Hello, nerds,

Today we are partially through the Masters 25 spoilers and while that’s not super duper financially relevant for us for the most part unless you’re holding a bunch of copies of cards and are sad (R.I.P. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben spec) to watch your money catch fire, we’re months away from me writing my “These cards are at their floor, but now” article like the one I wrote last week that no one commented on but a lot of people read. The google analytics say it was one of my most popular articles of 2018 and the lack of comments say that it was perfect and you couldn’t find a single fault with it. I knew it; I knocked it out of the park.

Let’s knock it out of the park this week by trying something new and useful. Our original method for this series was to look at new printings of cards that might make other cards also in the decks go up and buy those other cards. The new card may hit, it may not but if it enabled archetypes, its own financial upside was irrelevant. EDH isn’t enough demand to make Admiral Beckett Brass worth money but you better believe a bunch of stupid pirates are pricey. We haven’t really applied that principle to reprints. That isn’t we never tried it before today. However, I think Masters 25 is giving us a reason to look at more cards than a normal Masters set.

Priced Out

Some cards are just too expensive to even consider. Proxies have always been a thing (for poors) in EDH but for some reason, there are some cards that people never even consider inside the realm of possibility. Price has a lot to do with it – they never see anyone use the card so they don’t even know it exists or maybe the group would get salty about a guy with a $40 unsleeved deck having a Mana Crypt in the deck. Some cards are just priced out of people’s decks and most of the time they include a budget alternative or just eschew the card entirely. If the card suddenly becomes not only attainable, but easily attainable, the dynamic changes and entire new deckbuilding avenues open up. I think there are a few cards people are currently “Priced out” of and I think that will change. The cards in those decks will have some upside going forward depending on the degree of correlation and I think that is where we make the money. Let’s think about what to buy, shall we?

Imperial Recruiter

How low can this go? I could see this tanking as low as $30 or so before it stops its slide to oblivion and that’s very good for a small number of EDH player that will soon be a much larger number. Recruiter of the Guard has been a huge hit in EDH and the decks that can run both are now super stoked and the decks that don’t have White can have a chance to do their own recruiter shenanigans. This majorly impacts a few decks.

The numbers here are less important than the ratios. Roughly a number of Animar and Alesha decks are affected and roughly half that number of a bunch of decks ranging from Marath which would love to tutor for a combo piece to Krenko which obviously would love a second copy of Kiki-Jiki in the deck can benefit from affordable Recruiters. I’ll post a few highlights from Animar and Alesha.

Shaman of Forgotten Ways

How low can this go? I doubt it goes much lower, basically ever. The dealers are starting to pay more and more and I think this card’s reprint risk is much lower than most people probably do. Even though it ended up being fine and people are really dumb, this was still something everyone expected to be banned in EDH. While it’s not banworthy it’s still very potent and I have replaced the Black Lotus-esque Somberwald Sage with this in a lot of decks because of the win condition. That’s a lie – I run both and I cut something like Brainstorm, but still, if I had to pick one or the other, I’d go with this.

The foil keeps flirting with $20 and with the low supply of foils, this just needs a little nudge over the cliff. I think this is an excellent target for Imperial Recruiter, helping you get from 3 mana to 5 and possibly yanking a win condition out of your deck. I’m bullish as bullish can be about this in both foil and non-foil and I think if Recruiter doesn’t do it, a year falling off of the calendar will.

Master of Cruelties

Probably due for a reprint soon (If you’re reading this Friday and you’re like “WTF this is in Masters 25!” just know that you’re in my future and I don’t know that yet), this casual favorite keep climbing straight to the stars. It does a lot of work in Alesha and putting it into play tapped and attacking is pretty sneaky. This straight murders people (well, no, the other creatures murder them) and it’s tutorable with Imperial Recruiter, which is what we want to happen, right?

