos for this column.

Currently I am using data, albeit small amounts sometimes, to make very safe picks based on what I know the near future to be. EDH allows us to do that with the lag time between online decklist adoption and actual paper decklist adoption. I’m not going to stray too far from that. While I’m forced to speculate about speculation, I am going to try and confine my picks to ones that won’t leave you holding the bag later if one or more of our assumptions turns out faulty. I sold a lot more copies of Squandered Resources than I did Didgeridoo. Didgeridid? Whatever. The point is, if I make a pick that wasn’t going to go up anyway, albeit probably slower, I’ll make a note that you’re assuming risk and should only do so if you can afford to lose the money and agree with all of our dumb assumptions.

Isn’t it funny that I’m like 4 years into writing this column and I’m only now telling you to only spec with money you can afford to lose? That’s how good EDH finance is, I never assume we won’t get there. Even our misses are just longer-term hits, baby! Bet it all on black!

OK, that out of the way, let’s talk about the assumptions we’re making. First, the piece of news upon which our assumptions are predicated.

The News

Someone in the EDHREC writers Slack channel alerted me to this press release. No, that wasn’t intended as a name drop. It’s an exclusive Slack channel, but not in that good a way. It’s exclusive like the club of people who turned themselves blue drinking colloidal silver is exclusive – yeah, you’re not in the group but that’s fine, trust me.  Let’s examine the thing.

Enhance

Enhance

Too far

Awww yisss. If this is what I think it is, it’s another Commander precon series with Planeswalkers at the helm. That’s assumption numero the first.

My next assumption is that planeswalkers will be legal as commanders from now on. It’s possible that it’s just all of us wanting it that makes us think it’s so but I said I wouldn’t hose you by making picks that won’t pan out if this assumption is wrong so let’s pretend we already know it’s true and save ourselves some equivocating.

 

When Do We Make Some Money?

I thought I’d never pretend you asked. Let’s do that now, shall we?

Our main assumptions, restated are

  1. Commander 2018 will have Planeswalkers as the commanders.
  2. Any Planeswalker will be a legal commander starting in late 2018.

From that, I can make a few sub-assumptions that can help us figure some things out.

  1. The decks are $40 MSRP which is more than normal. Either the walkers will be pushed in power level or they’re allowing themselves to reprint expensive cards they didn’t before (Doubling Season?)
  2. 4 decks means they won’t be all mono-colored. Commander 2017 showed they stress color balance over the set not over the decks and gave us a 5-color Dragon and 2-color cat and stuff in between.
  3. My Ajani Vengeant deck will make them regret the decision to allow older ‘walkers to be commanders.

I think hype alone is going to drive some prices if any of this information is confirmed, so we have a small window to act on it before everyone else comes to the conclusions we’re coming to today and scoops the cards. Better from us at a higher price than at current retail because we napped on this info.

The Chain Veil

Old Chainy veil is calming down a bit and my initial impression was that this is a likely reprint in the Commander decks or more likely one of them, but I got to thinking, is it? The Chain Veil is played in two types of decks with Planeswalkers; Superfriends, which is a deck with a lot of Planeswalkers and Chain Veil Teferi, a deck that uses exactly one Planeswalker in particular and rarely any others, although not always. The two reprint scenarios, then are either a Teferi reprint or a ‘Walker that is similarly good with The Chain Veil which won’t happen because you can’t put the stupid Chain Veil/Teferi infinite combo in a precon and only charge 5 extra dollars and expect the other decks to compete. You also can’t jam $300 worth of Planeswalkers in a $40 precon and call it a Superfriends deck, and you can put 4 Planeswalkers in a precon and call it a Superfriends deck. Since The Chain Veil isn’t great outside of those two scenarios, neither of which is appropriate for a precon (though fine to be built by the end user) I think reprint risk is mitigated. That gives us a declining, second-spike-ready artifact that can go in any Planeswalker deck that wants it. I think this goes up on hype as much as playability and you can always sell off before the full decklists are announced if you really are afraid of a reprint.

The foil is down, too. Hallelujah. A lot of this decrease is post-Atraxa hangover where the bad angel promised to make every card in any possible build $20 forever but there is a real chance for this to recover, especially with its reprint risk farther mitigated. This doesn’t even have to play nicely with the new cards to go up on hype, so be on the supply side of the coming wave.

Doubling Season

This is a bit of an obvious one, too, but I don’t know how good it would be outside of superfriends builds, necessarily. Also, people could always build that before and allowing a Planeswalker to helm the deck isn’t necessarily going to make that option more attractive. Unlike the Chain Veil, this only goes in green decks and if there is no new 5 color Walker (can you imagine? Yuck) I don’t know. Now that the two obvious ‘Walker cards are out of the way, it becomes a little tougher to figure out what we can make money off of. Let’s add to that the fact that all of the other cards in Superfriends seem to only be good at finding ‘Walkers in the deck.

