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: Here There Be Dargons

What a week it’s been. Fortunately for David Leavitt, someone else came along and grabbed the mantle of “Person the Magic Community is most mad at” which is probably too little too late considering even my local morning zoo radio program DJs (I don’t listen to the fart noises that pass for local radio, but a buddy with less taste does and he told me about it) was talking about his joke (which barely qualifies as a joke, not because it was offensive but because it was lazy) leaving the Magic community to focus on who we don’t like this week. And we don’t like the person who leaked pictures of the Dragons from the Commander 2017 dragon deck. At all.

I wanted to post the silly post he tried to make on twitter about how he isn’t responsible for the leaks, he just had a friend give him the pictures to share. The whole thing is really funny to me on top of how annoyed I am that some human parasite leaked a bunch of card images early and forced us to talk about them. Pasting your Instagram name on the leaks seems like a bad way to escape Wizards’ inevitable wrath coming down on you and is hilarious. Saying you’re not responsible for the leaks while being 100% responsible for the leaks is hilarious. Changing your Instagram name to “Turn 1 Thoughtseize” when there is already a Magic podcast with that name and pissing them off on top of everything else is hilarious. As much as this dude sucks for leaking the cards, at least he had the common decency to turn the entire affair into a gigantic comedy of errors for my amusement. It’s put me in such a good mood that I’m writing my article for next week super early so you can get in on this giant gamble we’re all going to be in on. Let’s look at what was leaked and what will matter.

 

The Ur-Dragon

This is a mythic that really feels mythic. That’s not necessarily saying it feels good, it just feels mythic. Learning nothing from how annoying Oloro, Ageless Ascetic is to play against, Wizards has come out with another creature that affects the board from the Command Zone. Let me assure you that “one or more Dragons you control attack” is correct grammatically and the fact that it isn’t “attacks” does not prove this is fake.

I’m not sure if this card is going to spike anything on its own. The fact that it’s the commander of a 5 color dragon deck likely makes a lot of stuff go up but I don’t want to recommend a bunch of cards that are likely to be reprinted so I’m going to stick to stuff I think is very safe.

What is very safe? First up, I would say stuff from Commander 2016. I expect Chromatic Lantern to be safe, which means it seems very, very likely to me that Coalition Relic is in these decks. Stay away from that, but if we get a full spoiler and still no relic, that’s a signal that they never intend to reprint that card again ever because they don’t know what they’re doing. Crystalline Crawler and Conquerer’s Flail would be great targets if they both hadn’t gone up already. There is a card from C16 that I do like, though.

Prismatic Geoscope

This is a “worse” Gilded Lotus that can sometimes tap for 5 mana which makes it very good. I like things that are very good in 5 color decks and this is it. I can’t imagine this stays below $5 over the next week or two. It was already a card I had my eye on and with a 5 color deck being spoiled, mana fixing will be at a premium and this has such a low likelihood of being reprinted this soon that I am all over this card, whose price is trending down and therefore seems like a great bargain. Yes, coming into play tapped sucks. But tapping for 5 mana does not suck and this is going to tap for 5 a lot. It’s going to tap for 2 a lot, also, but the kind of person who builds a tribal Dargon deck isn’t thinking about that.

You know what a person who builds Ur-Dargon IS thinking about?

Zirilian of the Claw

You know what’s safer than safe? Cards on the Reserved List, that’s what. This card is safe on the Reserved List, nestled between Yare and Zuberi Golden Feather. The buylist price for this never quite got as excited as the pretend retail price did in January of 2015 when someone bought a copy of this off of TCG Player and everyone pretended the entire internet was out of stock. If terrible dragons like Kolaghan getting printed can spike this card, imagine what the second spike is going to look like on the back of an actual dragon deck being printed without this card inside it. This is a no-brainer. Sell this to people with no brains. I don’t think any of this good will is going to extend to Hivis of the Scale, which is too bad, since stealing dragons seems very spicy in the wake of them printing new dragons. Zirilian isn’t getting play in Scion decks right now, though, so get out quickly.

Edit – Or not. This is basically gone from the internet. I told you it was a no-brainer. Don’t chase this spec, let everyone else deal with trying to offload copies.

There isn’t a whole lot else that’s really spicy that I don’t think has a decent shot of being in the deck. Urza’s Incubator seems like it’s on the table, Dragon Arch seems like a shoo-in, etc. I am tending to avoid obvious tribal stuff. Not every good card is a dargon, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami

Yes, that’s right, THE O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami, from all of those Kamigawa block flavor texts and novels.