While we’re on the subject, I want to point out that I find the rate of growth of the foil pretty surprising. Usually casual cards don’t have a very healthy foil growth rate but if you compare about 5 or 10 data points you pretty quickly figure out that this is maintaining a bare minimum 2x multiplier and it’s nothing special. This is far from a staple but I can’t see building Alesha without it. I’m bearish on foils and bullish on non-foils which, since the foils are at a bare minimum multiplier, could mean the foils have upside anyway.

Harsh Mentor

So there’s a lot of Amonkhet out there. That’s OK – I’ll wait. Meanwhile this card is in 1,500 decks on EDHREC and could be in a lot more if Alesha gets built more. This card is honestly better than people are giving it credit for and I think as people register more decks, the numbers will reflect a reality that they aren’t currently. It’s either that or only 175 people are running The Immortal Sun in EDH. Go check its page out. I think Mentor has more upside than we know and I like it.

Azusa, Lost but Seeking

This is in a lot of decks and even in quite a few as the commander. Also, the prerelease price on Card Kingdom is a third of what current retail is so that’s quite a reduction. I also think $18 is a little high for a non-mythic but its relevance in formats outside of EDH should bolster its price a bit. Regardless, we’re talking about a 2/3 reduction in price which can take it from “$55, are you insane?” to “Yeah, I’ll pay $15 or whatever” at peak supply. I bet this can flirt with $10 or less.

I don’t know how many Azusa decks will get built as a result of her reprinting but we can peek quickly at cards that would be affected.

Woodfall Primus

Woodfall Primus is pretty stable after its reprinting and has recovered a lot of its value. It’s holding pretty nicely in the original printing but the Modern Masters copies are a little more affordable. That said, Modern Masters didn’t give us that many copies and it’s been 5 years. Check out this graph.

You see what I see? It’s subtle, so I will zoom in on it.

That’s an arbitrage opportunity. That was a dealer going out of stock, seeing that retail wasn’t far off of what he was willing to pay and saying “screw it” and buying some copies. That affected the retail price since they clearly bought retail and the buy price went right back down because that one lunatic dropped their price since they got what they wanted at retail. That was recently. I think supply is getting low and that means the price is about to move. I realize the lines are diverging again, but how long until someone else runs out of stock of a very good EDH card and takes a look at how low supply is? I bet the dealer and retail prices re-converge and I bet it happens soon. Correlating that with the impending release of affordable copies of Azusa doesn’t seem that far-fetched. I feel very strongly about Woodfall Primus at current retail and I don’t care who knows it. I mean, I would prefer Pro Traders found out first, but after that, I don’t care.

Defense of the Heart

That stupid spike throws off the graph and makes it tough to read, but the price has been basically $10 basically forever. I think people think this is on the Reserved List, which isn’t a terrible assumption. It is not. Ring of Gix and Second Chance are, but not this card. This gets played in 4,337 decks on EDHREC and at $10, it’s a good deal for as old as it is. We’ll see if James Chilcott gets mad at me for mentioning this to you nerds – he asked me about this card last week and I didn’t think anything of it until I came across it in the Azusa lists and realized that it’s not actually on the Reserved List. Do I expect a reprint? Eh, maybe not. It’s not really on anyone’s radar and they’re not nimble enough to get a reprint out before anyone who bought in at $10 got out at $30. Unless, you know, it’s in Masters 25 and you know that but I don’t.

That’s what I got. We will know the full spoiler next week and that will give me some sort of idea about what to write about. That said, we found some very strong picks in this one and regardless of whether the lower price makes these archetypes take off, these cards are going up in price. Until next time!

I keep harping on the same concepts in this series and that’s because some methods are tried and true and until something changes substantially, they’re what make me money and I love to pass those ideas on to my readers. I’ll go over this one again because I think it bears repeating so everyone from the long-term reader to the first-time reader knows what I’m talking about. Namely, I want to talk about graph shapes; the U and the reverse-J.