Meh.

Ugh.

Oy vey.

We’re going to need to try a different approach, and that is to look at any cards in common between the 5 existing Planeswalker commanders. So… artifacts? Lands?

If I don’t say something smart pretty soon, this was a waste of an observation.

I’ll save like and hour on EDHREC – there’s nothing. There are no common cards between the 5 current Planeswalkers as Commanders and I doubt there’s anything in common with the new ones. That means we basically have to slide down a tier of certainty if we’re going to come up with anything worthwhile.

We’re Speccing For Real

I’ll finish this article by talking about the Planeswalkers I think would be the best Commanders and if there are any cards that pair nicely with them.

Tamiyo, Field Researcher

This would be nuts as a Commander, especially in green where you can cast her with Doubling Season and get the emblem right away on top of refilling your grip. This card isn’t super exciting outside of the odd Atraxa build right now but if this is in your command zone, your mana dorks draw cards, you can frost dudes all day and you can say goodbye to mana. Whaaa? There’s no interacting with that stupid emblem, either. Good luck.

Cards that pair well with this build – 

Doubling Season

Enter the Infinite

Every Eldrazi

Ajani Vengeant

This probably isn’t that good but I’m still going to build the stupid thing. Screw you and your lands in particular, scrub.

Cards that pair well with this build – I don’t even know, I regret bringing it up.

Kaya, Ghost Assassin 

I see people call this a good Stax commander, and I can’t disagree. This would be annoying as hell to play against.

Cards that pair well with this build – 

Stax cards.

I don’t know, Hokori?

Smokestacks probably? I think?

Let me google EDH stax cards.

Some dude wrote a whole crazy primer, but they all seem to want

So be apprised of that. Those cards are all probably good pickups anyway.

I feel like any of the decent commanders could get their own entire article. If we do it that way, we’ll want to wait until people start building the decks that way, so as much fun as I’m having here, there isn’t much point in continuing.

What I think we’ll do is revisit this when there is something more actionable and we may give any given commander the article treatment the way we would any new Legendary creature. For now, I think there are moves to make here and I am really feeling good about The Chain Veil because even an announcement is going to drive buying and we want to be holding copies when that happens.

I hope you got some value from this piece and we’ll try something a little more traditional next week. Until then!

Unlocked Pro Trader: Meet the New Captain, Same as the Old Captain

Everything old is new again and everything new seems to care about everything old. The Weatherlight has a new captain and while it’s not a Green/White creature, she is a creature a lot of people have been waiting on for a long time. We finally got the “Izzet-colored, arifacts matter” commander that people have been clamoring for and while she is sort of… linear, she also has a few surprises in that her card drawing triggers off of more than just artifacts. Let’s look at the card, shall we?

We can’t look at the card. Despite the fact that we have all of the information about the card, and it leaked because of a mistake Wizards made, they have decided that unveiling the art when they had planned to will still be exciting and it’s sort of hard to argue. Leaks like this are garbage. I saw someone compare it to sneaking downstairs the night before Christmas and peeking at all of your presents so you’re not surprised on Christmas morning and I’m not sure I agree. To me, it’s like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real and your parents got you socks. Also, I’m in my 30s and I was pissed off this year because no one got me socks. I had to buy my own socks like a peasant. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I weren’t a financier, I wouldn’t have even looked at these stupid leaks and it’s a good thing I looked because this is the second commander I came across that is going to build a very linear, obvious way and that will bump a lot of cards.

Card Bumps, You Say?

Yeah, man, why you think we’re here if not to talk about the money we’re about to scoop up because we’re even farther ahead of the curve than normal? While it sucks that these leaks happened, the silver lining is that we have a few extra weeks to predict what EDH players are going to build when they finally get ahold of the cards. Normally there is a gap between cards coming out and people buying them in large enough quantities for prices to move but this time the gap will be even larger since we can start thinking about what to buy now. Let’s make the most of this time and look at what I expect to end up in Jhoira decks.

The first thing to remember is that Planeswalkers are now Legendary so they are eligible for the trigger and may get jammed into decks alongside Jhoira.

 

Dack Fayden

With no real impetus for an impending reprint and a lot of this card’s meteoric past rise being predicated on use in formats where people may want more than one copy, how well this pairs with Jhoira could see it gain a few bucks in the coming months. I don’t know what sort of adoption it would need to really go up based on being a one-of in one EDH deck and with so many Legendary creatures being printed in Dominaria and with Commander 2018 promising to be packed with value, we could see a logjam in new decks being built with no clear winner presenting itself, but with the amount of clamoring we’ve seen for Jhoira, I expect this to over-perform relative to other commanders. But there I go again, listening to what people say they want like an idiot.

