I don’t play Duel Commander and I don’t think it matters.

OK, Good night, everyone! We’ll see you next week!

Ok, apparently I’m being told that I have to write an entire article this week and if my hypothesis is that Duel EDH doesn’t matter for prices, I need to prove it. Great. That sounds sort of tedious. It’s much easier to prove that something does something than that it doesn’t do something, right? Basically the only way I can do that is to look for something it should be doing if we at all understand what it would be doing if it were doing something and then look to see if that thing’s not being done and if it’s not being done then the thing that should have been doing it clearly didn’t do it because nothing’s doing it in which case that thing isn’t capable of doing the thing we thought it could do. Still with me? Crap. I really thought you’d read that and give up and go read a different article. I’m really going to have to delve into this, aren’t I? OK, fine. I welcome the challenge.

Does It Do Anything?

Remember earlier when I said “look for something it should be doing if we at all understand what it would be doing if it were doing something and then look to see if that thing’s not being done and if it’s not being done then the thing that should have been doing it clearly didn’t do it because nothing’s doing it in which case that thing isn’t capable of doing the thing we thought it could do”? An example of that would be to try and isolate cards that aren’t played in Legacy or multiplayer EDH and then see if the prices are where they would be if that format could affect prices. The only other option is to try and look at a card that’s played in just multiplayer EDH and compare it to a card that’s played in 1v1 plus multiplayer and see if the card played in both formats is higher in price than can be explained by another factor.

The reason I wanted to talk about Duel EDH at all is because I saw that Edgar Markov was pretty popular this week on EDHREC.

Of the 5 decks more popular than Adgar Markov this week, 4 of them are in the Top 5 decks ever and all of them are in the Top 7. Edgar is pretty popular this week despite the Dragons and Wizards seeming so much sexier. You see why I like to wait until there is data to start trying to figure out which cards are going to go up? It’s almost like there’s a method to what I’m up to. If you predicted Edgar Markov would be the most popular commander a few weeks after the set came out, congratulations. Also, I don’t believe you. Also, prove to me you’re right more often than you’re wrong and aren’t just some lunatic who makes ridiculous pronouncements on reddit and who makes a snide “I told you so” post the 1% of the time you’re right. What’s that, you predicted there would be a cat deck based solely on the inclusion of Wasitora in the Dargon deck? Your powers of deduction are Sherlockesque to be sure! You should be looking for D.B. Cooper. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, I’m calling you a liar.

Keep Reading, Liar

Maybe some of you did predict that a pretty durdly, expensive Vampire would be tearing it up, I know I didn’t. What we did know was that the creatures with Eminence (all of which were put in the front of their respective boxes. Eminence in front? Sounds like a put-on) would be annoying to play against because you can’t interact with them at all, which is why we all hate Oloro and want him to stop making the person who keeps track of life totals have to keep track of so many life total changes and why don’t you be scribe, Greg? You’re the one gaining two stupid life a turn and continuously wrathing the board so we can’t even kill each other. Oh, Austere Command into Fumigate. Real cool, Greg. You can write down your own lifegain from Fumigate, Greg. I’m going home.

Edgar Markov is making his mark on EDHREC but he’s also being touted at the best 1v1 commander from all of Commander 2017 so it’s worth looking at what that entails and whether it matters. I don’t think it matters, and I am going to have to prove that.

Look Mom, No ‘Rec

In order to even look at this wacky format that I’m not sure is a factor but am keeping a somewhat open mind about, I can’t really use EDHREC. That’s scraping sites that are basically exclusive to Multiplayer EDH players and in the cases where they’re not strictly Multiplayer decks, there’s no real way to separate the 1v1 data from the Multiplayer data that I can see and that makes the site sort of worthless for this one particular instance. While I’m on the subject, I was accused after last week of being a shill for EDHREC. Ummm, what? A shill is someone who is paid by an entity to act as an enthusiastic customer to drum up excitement for those goods or services and all I did was tell people about new features that I was excited about brought to you by a company that pays me money and holy $^#& I’m an actual shill. In my defense, I was advocating using EDHREC for EDH price research long before my enthusiasm for the site landed me a job so at best I’m a reverse shill. You know who isn’t paying me? MTG Top 8. Not yet, anyway.

