By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, I can’t recommend highly enough that you sign up. This weekend, while answering Tumblr questions, this beauty popped up:

Within minutes the Magic twitterverse was falling over itself trying to figure out what to make of this. Were they repealing the Reserve List? Leaving it standing, but removing specific cards? Could this have to do with the new CEO? I’m sure I’m not the only one who almost immediately began thinking about the 40 Revised duals in my binder. Then, not long after, this popped up:

Whether it was Tumblr’s mistake (possible) or user error (likely), the whole tempest in a teapot was over not long after it began. It was a fun two hours though!

Aaaaanyways, over at Grand Prix Secaucus this weekend, we were treated to Sam Black making everyone get real excited because he was resolving The Great Aurora late in day two while making a run at (and missing) the top eight. What more could fans of Magic possibly want to see on one of the game’s largest stages? Competitive decks casting Seasons Past and The Great Aurora is basically all of our hopes and dreams realized; it’s the Magic we all loved as beginners and were then told isn’t good enough for constructed. Nine mana may as well be single payer healthcare, sorry buddy. Stick to one drops, incremental gains, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Really, The Great Aurora is Bernie Sanders’s campaign as a Magic Card.

While the price hasn’t moved (much) on TGA yet, it may by the time this goes live. And even if it doesn’t, that’s mostly because Black was only running one copy. Yet Seasons Past was in the $6 to $10 range shortly after Pro Tour Shadows Over Innistrad, and Finkel was running just one additional copy, for a total of two. I’m sure that the fact that it was the Pro Tour and it was Jon Finkel helped there quite a bit.

Several weeks ago, when Shadows Over Innistrad was still being cracked at release events, a UR control list showed up at the first SCG Open of the year that ran Pyromancer’s Goggles to great effect. The price exploded, and after a strong follow-up performance a week later, the price was surprisingly resilient. Pyromancer’s Goggles, a five mana artifact that taps for a single red mana the turn it comes into play. That’s a far cry from the safe choice of Town Gossipmonger.

That’s three (I guess maybe two and a half) large, splashy, “that’s an EDH card” cards that have made big waves in Standard all of the sudden, with price tags to match. Seeing cards like this become relevant in Standard is uncommon, and it feels like we’ve seen more of it in the last six months than average. Still, it seems as if there’s a strong incentive to look towards these huge, EDH-caliber cards. What if we look backwards?

I flipped through all the cards that were at least six mana and jumped out at me as specifically EDH cards over the last few years. I also included artifacts down to four mana, since there were specifically a few cheap ones I wanted to think about: Alhammatret’s Archive and The Chain Veil, for instance.

I also only included cards that had price points I considered relevant. Resolute Archangel is an awfully EDH card, but with a current price of $.25 and no upward movement, it’s not really worth considering right now. Same with Hedonist’s Trove. Hornet Queen, on the other hand, while having 0% gains, is already at least $1, saw a lot of movement at one point in time, and is subjectively a more relevant card.

This list is entirely subjective of course; Worldfire screams EDH to me even though it’s banned, and I probably skipped over something you would have listed. I’m also not sure how popular a card like Elderscale Wurm is, though it seems quite reasonable in the format. In any case, let’s call it a non-comprehensive and imperfect list.

This is all the cards, sorted by the percent gain they’ve seen since they were released. Right at the top is Pyromancer’s Goggles, one of the many gifts Magic Origins has given us. At the bottom is Ugin’s Nexus, a card whose price has basically not changed. Some of the prices here have more going on than is obvious at first glance. For instance, Primeval Bounty was played in Standard, and had some price movement back then. Similarly, Hornet Queen was more expensive than it is today thanks to Standard.

I’m going to cut out all the cards whose prices are currently predicated on competitive demand. This is cards like Pyromancer’s Goggles and Seasons Past. Those are very compelling reasons to consider picking up cheap EDH cards, but that’s a bonus, not a reliable feature, and I want to think about these cards mostly as long-term casual staples instead. I’m leaving a card like Hornet Queen though, because even though it was popular in Standard at one time, the price today is entirely due to EDH. You’ll also see The Great Aurora on here, because its price isn’t based on competitive play — yet.

