Category Archives: Casual Fridays

Casual Fridays

Zombies (Potentially) Rising

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So Shadows over Innistrad is getting spoiled and to no one’s surprise, Zombies are making an appearance.

Today I want to go over the stuff that’s not printed as a Zombie but has been given errata to make it a Zombie. This is important for tribal abilities, but more importantly, it’s a chance to pick up a card on the cheap before people realize it’s a Zombie. Beat the rush!

I also want to review some of my favorite Zombie enablers. We saw new Allies raise the price of older cards, and we should get a similar effect here.

Ashen Ghoul – A classic “It keeps coming back!” card, this may not be strong, but it is resilient. Plus, it’s from Ice Age, giving it a laughably low supply.

Coffin Queen – Yes, she’s a Zombie now. She’s amazing if you have a sacrifice outlet handy.

Eastern Paladin &Western Paladin – Total badasses in my Balthor the Defiled deck. You’re never lacking for targets, even if it’s creatures only and not permanents as the original was.

Gloomdrifter – One of the true joys of writing weekly is the chance to discover new things. I didn’t know about this card at all and it is exactly what I love. Zombies reanimate well, and when your Patriarch’s Bidding brings this back it becomes delightfully uneven.

Kabal Ghoul – Old School hasn’t caused this price to go crazy yet but it’s a good card to speculate on due to tiny supply.

Lord of the Undead – It’s already pretty expensive but you should know it’s a Zombie too.

Lord of Tresserhorn – I love this card, I do. It has a ridiculous amount of baggage, though, but I will give full credit to anyone with the intestinal fortitude to run this as a Commander over Thraximundar or Nekusar.

Marauding Knight – There will be games where this is quite dull and others where your opponents die very quickly.

Necrosavant– It is big and brings itself back relatively easily. What’s not to love?

Nightscape Battlemage andNightscape Master – These are Zombies with often-relevant abilities, especially the Master. Repeatable bounce is ridiculously useful and applies to both your creatures and theirs.

Plaguebearer – Exodus rare, amazing ability, fragile but capable of dominating a game, especially where tokens are involved.

Rathi Assassin – It’s a lot of fun to have an assassin effect on the field, primarily because you never get attacked for it. This one can even search up other random mercenaries you have.

Stronghold Assassin – In a well-built Zombie deck, sacrificing creatures is not a drawback. Go forth and wreak havoc.

The Fallen – Worth including just for the amazingly creepy art. Plus, 93/94 might really make the original Dark versions spike eventually.

Tsabo’s Assassin – It’s a brick of text, I know, but basically it says “Tap: Bury a creature that’s the most common color.” The fact that it can’t do a thing about colorless creatures is starting to become a drawback, though.

Boris Devilboon – It’s a red card, but it’s a zombie, and good token makers are surprisingly hard to come by in 93/94. It’s already up to $5 though, so it would need a major effort to climb significantly higher.
The following cards aren’t Zombies, but they are excellent accessories for the tribe and represent good candidates for growth.

Call to the Grave – It’s got two printings, and that’s a strike against it, but it’s got excellent potential. It’s also one of the most deliciously one-sided effects you can have.

Deadapult – This card is why I have such trouble ignoring the red part of the Zombie tribe. It’s cheap, effective, and exactly what you want to be doing. Plus, it has one of the greatest names in Magic history.

Deathmark Prelate – Zombies and Clerics have a very on-off relationship. Rotlung Reanimator and this card work so well together, feeding off of shambling masses that want to come back over and over again.

Dread Summons – Depending on the people you play against, this might be one of the most efficient cards in terms of mana spent and power gained. If you are in a four-player game, and you hit half the time, each mana in X is going to get you four power. The only thing close to that is Entreat the Angels when on a Miracle draw. In addition, this is a mill card and we all know how people love to mill.

Empty the Pits – It’s got a big starting price but if you like instant-speed tokens, here you are.