This seems really underwhelming. It’s not always easy to hit them with a creature and if you do, the reward should be better than “Maybe destroy a permanent” but that might just be me. I’m not excited about putting this at the helm of its own deck. I’m sure you will get to summon this a lot more often than Ur-Dragon, but I just don’t like this card much. It’s not going to make anything that the 5-color dragon deck just existing won’t spike already so I’m not going to waste too much more ink on this card.

Wasitora, Nekoru Queen

Finally, the Jund-colored Cat Dragon that makes Cat Dragon tokens we’ve all been begging for.

I could see this getting its own deck built around it, actually. I don’t know how popular it would be, but this is very aggressive. Things that double your attack phases or the number of tokens you produce will get played, but I don’t know how much upside they have. Saskia basically already spiked everything this would spike and I don’t know if this adds enough additional demand for any of it to go up again. This just feels a little weak for multiplayer. Only getting the token if they don’t have a creature to sac feels durdly. If you die both things every time this might feel more playable. This also has no white so you couldn’t even play any of the other cat cards basically making this card’s tribal identity as a cat worthless.

Ramos, Dragon Engine

I hate to have to post a pic with dumdum’s Instagram account slapped on it, but this is the picture we have so we’re going with it. I was joking before but this actually is THE Ramos from Mercadian Masques era lore. I don’t know if you want this as your commander as opposed to Ur-Dragon, but this is pretty sweet. With the amount of Proliferate and cards like Doubling Season running around, this could potentially get out of hand quickly. Only being able to activate his ability once a turn keeps this from getting completely bonkers, but this is a great mana battery and I expect people to build something around him. I don’t think this spikes anything that Atraxa, a commander still bound to be more popular than anything from the dragon deck a year from now, hasn’t spiked already.

Taigam, Ojutai Master

Finally, a card that isn’t 100% a dragon card. This could spawn its own deck, rebounding cards like Time Warp, which this makes uncounterable. This is the most exciting card we’ve seen for sure and this, while it references dragons, need not be played with them at all, unless you really want to jam Ojutai(s) which you probably should do because, why not?

There is no real rush on this card so I’m going to give it its own article because there are so many relevant cards based on the deck that will creep up around this. People have dargon fever today so I want to finish out by addressing the rest of the dragon stuff I think has upside.

Foil Everything

We want to buy cards that are safe from reprint and in addition to stuff on the Reserved List, foils are safe. Only the new cards are getting the foil treatment meaning even stuff we know is being reprinted can be a buy in foil, especially if it plays nicely in the decks.

Haven and Crucible of the Spirit Dragon seem like decent moves to make in foil. They will be staples of Dargon tribal decks forever and aren’t very easy at all to reprint in foil. People are going to treat the non-foils like radioactive waste now that they’re spoiled but have months to go before they’re reprinted which means some people might use the intervening time to upgrade. Cavern of Souls is already plenty expensive, but cheaper, tribal lands that pertain to Dragons seem like cheap foil pickups that are going to fly off of shelves.

Stuff From Scion Decks

We don’t have to really guess what’s going to get played in Ur-Dragon 5-color dragons because people are already playing that deck, basically. Scion of the Ur-Dragon has a very detailed EDHREC page full of the cards that are going to get played in the deck and that’s pretty good intel. We can see that cards like Crux of Fate and Quicksilver Amulet are staples in decks like this and will probably be good moves going forward (I’d avoid non-foils on Crux).

Here’s an example of a card that’s languishing a bit and could get the kick in the ass it needs to reverse course and shape up a bit. The reprint tanked the price, even on foils, but it’s unlikely this card is ever reprinted in foil. What’s out there is what’s out there. I like this pickup and this card has already demonstrated it can be $8, so its current price of $1.50 foil on Coolstuff is pretty damn tempting.

Similarly, this has been printed 3 times (Archenemy and a Duel Deck) but only once in foil. I would say there is a decent likelihood this is in the deck but not in foil. I also like foils of this card’s wimpier Khans block corollary – Dragonlord’s Servent. Foils seem safe and with the price pretty flat (although the buylist price is showing signs of life, maybe) any increase in demand is going to be reflected in the price right away.

Check the EDHREC page because there is a lot there. Sarkhan’s Triumph? Dragonstorm? Belbe’s Portal? There are a ton of cards already associated with 5-color Dragons that are ready to go when we get this deck in the fall.

Next time I will dig into what I like in a Taigam deck, but for now, enjoy this early edition brought on by the leaks. You suck, MTG Noobie and I’m glad you deleted your Twitter account between the time I started writing this article and finished it. Still, we can’t pretend the leaks didn’t happen, so let’s get out there and buy accordingly. Until next time!