GRAAAAAAPHS

If a card is reprinted and its price never recovers, you’ll see a really sad graph shape. It peaks then declines to a valley and it’s so depressing that I am not even going to try and find an example and post it here. It’s like the stuff in the gore subreddit – no one really wants to see that. Instead, let’s talk about a happier scenario – a price declines after a reprint but Mr. Organic Demand comes along and says “Turn that frown upside down” and you’re on the maglev bullet train to money town, baby, where the money grows on money trees and you can pay someone to harvest the money with all of the money you’re making. That looks like this.

So if you saw the rebound coming and bought in at the floor, you’re feeling good. The rebound was predictable if you look at EDH demand at all and understand which cards are likely to rebound based on the amalgam of all of their factors such as how many decks the card is in, when it was first printed, the likelihood of another reprinting coming along and pantsing it, etc. However, as a financier, telling you that Crypt Ghast must be a good card because it was $3 then it was $1 then it was $3 again is pretty useless information unless I think it will got to $8, which I don’t since it was never $8 when the supply was lower and the demand was the same. U-shaped graphs are neat but they can’t make us much money since the price has already recovered. You want the first half of that U shape. You want what I call the reverse-J shape, because our language doesn’t have a letter that looks like the first half of a U.

I use this graphic every time but it illustrates how much money can be made if the card recovers to its pre-dip price. So why do I bring all of this up? And what does the title of the article refer to?

I’m So Glad I Pretended You Asked

A long time ago when I started writing about EDH finance full-time, I thought about how to make money on EDH cards and I decided that when new cards were printed, trying to guess their price was less relevant than looking at the archetypes they were likely to enable and speculating on those older cards. Supply would be lower, upside would be higher since the demand wouldn’t be as easily back-filled with copies at the same price making it spike quickly before anyone could react and every card in the deck would go up – theoretically, a rising tide would lift all boats. Well, today we’re all about Low Tide – the first half of the U. We’re going reverse-J hunting and there is a set that came out recently that is going to be just lousy with those sexy shapes. I think the cards in a certain set are at their floor and we’re going to look at EDH demand to see how likely a recovery is and how much money I think you can make if you buy now. Forget dinosaurs and pirates, let’s think about Benjamins.

Iconic Recovery

Iconic Masters reprinted a ton of sexy EDH cards and I think a lot of them are going to recover. How do we determine the likelihood of recovery? I’m not going to address every factor, but I will do three things.

• I arbitrarily picked Crypt Ghast because that recovered nicely. I’m going to see how many decks on EDHREC have Crypt Ghast in them and then I am going to compare that number to the number of decks the cards in Iconic Masters are in. If it sounds really simple, it’s because it is. Also, almost no one does this sort of analysis so maybe just thank me for doing it for you even though it’s easy and also reminding you to do it because that’s the actual hard part.
• I am going to look at how many times the card has been reprinted and which set it was in initially. If it’s older than Crypt Ghast, I’ll say something vague about how the set print runs were smaller back then.
• I’m going to pretend I have some insight into what they tend to select to reprint and gauge how likely I think a second reprinting to be. Most people are very bad at this. I include myself in that group. We go with our guts a lot – I certainly didn’t see a second Black Market reprinting coming and I all but applauded the first one. If this were obvious to anyone, speculating would be a lot less risky and everyone would do it.

So with Crypt Ghast as a nice comparison, let’s look at some Iconic Masters cards. For reference,

16,672 is a number. We’ll remember that later.

Austere Command

So this is in fewer decks than Crypt Ghast, but not too many fewer. I don’t think it’s significant. It’s in the Top 50 White cards on EDHREC so if you’re playing White, chances are you will use this. It’s at what I would call its floor. Look at the price graph for Iconic Masters.

Dealers don’t seem to think it’s going to get any cheaper. If it gets any cheaper or if dealers raise their buy price any more, you’re going to be able to arbitrage the stupid things. Why do that when you can just wait for the price to double, which is what I think it will do? That question mark was for the “why do that” part of the sentence, I am not questioning whether I think it will double, I do. That wasn’t, like, a Ron Burgundy question mark. We’re getting off track – Buy Austere Commands, nerds.