Would you have guessed Boundless Realms is the most profitable EDH card printed in the last 4 years or so? I wouldn’t have! At least, the most profitable high-cmc card. 550% growth is no joke, and had you bought a few hundred of these at their low point, you’d be a richer man for it.

In order to unpack this list, we’ll look at it through a few filters. First, I want to look at card types. How do artifacts fare?

Wow, artifacts look excellent. 7 of the top 11 slots are artifacts. Is part of that perhaps that I included artifacts with a lower CMC than the other spells? I don’t think so. Only one artifact with strong gains fell below my six mana cutoff; Gilded Lotus. The other three that fall below that threshold are also the three with the smallest gains in the top half.

You’ll also notice that the older they are, the better they look. All the best performing artifacts are oldest, with the four smallest gains coming on on the four youngest copies.

Clearly there’s a strong correlation here. Artifacts as a card type do great. Is this because  they can be cast in any deck? Possibly. Probably. Aside from The Chain Veil and maybe Darksteel Forge, those are all cards I would consider fairly universal, as in most EDH decks would be happy to play any or all of them.

How about Sorceries?

These are much more distributed than artifacts, but given how dense artifacts are at the top, they couldn’t not be. We see that the best performing card in our list is in fact a sorcery, but also so is one of the cards with 0% gain. Overall, they’re evenly spread through the list.

There’s no noticeable correlation with converted mana costs amongst sorceries as far as I can tell, though I do see that age is fairly important. There’s a clear trend towards towards younger cards as you move from top to bottom, especially if you ignore Worldfire, which again, is currently banned in EDH. That’s certainly worth noting — age seems to play a big part in the value of sorceries, and probably most cards. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody of course. The older a card is, the fewer copies there are, and the higher prices are pushed.

Speaking of age, let’s look at that metric.

With age in months color coded, there’s a distinct trend. Older cards take up a lot more real estate at the top of the chart than the bottom. If you kick out Woldfire and Elderscale Wurm, a creature whose prevalence in EDH I’m beginning to question, it becomes even more pronounced. Now notice that Primeval Bounty, one of the oldest, least-impressive cards started at $3.50, making large gains tougher than if it had started at $1. Were it ever that cheap, it would be the second largest gain on our chart!

We saw trends in both artifacts and sorceries that age is an indicator of gains, and this graph serves to lend strength to that notion.

Huh, creatures have not done too well. Even Diluvian Primoridal, a creature of unquestionable utility in EDH and over three years old, still hasn’t broken a $1. This isn’t a foil/nonfoil thing either; foils are like $2. I guess Colossus of Akros did fairly well, though that is an awfully splashy creature in a way that few others are. (Cool tidbit: @deejfordicus is the model for Colossus.) Hornet Queen, another extremely powerful creature in the format, is also quite low. It’s also not been too long since a reprint either. Will Hornet Queen end up on the top end of this chart in a year or two? It doesn’t seem unreasonable, though the sub par performance of creatures in general isn’t inspiring. Endbringer is also a creature I could see show up in nearly every EDH deck down the road, but will it be enough to buoy it above $2?

Finally, does converted mana cost matter?

Nope.

One thing I’d really like to look at, but don’t know how, is some sort of power level metric. I think about a card like Rise of the Dark Realms, which almost always wins its caster the game, compared to a spell like Ghastly Conscription, which seems like a much worse version of the same effect. I have no way to measure this though. At first I thought I could use EDHREC’s prevalence feature, which tells me how many decks out of their entire database a card shows up in, but it’s not accurate at all because it doesn’t account for cost. Woodland Cemetery shows up in three times more decks than Bayou, and the latter is unquestionably better than the former. Similarly, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale only shows up in a little over 100 decks — do you think that’s because it’s not a strong card, or because people can’t afford the $1,000 for an EN copy? It’s really unfortunate we don’t have a reliable way to rate cards like this, because I think it would be quite telling. This is where the MTG in “mtg finance” comes in I guess. You need to use your knowledge as a player to differentiate which are truly powerful spells.