Unlocked Pro Trader: Gone Before You Can Blink

Last week we talked about Amonkhet cards pushing older commanders to the forefront of builders’ minds and how cards we thought had settled might be shaken up again by the new activity. Sometimes one or two new cards are enough to get people excited about an old deck and people who didn’t have a deck before or are rebuilding it can be just as powerful financially as a new deck materializing. Was Anointed Procession combined with Harsh Mentor and Canyon Slough enough of an impetus for Queen Marchesa and Alesha to jump? It seems that way. Would one new card be enough of an impetus for an older deck to go up. What if it wasn’t from the latest Conspiracy set but from even farther back? Would one card be enough to get people excited about Brago? It depends. What if that card is Ancestral Recall with 0 mana buyback?

With Brago, King Eternal, we take this $0.60 uncommon from an OK card in Limited if you get enough cartouches to Power 9, letting you draw 3 cards a turn if you play your cards right. Brago was good before, was considered Tier 1 or 1.5 in French by many people (which is such a foreign concept to most EDH players that it’s barely worth mentioning) and with people starting to play 1v1 online, he could get even more popular, which could translate into paper demand. Did I say could? I mean “almost has to” because anything that is sufficiently popular will translate into being more popular anywhere no matter how much compartmentalization there is between MODO and paper and 1v1 and multiplayer. People who lose to something will imitate it.

If Brago does get a second look, cards in the Brago deck, especially ones that get better with new Amonkhet cards and are therefore even more likely to make the cut in a new deck, are worth looking at. Here’s what I think matters.

Panharmonicon

I think it’s basically time on this card. It’s recovering from a historic low and while I don’t like to “grab a falling knife” as they say on Wall Street, I don’t want to wait too long to see how high this bounces. I think this is one of the EDHiest cards to ever ED any Hs and that’s good for this card. It made a bit of a splash in Standard for a minute, hence the high price. High price for a minute up first was good because a high buylist meant a lot of them went from packs to dealers’ hands as players traded them in to the LGS for store credit to buy more packs and such. Bulk rares have a tendency to accumulate and get forgotten in boxes but $8 cards are more easily accounted for.

There is some danger surrounding this card vis-a-vis whether or not this eats it at rotation. If you pay $2 and this becomes $0.50, that might feel bad. But even in that situation I think you are OK paying $2 and here’s why.

  1. I don’t think this gets that cheap. This is a card used in a ton of EDH decks already and that number will only grow. Players love triggers and doubling triggers is the best. Look at what EDH has made expensive that used to be a bulk rare – Parallel Lives, Doubling Season, Mana Reflection, Caged Sun. Double is good and Panharmonicon doubles stuff.
  2. I don’t think you care even if it does tank. EDH demand is robust and while it’s not quite a staple, 6200 inclusions and counting is strong and that means the card will go back up. People used to say Parallel Lives wouldn’t hit $2 because it wasn’t half as good as Doubling Season. K. This card is stupid, it’s played in as many decks as Illusionists’ Bracers and that card is $2.50 and counting. If this does dip below a buck at rotation, which I doubt, buy more. Your average cost sinks way below $2 and you profit a ton when this hits $5+.

I think it’s time to buy this card and worry about a potential price decrease later. They change the rotation policy every year so I have no idea what effect this rotation will have on the price of a card like this but I know that it’s about as cheap as it’s going to get for now. If you’re that worried, trade all of your new stuff that you’re sure is going to go down at rotation for these and that way you don’t worry about overpaying for cash. In general, I like to find targets that will retain value and trade all of my standard stuff that I can’t sell into them. If you find yourself waiting too long, you can also ship a bunch of standard jank in to dealers with a high trade-in bonus and cash out. Finally, there’s PucaTrade, which I guess people hate now but which has been useful for trading stacks of jank into Torpor Orbs for me. I haven’t messed with that site in a minute, though.

Parallax Wave

Price correction is due here for certain. I noticed that this was $5.50 on Card Kingdom and is all but sold out elsewhere. A few shops have this at $4 or so (up from the $3 it was last time I wrote about it) but have low stock. TCG Player Market Price concurs with this at around $5.50. We have a coming price correction that needs an impetus, and I think more Brago decks could be it. There isn’t enough of a discrepancy between the new price ($6+) that will be coming and the current, low-hanging fruit price on a few loose copies for there to be an arbitrage opportunities, but I still think buying ahead of an impending correction is wise. This card is played in Atraxa and the number of Atraxa decks keeps growing, not to mention the number of Brago decks that are being built this week. I like this card a ton moving forward.