Endless Ranks of the Dead – It’s snuck up to the $3 range and they even brought the art back for Relentless Dead. This is really the definition of a casual card, as it’s so incredibly slow in a 60-card format. In kitchen table games, though, it’s the card people are going to keep glancing at nervously until the game is over.

Ghoulcaller Gisa – She’s already seen a small spike and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she’s put into Standard during this block. If she is, the price will spike hard on foils and drop for non-foils. I’m salivating at the thought of using her plus Relentless Dead.

Grave Betrayal – It’s expensive at seven mana but suddenly, no one wants to make a move at all, because you’ll be the beneficiary. This is one of the cards that will get you killed, but you’ll play it with a grin. If you’re able to wrath after landing this, it’s one of the best feelings you can have.

Grave Titan – I don’t know who decreed that the giant whose belly is full of zombies isn’t a zombie, but I hope that person suffers eternal torment at the hands of Vorthoses like me who just yell, “LOOK AT THE ART!!” over and over again.

Havengul Runebinder – Generally speaking, you hate to exile creatures out of your own graveyard, value or not. The effect is undeniably powerful, though, and something you have to at least consider. There’s always Riftsweeper to return the cards back.

Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet – Not a Zombie himself but one of the greatest ways to both hose a graveyard strategy AND get full value all at the same time.

Lim-dul the Necromancer – Seven mana is a lot for a mere 4/4 but the abilities are worth the wait. Most tellingly, he can’t regenerate himself, though. Unsurprisingly, this is a lot of mana before you even get to use one of the abilities, but it’s another card that will just take over a game.

Necromancer’s Covenant – There’s this card, and one Soldier Zombie for BW, and that’s all the support white gives black’s signature tribe. If this lands, it’s powerful, but not impossible to overcome.

Necromantic Selection – Who doesn’t love a wrath with upside? You can just wait on this until you get something sweet out there, at which point you steal the best creature for yourself.

Overseer of the Damned – First of all, this doesn’t work with Kalitas. The creatures have to die for this to trigger and Kalitas has a clause that replaces death. Nice to have a backup, though.

Rooftop Storm – This is it. The holy grail for a tribal deck. Dump your hand after playing this, and do it again as needed. It’s fifty cents now and it could be six times that when the Zombies go wild.

Stitcher Geralf – He hasn’t seen the same price rise that his sister Gisa has, and maybe it’s just a matter of time. This is another card that could easily be in Standard.

Tombstone Stairwell – Reserve list alert! With the right enabler, this card is a house. My personal preference is Vengeful Dead, but Noxious Ghoul is another card that ensures the triumph of the mindless horde.

Unholy Grotto – Volrath’s Stronghold is more universal and more expensive, but given the chance and the right deck, this is just as good. The foils are at a truly reasonable price, too.

 

There’s a chance I missed your favorite Zombie enabler. Comment away, let me know what cards make your Thraximundar/Grimgrin/whoever deck sing!

Casual Fridays

How Chronicles burned Wizards

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Come with me, back in time.

Step into the Wayback machine, set for November of 1994. Magic: The Gathering has taken the gaming world by storm with its gameplay, portability, and fun. Stores cannot keep product on the shelf, and Wizards of the Coast has been plagued with problems as it tries to meet demand. People who run stores ask for 100 boxes and get ten, meaning that no one knows how much product they will get. Prices fluctuate wildly based on availability, local metagame, and the lack of centralized information.

Fallen Empires was supposed to fix all of that. Magic, for about the first 18 months of its life, was unable to stay in stock. Alpha, Beta, Unlimited…all of these had bigger and bigger print runs that they thought would keep up with demand but really, all it did was make players hungrier as the game grew and spread.

Stores would order what they thought they could sell, and then Wizards would only be able to meet a portion of those orders. By the time The Dark was printed, this was the practice stores had settled on: Order a whole bunch, and get only a part of that.