Our rough-hewn analysis has revealed a few trends. Artifacts definitely seem to perform best, with sorceries taking a distant second. Creatures historically haven’t stacked up well — at least, not the high mana cost ones. (Solemn Simulacrum would have been at the top of the list had I included him, but he’s a touch too old. Lower CMC cards would be a different list though.) Age is certainly a factor in price, though being old doesn’t mean a card has to be expensive.

All of those charts cut the competitive cards too, remember. Pyromancer’s Goggles and Seasons Past were near the top of the chart, and Omniscience would have been first had I used it’s historical lows and highs; $4 and $40 respectively. Had you bought in right away at their lows you would have made bank, yet that begs the question, had they not broken out in constructed, would they still have been windfalls? That’s a future we’ll never know, though I’m willing to bet at least Omniscience and perhaps Goggles would have done well.

There’s another thing I want to show you too. Here’s the price graph for Rise of the Dark Realms:

That’s a slow, steady growth over time. No cliffs and walls here. Just consistent demand coupled with attrition. Most of the cards on the list look something like that. If it isn’t quite that smooth, it’s a series of steppes instead, which is basically the same thing. Given what we’ve seen about how age works — older cards are more likely to be valuable — and the price graph above, there’s a reasonably obvious answer about when to buy. We’re definitely incentivized to pick up our copies nearly as soon as the card is printed, or at least during the card’s lull a few weeks after release. Grabbing a card that’s already two to three years old may be too late, or at least, will be less profitable. Either it’s a card that’s rising, in which case after two years you’ve already waited too long, or the price is still flat after two years, in which case it may be a dud. In other words, buying any of the cards on the list above that aren’t at least as new as Battle for Zendikar may be a bad idea. I could see Clone Legion; in fact, I kind of like that one, but it’s still fairly fresh all things considered. Ugin’s Nexus though? Ghastly Conscription? No thanks.

Overall, it looks like anything we pick up we’ll most likely be in for the long haul, unless we get stupidly lucky such as with Pyromancer’s Goggles. We should definitely look at huge, powerful artifacts, or ones that do great things for your mana, such as Gilded Lotus or Chromatic Lantern. (Latern didn’t show up on our list because it was too cheap, but have you seen the price of that card lately?) Sorceries are good too, but you want ones that really do something. Boundless Realms ramps you for like six or seven. Rise of the Dark Realms often kills your opponents on resolution. Don’t worry too much about mana cost in either direction; so long as it has a profound effect, it’s good. And creatures in general are unexciting, though I admit to being drawn to Endbringer and Hornet Queen.

As for me? I’ll probably stash some of The Great Aurora, some Clone Legion, Endbringer (because I’m dumb), and possibly Alhammarret’s Archive if I can find them for a good price, because that card is stupid. I’ll also begin watching each new set closely for the gigantic EDH staples and begin buying in much sooner than I have in the past.

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of MTG Fast Finance! An on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important Magic economy changes.

This article was originally posted 5/3/16 as ProTrader only. Due to the feedback received, I’ve chosen to make the part of this article relating to reprints public. Enjoy!

Not as Easy as it Looks

This all blends into a much larger discussion of reprints as a whole. It’s been a hot topic again recently, with the removal of Modern from the Pro Tour circuit. Without a Modern PT, there’s concern that WotCaHS (Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro Subsidiary) won’t reprint nearly as many staples, and it will lead to players being priced out of the format. I understand the concern here, and it comes from a well-intentioned placed. However, reprints are not nearly as simple as “shove card X into set Y.” Check out this recent Rosewater Tumblr post on the topic:

He states it blatantly. Yes, we’d like to do something about making Modern more accessible, but no, jamming everything into Standard isn’t the right path.

Corbin Hosler had an excellent string of tweets not too long ago documenting one piece of this rather challenging puzzle. He probably should have made it an article, but he didn’t, so instead I’m stealing his content and using it for mine.