Eldrazi Displacer

While we’re talking about cards that I don’t think will dip a ton at rotation and which get played enough in EDH to justify paying around $2 for them, there’s this gem. True colorless mana is a little tricky to come by but shouldn’t be too arduous in a 2-color deck. You have Temple of the False God (a card I hate), Ash Barrens, Academy Ruins, Inventor’s Fair, Mystic Gate, Rogue’s Passage and Reliquary Tower all commonly played in Brago decks, though, so you should be good for an activation or two even without your Sol Ring.

Again, I’m not worried about too much of a dip at rotation. I think this is played enough in enough different decks and formats that you’re not going to ever eat it buying in around $2. If this does end up $0.50 by some crazy fluke, don’t you want every copy of it at $0.50? Steel of the Godhead is $2, I’m OK paying $0.50 for Eldrazi Displacer, a card that, by the way, is way harder to reprint than Steel of the Godhead.

Strionic Resonator

Anyone else notice this happening? If you thought these were still cheap, well, they ain’t. They’ve been climbing for a year and while it took two years for it to finally happen, it did. I hope you snatched an armload of these for bulk back in the day. I even had Noah Bradley sign one for me.

Something else to notice is that this peaked around $5 and is down a bit. This means $5 is a safe bet for a future price and as more copies get taken out of the marketplace, it’s even safer. Every dollar you buy below $5 is basically a dollar you’re guaranteed to make in a year or maybe less. Brago decks love this card and so do a lot of other decks, so I think this is a pretty safe pickup the closer you can buy to $3 right now. This card is 2014’s Panharmonicon and look at it grow.

Everything else in Brago is either cheap or Grim Monolith. You can probably scoop up a bunch of Mystic Remora but who knows when that will pay off? (I bought a hundred of them for a nickel each but I’ve been waiting for a long time and still no payoff. At this point I might just buylist them for $0.30) You could try and make money on Restoration Angel or one of the myriad angels in the deck. You could buy every Reality Acid on TCG Player and watch everyone wonder why. The point is, if you notice something that wasn’t really exciting (Brago decks) because suddenly very exciting, see why people are excited. In this case, they’re excited about drawing 3 cards a turn on top of the cards you’ll draw with Cloudblazer and Mulldrifter.

Thanks for reading. Next week, I’m sure there will be something else I notice, if only as a result of building more stupid EDH decks even though I already have too many. Until next time!

Brainstorm Brewery #239: The Return of the Pridemage

 

Corbin is tired from PT Amonkhet and Jason hijacks the start of the cast.   The evolving standard meta and best moment in player interviews are discussed. Someone gives Doug an excuse to talk about Pokemon.  Breaking bulk covers odd tokens and old core sets.  Jason talks about which EDH decks Amonkhet cards are influencing.

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Unlocked Pro Trader: Dawn to Dusk of a New Day’s Doings

Don’t call it a comeback, because THIS mad, murderous Monarch never left. That’s right, Queen Marchesa has clawed her way up the rankings on EDHREC, ending up the 6th most popular deck this week. This didn’t make a lot of sense to me initially, but after doing some sleuthing on EDHREC, it still doesn’t make a ton of sense.

These are the new cards. Is Canyon Slough really that exciting? It could be, because another card is making a bit of a comeback and clearly, access to a red-black cycling land is the difference-maker. Let’s take a look at the new stuff in Alesha, Who Smiles at Death.

Is Harsh Mentor enough of an impetus to resurrect these decks and build them at a rate they haven’t been built since they were new? Perhaps, but it’s also worth looking at the specific cards that seem to be enabling these two decks, Anointed Procession in the case of Marchesa and Dusk//Dawn in the case of Alesha. These are basically the two decks bothering with Mentor, although Samut is giving him a try, as well.

Is a card like Harsh Mentor enough of an impetus to submit an updated version of your deck so it can get scraped by EDHREC? Maybe, maybe not. But that’s actually a good thing – I think the inertia surrounding what a pain it is to submit a new deck based on one or two new cards is actually a useful analytical tool if we can harness it properly. I’ll explain.

If a card is exciting enough for a measurable number of people to either build a new deck or submit an updated version of their deck, that is indicative of a larger phenomenon going on. If only 5% of people will build a new deck or update their deck as a result of a new card, usually that signal will get lost in the noise. We could, I guess, physically write down the number of decks and check them every week, but EDHREC graphs these trends automatically and by virtue of the changes with the largest magnitude being even picked up by the graph algorithm, we’re automatically filtering out only the information that matters. If 5% of people update their decks and a deck shoots up to the 6th-most-built deck when people are still building with Commander 2016 commanders and the new commanders from Amonkhet and no one is really buying Conspiracy 2, that’s a big effect. If we’re graphing it at all, it’s worth noting, right?