Well, Wizards had finally figured out how to meet demand, and when Fallen Empires came out in November 1994, they gave every store as much as they had asked for…and lots of stores couldn’t pay for 10 cases when they were only expecting one. Fallen Empires remains the gold standard for overprinting sets for this reason.

The next expansion was part of a three-sets-in-four-months run that Wizards is going to try again this summer. April 1995 saw Ice Age, June brought Fourth Edition, and then July had Chronicles.

Personal aside: I was a sophomore when Ice Age came out. I remember seeing that a new  Counterspell was all of a sudden in the nickel bin at my LGS, and I bought four for a quarter, and I thought, “Someone really messed this up!!”

Ice Age had a small number of reprints, stuff like Icy Manipulator and Hurricane, but the other two sets were all reprints, all the time, and Chronicles specifically picked on things that were Rare or Uncommon. This was a game-changer, as some prices took a huge hit, as the number in circulation went up by an estimated factor of 10-20, according to Ben Bleweiss.

We have to remember how we found out about price changes back then. There were two main magazines that collected price data: InQuest and Scrye. Prices updated once a month when these bad boys hit the streets.

There was no shadowy #mtgfinance cartel orchestrating buyouts; this was opening a magazine and finding out that your rare $20 Killer Bees from Legends, the scourge of Hoover High School and a card with an ungodly number of kills…is now a dollar card thanks to being printed as an uncommon in Chronicles. Also, his Bees were not the only Bees to be reckoned with anymore, as we all had died to that card and now we all wanted to rack up kills with them!

What I want to think about is how the overprinting of Fallen Empires and Chronicles has made Wizards extremely hesitant about how they approach reprints at this time. We have some unofficial data about scarcity of Fifth Edition through Tenth Edition: They did not sell well, as evidenced by their low prices, aside from a few key cards.

It’s hard for me to express what it was like back then. There were boxes and boxes of Fallen Empires sitting on shelves, their six-card packs offering pump knights and the hope of a Breeding Pit. There was almost none of The Dark or things previous.

Contributing to the problem was that the packs previous to Ice Age were searchable. We knew the rare (or uncommon 3, or 2, or whatever system was in place) was the last card, face down. A little patience could tickle that card upward enough to expose the name, at which point the semi-transparent white plastic of the pack would yield the name of the card and whether it was worth buying…so the only older packs left on game store shelves were not going to have the cards people wanted most.

I’ve seen this trick done and it is disheartening in the extreme. Do not, ever, never, under any circumstance buy a loose pack of anything previous to Ice Age, when opaque foil started being used on booster packs. It’s been checked for duals/power/expensive cards already and while you might make a little money on the uncommons you have no hope of snagging the chase cards.

Chronicles was meant to make the game accessible for those who hadn’t had a chance to buy cards during Magic’s early days. Because Wizards had sorted out the printing problems and could meet demand, it was theorized that everyone would be happy having lots of copies of the stuff that wasn’t available early.

There were indeed a lot of people who were stoked to have lots more copies in circulation, but there were lots of others who saw the value of their cards drop like a rock. This very vocal group of people continued to make noise at the company over reprints, to the point that Wizards tried to mollify them almost immediately with the creation of a reprint policy. This locked down the rares which had not yet been reprinted and prevented any rare printed between Ice Age and Urza’s Destiny from being reprinted more than once. That ‘one time’ is why you get Judge Foil versions of things that weren’t allowed to be reprinted.

Say what you want about what exactly Wizards does in response to player outcries, but they have never failed to deliver a response, even if that response boils down to ‘calm down and wait,’ as evidenced with the outbreak of Modern Eldrazi. Wizards reacted swiftly to the outcry and decided that they were not going to devalue collections instantly.

This decision is at the heart of Wizards’ support of non-Standard formats. They have made a conscious and deliberate decision to attempt to lower prices gradually. Even big Standard reprints like Thoughtseize and fetchlands have not hit those prices too hard, and those are top-tier, four-of tournament staples.