Austere Command has one more reprinting than Crypt Ghast but Lorwyn and Commander (1? Do we call it Commander 1? Just Commander? The first one, whatever we call that) had pretty low print runs compared to RTR and Commander 2014. Remember I said this paragraph would be vague? I meant it. I don’t see a reason why Austere Command won’t completely recover, which means we’re at the bottom of that reverse J. You could wait any longer but look at the Iconic Masters graph again. Dealers aren’t waiting. Why would you?

Consecrated Sphinx

We should make like an epileptic in an office supply store and pick up staples all day. This card is in lots of decks and the dealer buy price is converging with the sale price. We’re at peak supply for Inconic Masters and the copies are as cheap as they are going to get. Whether you think the price will fully recover (I don’t see why not) or not, if you want copies, buy them now because they will only get more expensive. If you think it’s a slam dunk to buy at $15 or lower a card that has demonstrated it can be $35, you might want to do that. This didn’t get a ton of new supply being printed at Mythic in Iconic Masters and this is a little more than the price of a booster pack right now. I think this is a good pickup.

Dealers aren’t as keen on the non-foil copies of the Iconic Masters version, but you saw the price convergence for the Mirrodin Besieged copies. Sphinx is like $10 for IM right now. If it hits $8 and you bought in at $10, buy the same amount again. Congrats, you bought in at $9. If it hits $7, buy in more. If it hits $6, I will buy a playset, blend it into a smoothie and drink it. It won’t hit $6, not anywhere it’s currently $10. TCG Player low is already $13, snapple any cheap eBay auctions you can and thank me later. This is a $20+ card in a year.

Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger 

This is in half as many decks as Crypt Ghast. Here I am talking about how it’s going to recover as much or nearly as much. Why am I saying that? Don’t I forsee the demand as being half as much as that of Crypt Ghast? Why do I forsee recovery? The answer to that is in a euphemism Wizards of the Coast loves to use and how it’s not always a euphemism.

They don’t bring prices down, they “increase availability” which usually means “bring prices down” but not always. Reprints introduce more copies of a card into the market. That has the effect of lowering prices, generally, since you’re disrupting one half of the supply/demand dichotomy and therefore affecting the other. However, in the case of a card like Vorniclex that was a $30 mythic from a set you can’t buy anymore, people were priced out. People could break off $5 for a Crypt Ghast but $30 for Vorinclex was out of a lot of price ranges. A $13 Vorinclex? Now you’re talking. People who simply didn’t have access before have access now and I think that creates new demand. When a card goes below a certain price threshold, it becomes more available to people and they buy. I think Vorinclex’s price can recover even if it takes longer because when it’s cheap, it stops not being an option for some people. This is almost the same as Sphinx in every way except for number of decks it’s in so I expect it to recover less than Sphinx but I expect it to be in more decks than it used to be in a year. This is a bit more of a casual card than Sphinx so people being priced out is an actual factor. I think this could recover 75-80% of its pre-reprint value in a year or two. If that’s too long to wait, don’t worry because I have other targets.

Rune-Scarred Demon

I don’t feel like I need to say too much about this. It’s practically a bulk rare and this is a card that once flirted with $8. This won’t be $8 again but it’s at its absolute floor and the demand profile is the same as Crypt Ghast, it’s at the same price point, it’s a card that appeals to both casual and competitive EDH players and it’s not super likely to be re-reprinted in the next year or two. I think you can wait and see if this is in Masters 25 before you buy in, but I think you break off $200 or so and you’ll be very happy with how this performs. I could be missing something, but what? This is pretty Crypt Ghasty and unlike Crypt Ghast, this was reprinted in a set with $10 booster packs, not a popular Commander deck series.

I didn’t mean to do one card of each color so far but since I was going to do 5 cards, let’s pick a red one and wrap it up.

Sheoldred, Whispering One

Red sucks in EDH

I didn’t do a red card because they’re all either not in very many decks, almost exclusively used outside of EDH or they’re Kiki-Jiki and liable to get reprinted 3 more times. I’m giving you a good pick instead of arbitrarily completing a cycle I didn’t even know could be a cycle until I was 80% of the way through it. You’re welcome.

