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!

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!