I admit, I gave up trying to predict Wizards’ future behavior after they put Iona, Shield of Emeria in Modern Masters 2015 and then with the same art in the From the Vault set that same summer, yet the Reserved List makes a certain amount of sense. Some things are safe, everything else is fair game. You might not agree with this policy. Mark Rosewater doesn’t. Lots of people don’t, but as has been stated, it’s a policy and a promise that Wizards intends to honor.

MTG_iona

However, Wizards doesn’t want to make access to older cards too easy and too fast for the new player at the expense of the established player. This is a tricky line to walk, and I don’t think there’s a single correct path.

Wizards is aware of the pitfalls they have made in trying to strike that balance. Randy Buehler said it flat out: Chronicles was a fairly big mistake. It was overprinted. It tanked too much value too fast, and now every time there’s a set of reprints of non-Standard cards (Modern Masters, Modern Event Deck, From the Vaults, etc.) they have to reassure players that this will not be Chronicles all over again.

Wizards would rather underprint than overprint. We saw this in both Modern Masters releases, where there was a burst of product available but the demand was too high to keep prices low for long. You can find it now, but it’s going to cost you, and Wizards is okay with this outcome.

The end result is this: Eternal Masters is going to have a print run that’s relatively small. More Modern Masters 2013 than the 2015 version in terms of the numbers, and that means there will be less in circulation than you’re hoping for, especially the mythics or other cards you need a four-of, such as Force of Will.

 

Casual Fridays, Uncategorized

The Safety in Shiny Things

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I love foils. I’m not shy about it. I am constantly looking for foils to go into my Commander decks, and that’s proven to be a sensible financial investment.

In the last couple of years, we’ve had some notable foil versions of lots of cards, and I want to examine what the long-term prospects of those cards are, because it seems likely that we’re going to get more and more of these.

For a long time, the usual special release of a card was a Judge Foil. This was a slow-but-sure way to get reprints out there or to put out foil versions of a card that had zero chance of being foil. Flusterstorm is an example of this.

flusterstorm

The Commander version has been ticking upward since its release in 2011, primarily due to Legacy play, but its power in any format cannot be overstated. The Judge Foil has consistently stayed more expensive, but not to a major multiplier. We don’t have exact numbers of how many Commander versions there are and how many Judge versions there are, but a multiplier of only 1.5 is surprising.

Should Flusterstorm be reprinted, what would happen to these prices? Well, it depends. Are there foils of the new printing? Is it in Conspiracy 2: Conspire Harder? Eternal Masters? Another Judge printing?

Normally, the most valuable printing of something is the original foil. In these cases, new versions, even in foil, aren’t going to ding the originals or even will increase the values.

For instance, Damnation. The foil has stayed consistently in the $100-$120 range for the past couple of years, despite the presence of an MPR version and a Judge Foil in 2015. The foil has stayed stable, even with the foil judge version coming out. That’s what we want from our high-end cards: stability.

A big factor, though, is the art and the look. Let’s look at a case when the new art can blow the old versions away: Hanna, Ship’s Navigator.

Hanna

Hanna’s pack foil lost about a third of her value, dropping from $55 to $35 at the beginning of 2015, with the release of a Judge Foil featuring gorgeous new art from Terese Nielsen. In this case, the original took a hit but that’s quite rare. Mostly, old foils and especially those in the old frame, are immune to losing significant value.

There’s another example in recent times of a card that’s been given multiple printings and what the prices can do: Polluted Delta, along with the other Onslaught fetches.

The original Onslaught foil of Polluted Delta is at a little under $400, but two years ago it was about $100 more. In 2009, there was a Judge printing of those lands, and that helped keep prices reasonable, if not quite affordable in terms of the foils. We’ve gotten two new printings of the card, though, in Khans of Tarkir and as a Zendikar Expedition.