Saheeli Rai

Currently made out of plutonium, people are dumping copies of this part of a banned combo as fast as they can. At their absolute floor, copies of this card are a steal and those abilities are all really nuts in an artifact-based EDH deck and, hey, playing Saheeli happens to draw you a card, too. Saheeli should be really cozy with Jhoira and their fates are intertwined, meaning if Jhoira is as popular as everyone claims they want it to be, we could see a nice price recovery for this card.

Tamiyo, The Moon Sage

I don’t want to spend too much of my verbal budget on Planeswalkers since this was supposed to just be a bullet point in the larger point I was making, but I found more good planeswalkers than I expected. Tamiyo isn’t really going anywhere but it sure equilibrated higher than anyone would have thought. This is good alongside Jhoira and it’s also an expensive, powerful planeswalker and its current malaise might be snapped by renewed interest. I also have the least confidence in this of every ‘walker I suggested.

Tezzeret, the Seeker

Modern Masters 2015 was a while ago and while this hasn’t begun to recover yet, I don’t think another reprinting is imminent and I think as good as this is, it’s going to tick back up. It probably has some unknown amount of competition from unprinted Planeswalkers. It seems like every time I get a handle on what Planeswalkers are supposed to do, they print another 30 in a a 12 month period and it throws everything off. This is a better than average planeswalker and it is blue and it deals with artifacts and that has to be enough.

What Else?

Well, it isn’t just Planeswalkers that trigger her ability and I think she is going to be a good either eggs or storm commander. I am excited.

Aetherflux Reservoir

The non-foil is on a downward trend approaching rotation…

As is the foil. I think both are good picksups then, I think reprint risk is pretty low and I think this is a solid EDH finisher in Oloro, which is a Top 3 deck of all time in popularity as well as a great inclusion in a lot of storm and spellslinger decks. Its EDHREC profile shows some pretty robust inclusion and speaks to its versatility and ubiquity. More lifelink or lifegain-focused decks coming along only adds new interest in this card and that’s particularly good for a foil that has demonstrated the ability to flirt with $8 while still in-print. I don’t know how much lower foils of this get but this is a no-brainer pickup.

Helm of Awakening

Helping your opponents isn’t always great, but 3,005 people on EDHREC have decided they’d rather play a card that they can really abuse and allow opponents get some tangential benefit from than not play it and here we are. Cheaper and more accessible than Stone Calendar and cheaper mana-wise, too, this is a card I keep seeing pop up in Jhoira lists and I expect that to continue. This makes eggs even better as you get to play them for cheap or free and use their mana to freewheel the activation on the next egg, letting you chaing them. Combine that with the double draw trigger and you will always have a full mitt. This also turns cards like Sensei’s Top into free cantrips and generally makes it easier to go off early in the game. We’ve seen rares from this block hit $10 with less provocation.

Semblance Anvil

This is looking pretty healthy. It’s fluctuating but the overall trend is upward and with a set-specific keyword, its reprint options are somewhat limited (though set-specific keywords have never stopped them from jamming the card in a Commander precon which is the worst case scenario). I honestly think this card has been secretly way better than people give it credit for and I have no idea why it doesn’t get more play. If you name artifacts, you just dump your hand and if you have a Vedalken Archmage in your command zone ready to go at all times, you fill your hand as fast as you can dump it.

Unwinding Clock

Whereas here, I can’t find any possible way to balance this ability against anything in the other precon decks, so anything with an artifact focus would be too good with this and any deck with this but no apparent artifact focus couldn’t really justify the slot. Therefore, I think this would be a very unlikely reprint in a Commander precon. I don’t know if that further limits its reprintability compared with something like Semblance Anvil but I do think it’s unlikely to be in a Commander precon. They invent 5 new sealed products a year, so never say never, but I bet this grows for years and I bet you feel silly for not getting these a few years ago when EDH proved what a driving force it was. I was celebrating with the triple up I got on Caged Sun (meaning I sold them way too early) and I missed an even more obvious card in hindsight.

I think there are a few more cards that have upside and maybe I’ll cover them next week, maybe I’ll tweet about them, maybe they’ll be in the Gathering Magic piece I wrote this week, maybe I’ll podcast about them, maybe I’ll write an EDHREC article for no reason or maybe I’ll be a guest on someone else’s podcast and talk about them. Follow me all over, I have so many insights I can’t hold them all and they fall out of my grasp like hilarious, errant citrus fruit. All of these finance tips will be lost. Like limes in the rain. Until next time.

Image result for limes are hilarious

 

Brainstorm Brewery #280 Horobi’s Death Whale

 

Corbin (@Chosler88) is back this week and bring the professionalism of Bill O’Rilley to the cast as Jason (@jasonEalt ) and DJ (@Rose0fThorns) welcome MtG historian & personality Brain David Marshall (@Top8Games) to the show this week to talk about all things magic, movies, and comics. Make sure to visit BDM’s Kickstarter for The Totally Unstuck Adventures of Anna Chronos: Second Hands

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