MTG Top 8 is a repository for competitive decks and that means if there are 1v1 tournaments, they’ll have the lists, especially for MODO events. These reports will be pretty useful for us and the page for Markov decks may not be populated with that much data, but there is a feature on this site that I like.

You see it?

Compare decks? How useful can one site be? When you generate that report it gives you a list of all of the cards in all of the decks with a column for each deck and a green check mark by the cards that are in all of the decks. Knowing what’s a consensus “staple” (I’m using ironic quotes because our sample size is comically small here).

We’re getting a consensus with Markov decks and from a financial standpoint, it’s pretty disappointing. First of all, you can basically eliminate the lands because while there was some consensus there, it looked like a Legacy deck landbase. Off-color fetches like Polluted Delta abound and there were ABU duals in the decks. It’s simultaneously useless to say “Badlands is a pretty good pickup, guise” since every dual spiked recently and also, 1v1 EHD isn’t a reason to pick up ABU duals. Legacy and Modern have so much demand for a card like Mutavault that even if every 1v1 deck ran Mutavault, there would be no way to separate the 1v1 signal from the “ubiquitous in any format that can support tribal” noise. There is nothing we can glean from looking at lands.

Similarly, the spells are pretty useless. As an EDH player coming from a 40 life format, seeing spells like Rift Bolt and Searing Spear makes me roll my eyes. Those are fine spells in this wacky 100 card Legacy format, but they don’t scale well when you’re trying to kill Jin-Gitaxis or Vorinclex and the 2 mana that Searing Spear costs could be a Go For The Throat. There is nothing interesting in the spells and I checked every one.

That basically leaves us with creatures. There was some consensus on some of the creatures but even that was a little disappointing. The format really emphasizes a low mana curve for an aggro deck like this, meaning Gifted Aetherborn, Bold Impaler, Heir of Falkenrath and Olivia’s Bloodsworn make the deck whereas EDH staples like Necropolis Regent and Mephidross Vampire are nowhere to be found. There is basically no overlap between EDH and 1v1 except for a small handful of cards like Olivia(s), Guul Draz Assassin and Bloodghast.

I’m not really able to conclude that this format doesn’t affect prices of EDH cards but it doesn’t even really use EDH cards. What I can say is that Edgar Markov, a very popular Multiplayer and 1v1 commander is like $4 on Tcg Player and Inalla is like $1.25. Is any of this predictable? I’m not so sure it is, but Vial Smasher randomly spiked a lot in like February based on 1v1 before it was banned. I think 1v1 cards are such a small percentage of EDH cards as a whole that you can pay attention to the format if you want to, and with MTG Top 8 data so quick and easy to parse for the most point, you won’t spend too much time on it, but I’m not going to really cover it here unless something seems pretty compelling. I think when spikey players grab ahold of a card there is a tendency for them to create larger waves and make a more profound change in prices based on their buying behavior and it’s probably not necessarily predicated on demand 100%.  Remember, EDH demand made Food Chain a $7 card for years – it spiked to $40 because it was in a Legacy deck and even then it was 2 years after it first spiked based on the printing of Misthollow Griffin because that deck finally got a Top 8 at something. Food Chain wasn’t a $7 card, probably, but it wasn’t EDH that made it the price it is today, no matter how much ex post facto justification people want to throw at it. Spikey formats put a lot of eyeballs on a card even if it’s a format that frankly I don’t see a ton of people playing. Markov could be the next Vial Smasher and with the $28 or whatever people are charging for Teferi’s Protection, there isn’t much pressure on any card that isn’t that card to go up in value from the Vamps deck meaning some of the other stuff in there has some upside.

What About Edgar in Multiplayer?

I’m glad I pretended you asked that. While I didn’t see any ripe targets after scrutinizing all of the 1v1 decks (Feel free to check my work and see if you think I missed something) I got to work on Edgar’s EDHREC page and found a few things you might like.