(1)Magic was built on a platform of desirable cards – some will be “chased” after, leading players to open more packs.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(2) This leads to some cards being worth more than others as players want those cards to play with.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(3) Over time, these differences become more pronounced as older formats see cards rise to the top and supply is lessened.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(4) This brings us to reprints. Reprints drive big sales for Wizards, but there is danger is printing too many reprints.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(5) Not enough reprints make things inaccessible. Too many – Chronicles – drive players away from the game and nuke the value of collections

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(6)Lots of people say they don’t want expensive cards – then they buy a pack of MMA hoping to crack a Goyf. This is desirable if you’re WOTC

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(7) It is generally agreed that Modern and Legacy are better than Standard. They are also vastly more expensive most of the time.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(8) Because WOTC doesn’t profit from secondary market sales, people want WOTC to reprint stuff like Liliana and Snapcaster themselves.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(9) Wizards is dabbling in this with MMA and EMA. This sells sets and is good. However, there are dangers to overprinting.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(10) For instance, if Modern and Legacy were the same price as Standard, why would anyone choose to play Standard over those two formats?

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(11) But because those formats change so much more slowly than Standard, it is impossible to sell as many new booster packs to players.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(12) Yes, stuff like MMA and EMA sell out immediately. However, if they truly printed those to demand, why would we care about Standard?

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(13) What happens after those sets sell out and everyone can now play Modern? Standard is forgotten and no one buys new Standard set.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(14) So yes, while a fully-printed EMA would make WOTC a ton of money now, it would come back to bite them in the next few years.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(15) At that point, the only way to sell new product is to either push the power level – a danger to the game’s very existence.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(16) Or to force players to play a different format, which is also not desirable.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(17) To summarize: Standard should be low-cost and easy to get into – $700-800 Standard decks are too much.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(18) But Modern and Legacy – if they are to be at all supported by WOTC – must be more expensive for the business model to survive.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(19) This shows why the issue of reprints is more complicated than it appears when someone yells “REPRINT LILY NOW”

Done spamming you now.

— Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

Chronicles was a disaster for Wizards back in the day, and it was cited by Aaron Forsythe as exactly what they wanted to avoid when discussing how to manage Modern Masters. It’s far safer to underprint a product like that than overprint, because overprinting can ruin future profits, and thus the health of the game as a whole. If it’s $400 for a tier one Standard deck and $450 for a tier one Modern deck, how many people would play Standard instead of Modern? Many fewer packs of the new set would be opened, and Wizards would end up cannibalizing their own product’s long term health for some short term profits. They’re already bad about that as it is with regards to MTGO. Do we really want paper Magic to begin experiencing the same failures as MODO?

Right Bullet, Wrong Target

One of the more common proclamations is that WotCaHS should give absolutely zero consideration to maintaining collection values of the enfranchised, so that new players can get into the format. Slash and burn card prices, screw the privileged elite, and let everyone into the party. It sounds great, right?

As someone who owns a set of Tarmogoyfs, let me say this: I don’t care if they reprint him as a rare in Standard. I don’t care if Goyf’s price drops. I’ve had them for years, will continue to have them, and wouldn’t sell them unless I was selling the entire damn collection, which is a long ways away. They represent only a small portion of my collection’s value.

However, I’m not the average player. Most people don’t own nearly as many cards as I do, and a $600 set of Tarmogoyfs is a much larger percentage of their total collection’s value than mine. If you reduce that number by $500, you’ve just taken a humongous chunk out of the average player’s Magic gross worth. Why punish those that don’t have a house’s value tied up in cardboard?

Going beyond that, assuming you don’t care about the 1% of Magic players that wouldn’t be bothered by a drop in Goyf’s price, what about all those players out there that are actively working towards sets? Nearly 4,000 non-foil Tarmogoyfs show up on Want lists right now on PucaTrade. Imagine spending however many months it may take to earn enough points for a Tarmogoyf, receiving it, and then finding out it’s showing up at rare in Eldritch Moon. Poof, there goes $100 worth of card value that you just spent six weeks grinding out. Is it fair to those players? Forget about guys like me, I’m not the one that a Standard reprint would hose. It’s all the mid-level players that those reprints really screw. Reprinting Tarmogoyf in Standard at rare is a dramatic example, of course, but you get the idea. Crashing card values doesn’t harm the hoarders like myself nearly as badly as it harms the thousands of people trying to scrape together a reasonable Modern collection.

It’s First Order or Something

Corbin spoke about how it’s important for WotCaHS to manage the cost of entry of Modern and Legacy relative to Standard, so as to avoid cannibalizing their own product. We talked about how crashing card values harms players, but not necessarily the players you’d expect it to. Now, let’s look at another facet: reprinting Modern cards tends to ruin Standard.