With Conspiracy 2 being basically unsellable at dealer cost, boxes aren’t really getting popped and the singles aren’t getting any more plentiful. Add to that the fact that Leovold was banned in EDH and therefore for the set to maintain even its current value, something else will have to grow and some of the cards are taking a lot longer than expected to move at all, or even become adopted (I’m looking at you, Regal Behemoth).

I don’t want to just rehash my article about Marchesa from the first time around but it’s worth re-reading now to see which of the cards have doubled since it was written. I do think there are some cards to look at, though, in the context of the deck being made by people who have access to Kaladesh and Amonkhet block cards. I think the cards I liked in Marchesa are the same as before, but there are new ones to like now.

If it’s Anointed Procession that has given us a second look at Marchesa, I think there are some cards you might want to take a second look at.

Assemble the Legion

This is down from its historic high which is good because the buylist price isn’t budging. A shrinking spread can only indicate that movement is coming. There is moderate reprint risk for this card, especially since there is a tribal EDH theme for Commander 2017 and red-white soldiers is a real possibility (though how boring would that be?) and this likely gets wedged into that deck. However, I think the reprint would be shrugged off eventually and the risk is low since the buy-in is low. This card is about to do something and I think you want to be holding copies when it does.

Marchesa decks are already toying with Anointed Procession because you can get double assassin tokens when you’re not the Monarch and white is probably the second best color for tokens, letting you generate a ton of blockers with cards like Martial Coup so you maintain your Monarch status and get a free Phyrexian Arena.

Purphoros, God of the Forge

This is one of the best gods and with decks that didn’t have access to Parallel Lives before now beginning to flirt with jamming this guy into decks with Anointed Procession. That’s a pretty good idea, you ask me. The foils are also starting to disappear on TCG Player and with the reprint risk for foils being much lower, that seems like a good bet, especially with the foil multiplier being under 2x. If Procession opens up a few more red-white decks to taking tokens seriously, Purphoros can ride that wave to money town. Graphically, Purphoros looks pretty good and although the buy price appears to be backing off a bit, overall it’s trending toward a lower spread which usually means a retail price correction is incoming. The foils selling out could be what triggers the market, increase in play as a result of Amonkhet making decks that use Purphoros could be a factor, also. All we know for sure is that a god was printed in a Commander precon and all bets are off, making foils seem even safer.

It’s not just Marchesa getting more love, either, like I said before, Alesha is getting a second look. Harsh Mentor is much better in the Alesha deck and that’s likely  factor for the renewed interest but I think Dusk//Dawn plays a role as well. There have been cards printed since Alesha was new that could get a second look now since people are building or at least updating enough Alesha decks that it caused a blip, so let’s take a look and see if there is anything there.

Gamble

Gamble seems like it was custom made for Alesha decks and the Eternal Masters reprinting has largely done its work. I talk a lot about how I love the look of a reverse-J-shaped graph because you can tell it’s the first half of a U-shaped graph that indicates a price fully recovered. The first half of that graph is great because you can watch the price decline until it’s time to buy in. I think Gamble will recover to roughly half to 3/4 of its peak so buying at the floor, even at $5-$6, seems reasonable. Gamble is no slouch in EDH.

This is a card that’s pretty good in some pretty popular decks and gets non-zero amount of eternal play as well. Gamble was a $40 card in a set where cards like Gilded Drake and Phyrexian Tower are only $30, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that a $5 buy-in is pretty safe.

Knight of the White Orchid

This is a mainstay in Alesha and it’s basically at its floor. We’re not likely to get another bout of inclusion in Standard to make this an $8 card again and if we do it will be accompanied by a reprinting, but this has upside and it shrugs off Dusk//Dawn so already it’s worth looking at.

Every time a new set is printed, check out EDHREC to see what older decks are impacted by new cards, and keep checking back. It took a few weeks for the trend of an increasing number of Marchesa and Alesha decks to emerge but once I caught, I found quite a few cards I really liked in the context of this new trend. If a deck is being rebuilt and resubmitted often enough to show up as much as new commanders in new decks, it’s definitely worth seeing if you can figure out why and what comes up along with it. $4 Phyrexian Arena? Could be. Maybe not. The important thing is to realize that the data is speaking to us and it is important that we listen. That will do it for me this week. Join me next week where I’ll almost certainly have some more money-making picks for you. Until next time!