Bloodsworn Steward

This seems pretty juicy to me. Not all partner decks want this effect but the ones that do are almost all red or will have red somewhere in the partnership. Bruse Tarl especially was born to marry with this card. The fact that we can snag a $34.99 MSRP Vampires deck with a $28 Teferi’s Protection in it means there is a lot of depression in the prices of the rest of the deck considering the rest of it basically has to be $7 total and there is a $3 land in it for starters. This might even see play in 1v1, but I don’t think that matters as much as the fact that this is brutal paired with Bruse and whomever else is paired with Bruse in some sort of 3-way pairing.  Check out Exhibit A.

There will be no Exhibit B. The prosecution rests. BIATCH. While the graphical behavior of this card isn’t the healthiest-looking, it still shows cards of this nature have some upside in a pairing-based world. I expect growth from our 4/4 for 4 beatstick.

Mephidross Vampire

What’s that? A sicko combo piece is getting new upside based on it being in a relevant tribe? Check out the blue line representing buylist pricing – dealers are paying attention to this card and raising their buy prices. As buy price and retail price begin to converge, that means a price correction is inbound and you want to be Holden like Caulfield when that happens. This has demonstrated an ability to be $10, which means there aren’t likely to be a ton of these mispriced in boxes and binders and a run on supply means there are fewer cheap copies to soak demand which usually means an increase in both buylist and retail. A price correction seems likely inbound.

Vampire Nocturnus

With cards like this, sometimes the 60 card casual demand which can soak up four copies at a time is enough to mitigate the fact that this has two printings (albeit at mythic) and a $5 promo version (actually 2, one non-foil) running around. This card is pretty absurd, although a little awkward to cast in a 3-color deck. Still, it’s hard to justify excluding this and dealers are clearly increasing their buy price which means a sell price increase isn’t far behind. Buy these from Card Kingdom, put them in a box for two months then send them back to the buylist for $5 profit a copy, that would be my guess. Or just offer to let them hang onto the cards and send you a check for $200. They usually don’t go for that, but you can try. Mention how much in postage it will save both parties.

Finally, I would keep an eye on Exquisite Blood. Vampire decks love the effect and with Sanguine Bond completely getting its pants pulled down this month with two reprintings in rapid succession, it’s never been easier to get half of the combo. You know when McDonald’s gives people a million Park Place tabs on their fries but only gives out a few Boardwalks to make sure that people never win but all of them think they can win? I think barring a reprint (in what? 25 years of Magic?), Exquisite Blood is $25 and Sanguine Bond is $0.25. Get in and get out, I think.

I think that although I’m unconvinced that 1v1 has a non-hype effect on cards, I think it’s easy enough to keep an eye on it that I’ll bother with it from now on and maybe you should, too. It beats being surprised when something becomes the next Vial Smasher, especially if it’s something terrible like Arabho. Until next time!

Man, “Back to Basics” would have been a sweet title for an article where I talked about lands, wouldn’t it? Maybe a bunch of the many lands and spells that search for basic lands in EDH, perhaps? Or maybe a focus on Back to Basics, Blood Moon and other land-lock enchantments like it to highlight the fact that Mana Vortex and Land Equilibrium are both spiking. Instead, I am wasting this title on an article about how last week’s tirade (I give all of you enough credit to notice how sarcastic it was) led to a lot of feedback from readers on Twitter, Facebook, Discord and in the comments section of the piece itself telling me to stick with my formula. That was gratifying. I sometimes worry that I do a disservice by pointing out that potential cards are terrible because people seem to have no trouble selling the terrible cards in the the hype surrounding events in EDH. I’m not going to tell you not to buy cards anymore, but I will continue to suggest cards I think have upside based on the same analysis and logic I have been using.

Commander 2017 Is Unique

Not everyone plays EDH or understands it and years ago when the format wasn’t as popular or understood as it is now, this article was breaking off a lot of great advice for people. I still think the advice is very good, but in 2017 specifically, I think this article felt less necessary. Commander 2017 gave us tribes and people who don’t understand EDH can at least grok that you want to buy tribal stuff. The average armchair speculator doesn’t need to read analysis to tell them to buy kittycats before the kittycat deck comes out. The average armchair speculator isn’t necessarily going to identify Squandered Resources as a card with upside when The Gitrog Monster gets printed, though, and that’s why I think the method I’ve developed over the past few years is still very valuable to readers and I plan to stick with it.