Here’s my for-fun theorem:

1. Modern has many more sets legal than Standard
2. As a card pool grows, it is tougher and tougher for individual cards to rise to the top
3. Those that do stand out in a card pool are exceptionally powerful
4. A format is defined by its most powerful cards
5. Format defining cards are more desirable
6. Controlling for rarity, the more desirable a card, the more expensive it is
7. The most expensive cards are the ones most in need of a reprint
8. Cards that would be identified as ideal reprints are exceptionally powerful
9. The smaller a format, the more influence a powerful card exerts
10. Therefore: Modern’s best cards will have a dramatic impact on any Standard format in which they appear

(Yeah yeah I know it’s not a valid or sound proof.)

Because of how good the cards in Modern need to be to see considerable play, they will by their nature impact Standard heavily. We don’t need to look far to see evidence of this. When Thoughtseize was reprinted, it had a tremendous impact on Standard as a whole. Remember Mono-Black and Pack Rat and Desecration Demon? Standard was 50% MBC mirrors for six months. Even without those support cards, Thoughtseize would have been a key player in that format. In fact,  that Temur was basically non-existent in constructed Magic during that time can certainly be at least partially attributed to the presence of Thoughtseize.

Similarly, the fetches in Khans of Tarkir did a lot to Standard. Do you remember what the decks looked like before Shadows over Innistrad? They were all four color messes. Fetches, in combination with the battle lands, were responsible for that. You could make the argument that fetches wouldn’t have had such an impact on Standard had the battle lands not been printed, but that’s sort of the point — WotCaHS needs to bend over backwards to make sure these higher power cards don’t screw everything up.

Heck, look at two newer cards, Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy and Siege Rhino. Neither one is a reprint, but they’re both seeing play in older formats. And while doing so, also made Standard all about them the entire time. Standard only has a handful of exceptionally powerful cards in it at a time, and all the meaningful cards in Modern are exceptionally powerful.

This isn’t to say that Standard can’t accommodate for these cards whatsoever. After all, each of these reprints had to exist the first time, right? Sure, but don’t forget what these looked like the first time around. Tarmogoyf, in conjunction with Garruk Wildspeaker, was a pillar of Standard when it was legal. Cryptic Command was key in 5c Control, another top Standard deck. Snapcaster Mage was all over Standard for two entire years. Did they “ruin” Standard? Probably not. They definitely warped it though.

I fully admit that any card could be reprinted in Standard and the format could be shaped to accommodate it. A great example of this was Mirrodin, where they brought back Atog and Terror. Terror had been an amazingly powerful piece of removal prior to Mirrodin block, but with artifact creatures everywhere, it seemed much less impressive. At the same time Atog, which had been garbage in the past, was now impressively useful on a plane with so many artifacts.

Yeah, we could have Snapcaster Mage in Standard and not have him be the most important card in the format. But it would mean almost no playable one mana instants and sorceries, and the two mana ones would need to be powered down too. Not just in the set he’s legal either. You’d need these restrictions in place in the block preceding him, the block including him, and the block following him. That’s a year and a half of Magic sets that would need to be designed within strict guidelines, just to allow for a single card to be reprinted. And what about the other reprints going on at the same time? And what about the blocks even further out that are impacted by the presence or absence of those one mana instants or sorceries in adjacent blocks? You can see how making room for a single powerful card can impact years worth of Magic design. When Rosewater talks about how difficult it is to balance reprints, he’s not kidding.

QED or Something

I’m not saying reprints aren’t helpful or necessary, because they absolutely are. Without them, formats tend towards stagnation, and if reprints are simply not an option whatsoever, as in Legacy, there is only one conclusion. However, shoving multiple highly-desired cards into Standard sets comes with a host of problems that go far beyond simply costing a handful of enfranchised players some value. WotCaHS runs the risk of alienating burgeoning players, crashing markets, cannibalizing future Standard sets, and driving players out of the game altogether. When you consider how bad the consequences can be, and how many ways there are for things to go poorly, it should come as no surprise that they’re (rightfully) erring on the side of caution.