And you’re welcome for me reminding you to buy a card that has demonstrated the ability to flirt with $30 for like $10. This hits $20 again and you’ll be all “Wow, when did this get expensive again?” except you won’t because you’re reading this article so you won’t be surprised but other people will. I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Anyway, Sheoldred will recover and it’s at its floor now, so fill a shopping cart with them and windmill slam that “check out” button. You’re welcome.

This turned into a long article. If I were a lesser writer I would have given 3 picks instead of 5 but I am not a lesser writer. I am a man who finds you reverse-J-shaped graphs. You’re swell for reading, thanks for doing that. Until next time!

There aren’t any.

We good? Any more questions?

Look, if you’re going to insist I write an article this week, we’re going to have to pick a different topic. That’s handy, because I noticed another deck that isn’t new nor are most of the cards in it and I think that’s a good thing. New cards printed in Ixalan block, specifically Rivals of Ixalan have renewed interest in an older Commander because those cards are perfect for an older archetype, though not much else. What happens when cards are printed that are super narrow but seem laser-guided to one established deck? Well, those cards themselves are likely to be pretty worthless financially unless they make an impact somewhere else, but they get people interested in an older deck and that’s worth talking about.

So what’s my thesis today? I’ve been doing this long enough and tracking my older predictions long enough to know what actually happens in cases like this and what happens less often and what happens even less often so I’m going to season my predictions with my experience. I’m going to say “this could go up” less often than I used to because by now I have a little bit better of an idea of what it will take and what has the goods. 50% of the cards we’re going to talk about  are going to likely go up, maybe a little maybe a lot, based on more people building the deck based on it being popular on EDHREC and the cards coming out being so good in it. The other half are cards that were going to go up anyway but I hadn’t really thought about them until I saw people played them in this deck and that reminded me to talk about how the card is at its floor. Both of those are equally valid. You’re partly paying me to think through some stuff for you because you don’t want to understand EDH finance and you’re partly paying me to remind you of cards you might have thought were good pick-ups but forgot about because there’s a lot going on.

Let’s get into the money part.

So this has been a commander for a while and it’s being built an OK amount. Per EDHREC’s current sampling data, Sidisi is the 11th-most popular deck so the current number of decks in the database is a little misleading. For reference, there are currently only twice as many deck for Atraxa in our database. This isn’t a problem; remember, we have always used those numbers to establish ratios rather than look at the numbers as absolutes. The numbers help but the more you use them qualitatively and the less you use them quantitatively, the happier you will be because you will get confused by the data less. Yes, I realize I am implying I use “numbers” which have absolute values, qualitatively. Sidisi having 1,880 decks registered on the site is an exact but fairly meaningless amount without context. Quantitatively, that’s about half as many as Atraxa, which has the largest number of decks registered in the database. Qualitatively, we have enough Sidisi decks to bother looking at the cards in it. How’s that grab you? See why we’re not sweating absolute numbers a ton? It doesn’t do us any good. There are only 10 Commanders more popular on the site so let’s assume there are enough Sidisi decks for us to care about it. So what’s new?

Having lots of different data displayed can tell you a lot of information. When you list the most popular decks of all time, Sidisi is 11th. When you look at most popular this month, Sidisi jumps to 9th. When you look at this week, Sidisi jumps to 6th. That means that while Sidisi was always pretty popular, something has changed in the last few weeks. Of the 10 decks more popular than Sidisi of all time, 4 of them haven’t had a new deck registered in the last month and 7 of them were less popular than Sidisi this month or week despite being more popular all-time. Something happened. I submit that the printing of these four cards in Rivals of Ixalan gave the deck quite a boost.

Milling yourself is pretty handy in a Sidisi deck, and giving yourself a chance at a Sidisi trigger every time you attack and bringing your milled lands back from the dead is so useful it feels like World Shaper was tailor-made for this deck. Other decks could use that ability, sure (I personally can’t wait to pants people with Admonition Angel) but World Shaper has been making Sidisi players salivate since it was spoiled.