Things aren’t going to be as obvious moving forward. While it was obvious to people to buy cats for the cat deck (they were about 20% right, also, which is impressive for a crowd of complete lunatics with no discernible strategy) it isn’t quite as obvious what to buy for the Wizards decks now that we’ve actually seen the cards. How’s that stack of Patron Wizard look now that we have one deck where you copy the activated abilities of creatures and artifacts, one deck where you have a Mega Snapcaster and one deck where you can temporarily make a copy of a Wizard? Maybe it still looks good because you want to live the dream of having a huge pile of Wizards on the board and you can use Inalla to kill them and keep Patron Wizard up to counter the deluge of board wipes that are coming. But for the most part, we’re going to have to start looking at what the decks actually play. Patron Wizard isn’t in Kess or Mairsil decks and since those are the majority of decks being built from the Commander 2017 precon, it makes sense to see what’s going to sell on merit rather than hype in the coming months. In some ways, 2017 isn’t so different since we’re doing what we did last year – looking at what people actually build and buying before those cards go up, something we have weeks or even months to do safely. There were a lot of distractions but when the dust clears, if you have any money left, you can buy cards that are being granted upside by how the new decks are actually being built.

What We Would Have Done Anyway

So let’s pretend this year wasn’t ridiculous, a bunch of Reserved List cards didn’t spike because the people on the YouTube or a podcast told us to buy them, cards didn’t go up slightly based on leaked cards that indicated that Planeswalkers would be Legendary and then spike again later by a lot based on the exact same information and that everyone didn’t become an EDH deckbuilding expert based on learning that there would be a cat deck. Let’s look instead at what people are actually jamming in Mairsil, the Pretender.

I wish I could jam like 100 references to The Pretenders songs in this article, but I did that bit yesterday in my Gathering Magic article. This is a serious times article full of serious finance picks. Go elsewhere if you want tomfoolery and shenanigans.

Here are my totally serious financial picks based on Mairsil, a card I realize I might as well post here in case some of you don’t know what it does.

To make this card good, we want to maximize the number of times he enters the battlefield, maximize the number of effects we get, mitigate the “only once each turn” requirement and try to double any and all triggers. This is standard EDH stuff for a lot of it. There are two different ways to build Mairsil in my opinion and the way the deck builds are diverging shows that other people agree.

Shilling Time, Unwillingly Mine*

It’s shill o’clock now because I’m going to teach you about a new feature on EDHREC because it is going to be very helpful at deciphering the different card choices and the predominance of each. You may not want to target cards for an artifact-based combo build if you know it’s only 20% of total Mairsil builds and we finally have an algorithm to help us determine that. This is stuff you want to know, trust me.

First, access the page for a commander and make sure you’re displaying “view as commander” rather than “view as card”

Once you’re on the correct screen (I mean, I linked it but I’m trying to teach you nerds to fish so I’m trying to anticipate any mistakes that might throw you off so you know how to fix them without having to ask) scroll or glance over to the right.

The “theme selection” menu is new and it does some of the analytical work that can be very difficult otherwise. If it’s clear that certain builds are emerging, you can separate just the cards from those builds specifically. If you click on of those links, it takes you to a new page. Clicking “Artifact” takes you to a brand new page. Open both the general Mairsil page and also open the “artifact build” page and compare how the top and signature cards are different. Some of those artifact-based cards got buried because there was too much noise and not enough signal, but if you begin to isolate the cards that are specific to that build, a deck takes shape a lot better. This is more useful as a builder than as a financier, but it’s not entirely useless as a financier because Artifact combo-based builds (you generate infinite mana with Basalt Monolith and Staff of Domination after you use Quicksilver Elemental to give Mairsil the ability to have all of the activated abilities of itself to circumvent the “once per turn” clause of his own ability) are still a minority and therefore are less likely to spike card values than the basic, meat-and-potatoes “card advantage from lots of abilities” build. Also, any cards in common between both builds have as much upside as all Mairsil decks so you can invest like you did before when you just assumed that was the case for any card listed on the page ( we assumed that because we had to and now we don’t, so that’s better).

That said, I’m not going to isolate any particular build since the Artifact builds are currently so much in the minority that their signal gets lost in the noise already and any overlap cards won’t be missed. I think overlap cards are the most important, so let’s look at those in particular.

Quicksilver Elemental

This is pretty key in Mairsil builds because it allows you to circumvent the “only once per turn” clause on using abilities of cards with Cage counters on them. You give Mairsil all of the abilities he himself has and then he can use them with impunity. This doesn’t have much appeal outside of Mairsil decks but this will be in nearly every competent Mairsil build and I expect that to be a lot of decks. If the conventional wisdom is true that there are so many new EDH players that every foil Yomiji and White Sun’s Zenith is going to get snapped up, surely there are enough new EDH players to push a 14-year-old, pre-mythic rare above bulk. This is going to get played more than Patron Wizard and is just about as old. But, hey, this is going up based on what EDH players are actually playing and not what people who don’t play EDH think EDH players are going to play, so don’t expect this to hit the $18 Patron Wizard is at. I still think you scoop these at bulk, and do it soon since supply is beginning to quietly disappear. I bet this is $5 in a month or two, if not more. It’s actually good and actually super necessary.

Chainer, Dementia Master

I think other than Quicksilver Elemental, Shauku, Endbringer is the best thing to copy with Mairsil, but Shauku already went from 50 pennies to 50 dimes this week so that ship has already sailed and transformed into a treasure map or whatever stupid crap ships do these days. Chainer, though, is no slouch and you want your Mairsil to have this ability for sure. If something happens to Mairsil, you keep the Nightmares, which is pretty amazing. This is old enough that I think the increased use and the fact that Chainer is a pretty solid general in his own right that there is upside here. This has demonstrated an ability to flirt with the idea of $5 and a second spike could make that price stick, making people glad they bought in at $1.

Morphling

This is a Reserved List card that must have gotten missed. If this goes up, I can’t wait for a bunch of tweets about how RL cards are going up for no reason despite this likely to go up due to being good in a deck that is good and also being pretty near a historic low. It’s trending back up anyway and I think of the three “lings” this is the only one I like. Aetherling and Torchling have lower buy-ins but I think there is too much supply for the demand from Mairsil to soak. This, meanwhile, is a reasonably-priced, playable, iconic Reserved List card. Iconic Masters wants to print this so bad and can’t. I think buy this and stay away from the cheaper ones that look like better targets and probably aren’t.

Wait, I said I wasn’t going to talk people out of cards so I don’t look dumb later when they get bought out anyway. Umm, OK. Here’s my new paragraph.

Jeepers! Morphling sure is expensive!!!1 That’s why you should buy Aetherling instead! It’s the same card almost but way cheaper! Buy foils because foils can’t get reprinted or something. Plus it’s good in Atraxa decks.

Tree of Perdition

This is about to rotate which means it could go down. Since rotation (September 28th) comes sooner than “Mairsil pushes playable cards up” (months from now) I would say to wait and see how much this falls at rotation, if at all. It’s a casual favorite and is pretty unfair as far as cards go so I expect this to regain value. Mairsil alone won’t be enough to push this back up if it falls at rotation, but casual appeal, its relative rarity, the fact that 60 card casual soaks up more than one copy and similar factors make this a good candidate for maintaining value and climbing over time. This isn’t quite a “dectuple overnight” like Shauku, but this was a good stand-in card for me to talk about rotation and you can use our logic here to apply to any card from Mairsil about to rotate, provided it’s a good casual card and at mythic. $3-$5 means this has room to fall but it has room to grow, also.

That does it for me. I think Mairsil is a great commander, good decks will be built with it and I think EDHREC’s commitment to continuing to make the data easier to parse will be a big help to us in the future. If you’re sick of hearing about EDHREC, include in the comments where you go to get EDH data and let us know how you analyze that data – if there are alternatives, it would be good to know that. Until then, keep selling into hype and buying into organic growth. I’m proud of you nerds. See you next week.

*if you can’t fill your article with The Pretenders references, at least reference Echo and the Bunnymen to make people born after 1990 feel cool if they get it