Journey to Eternity is a great way to keep an important creature alive or just use as a sort of Pattern of Rebirth that gets you a utility land to bring back important creatures over and over. Your graveyard becomes a bigger hand with cards like Journey.

Path of Discovery is another card that seemed tailor-made for Sidisi. In fact, I started tracking how many more people were registering (I don’t have a good way to differentiate between people re-registering an old list or making a brand new one but new interest is new interest) Sidisi decks based on the spoiling of this card. It’s not great elsewhere but it’s dumb here.

Nezahal I could take or leave. What, 3 ridiculous bomb inclusions isn’t enough? It’s enough. Now let’s look at what I think could go up.

Traverse the Ulvenwald

A historical low for a powerful, 1-mana tutor played in Modern and EDH? Okey dokey. Sign me up for all of the copies. I don’t know if this can get any cheaper but I don’t think you worry. Spend what you can and if it does get cheaper, borrow money and buy even more. There are a lot of copies to soak up but this card is just too good and with it doing such a good impression of Worldly Tutor for a few bucks, I expect people will be getting up on this. It has pretty healthy EDHREC metrics, too.

Worried about the glut of copies?

Maybe you shouldn’t be. The foils are almost gone and the price is beginning to flirt with $15. That’s going to be a 10x multiplier soon. This is as good as I can feel about a card. If you have $100 extra bucks, buy those last few foils from eBay or stock up on the non-foil copies. Either way, this card will pop and it will be really obvious in hindsight. Instead of saying “I knew this would happen” in a reddit post like an unhelpful person, I’m telling you what will happen before it does so there is still time to buy copies for yourself. You’re welcome.

Cryptbreaker

Speaking of cards about to bottom out, this is a card that deserves a look. Not as reprintable as typical Zombie staples like Undead Warchief or Cemetery Reaper, this is a shoo-in for Sidisi decks. It’s a discard outlet, Zombie-maker and card-drawing outlet all in one card that happens to be a Zombie itself, so you can tap it to itself.

Foils got a bit crazy last summer but that just means another spike will be harder because dealers are sitting on a lot of copies so there won’t be cheap ones to back-fill demand.  I think this could hit that same value again, albeit getting there slowly but more organically and maintain it. I don’t think this card is a reprint risk and the moderate-to-low risk (if we’re being very conservative) is further mitigated in the case of foils. I realize we’re going back to doing core sets. I also think this is safe even in that case.

Other Sidisi

I stopped paying attention when this hit $4ish then started to crater. I sort of got distracted a little when it hit $2 and that sucks because it has basically doubled up. this demand is organic and the blue line representing dealer buy prices is going up right along with it which means no one thinks this is done growing. No one is out buying Dragon’s Maze of Tarkir packs so what was busted was busted and copies are drying up. This is a good card in its own right both as a Commander for people who love mono-Black decks that can tutor for stuff and creatures that have good abilities and it slots into a ton of black decks. I wish I had noticed this was creeping up last summer but I’m making up for it now. It’s basically removed a lot of the speculation I would have done about whether the demand would be organic. With all doubt removed, get on board. You can’t realize a double up since it already did that, but there will be growth and in the mean time, you have great binder candy.

The foils are a little trickier, having basically grown at a rate that outpaced dealer confidence. I don’t think the price will come down a ton but dealers don’t like it at its current price, which is too bad. Still, with this being a bad set that wasn’t bought a ton, non-foils are probably pretty good given how few copies there seem to be out there. I’m a seller in foil and a buyer in not. If the foils go up some more, whoopie. You would have made more money buying Traverse.

That does it for me. As you can see, the implications of the unbanning of Jace and BBE reach far and wide, even being felt in an EDH deck where card prices are going up for an unrelated reason. As always, check out the page for Sidisi on your own and try and use my method to scope out cards on your own. Got a spec idea I didn’t mention? Run it by me in the comments. Thanks for being a reader. Until next time!