PD Foil

The price on this flinched slightly, about 15%, when Khans came out but didn’t budge at all when the Expeditions became known. This tells us that the sheer number available as an in-print rare matters a lot more than the presence of the Expeditions version. There’s not many of the pack foils, and they are going to stay rare and expensive. You now have four choices for the foil in your deck, though, and all four have different looks and different frames and different prices. It’s totally up to you what you like vs. what you can afford.

The Judge Foil version of Polluted Delta took a little bit of a hit as well from the one-two punch of Khans and then Expeditions. I expect the price to recover, though, as the supply has maximized and people are getting the foils they want. There’s almost a glut on the market, though only two of these are printed in the last five years.

What does this mean going forward? It means that I love picking up the Expeditions edition filters. There’s one version competing, the original pack foil. These Expeditions will not go down in price once Oath of the Gatewatch stops being opened, and the relatively smaller print runs mean a smaller supply.

The pack foils from Shadowmoor and Eventide did not change in price when the Expeditions were announced, and that is telling. I think it reflects the relatively small print run of those sets more than anything else, and it’s entirely possible that there’s more Expedition Cascade Bluffs out there than Eventide foil versions.

These Expeditions are in a strange place, as some of them are more expensive than the pack foil, and others are cheaper. I am a fan of getting these, and other foil lands, as safe to hold their value for years going forward. If you want them for your Commander deck, your cube, or just to bling out any deck, I suggest you get them now.

Casual Fridays

Casual Appeal

I do not spend much money on Magic. In fact, I actively try to invest at little hard cash as possible into this hobby.

My usual spending habit is to get in a draft for about $15, crack those packs, and get my single elimination on. Occasionally I buy individual cards, especially if they are EDH foils, but mostly I limit my spending.

I think of myself as a casual player, despite having written for MTGPrice for more than two years. There are a few cards that I’ve gone after hard and traded for many copies of (Thespian’s Stage, Prophet of Kruphix) because I believed, but I’ve never spent a lot of money.

I have never been a person who is heavy into speculation, but my collection’s value has gone crazy because I rarely dip into my old cards.

We are living in a very strange time for Magic. There’s more people playing this game than ever before, and the players appear to have more money to spend than ever. The structure of the game allows for people to play at the level they are comfortable with, be it in terms of finances, format, styles, anything.

My advice to you is now to never sell your bulk. Store everything. I’m not sure about the cards that are bulk from sets as recent as Theros (just as an example) but the spikes are coming so fast and so frequent that I would hate to move bulk unless I was moving to a much smaller home. Commons are probably okay to get rid of, but uncommons might have some legs, especially selected good uncommons.

Let me give you an example: Inquisition of Kozilek.

Inq

I sold 20 of these to a buylist for $5 apiece when they first went to $8, but that was simply because I didn’t know they had gone up to $4 months before. I went back to my Rise of the Eldrazi boxes and got them all out, cackling as I made $100 off of a card that I thought was a crap uncommon. It was crap, too: Inquisition was easily a last-pick card in ROE draft.

I don’t regret selling at that price, because I didn’t expect that three years later, it would be a $25 card. A card spikes and I want to move it out. I’ll have made a ridiculous profit already, and I have zero way of knowing if it’ll get reprinted or banned.

It started as a budget alternative to Thoughtseize but because there’s so many terrifyingly cheap cards in Modern and Legacy, though the reprint version is now cheaper. Thoughtseize also provides a strong example of what can happen if you hold a card indefinitely: If you had them in the summer of 2013, they were at $75, and who knew how high it could go…until it got reprinted in Theros and the value dropped.

I think there are cards in recent sets that are very cheap, which given the right circumstance, might really take off. For instance, Become Immense has proven to be a very potent card, especially with Temur Battle Rage. So far, no one has added Become Immense to Prophetic Flamespeaker, saving a card. Flamespeaker is about $1 now but it could go crazy as soon as one deck puts up results.

I want to look at a pair of recent spikes and think about if there’s room to grow.

dPath

I’ve given up trying to predict what card people will latch onto in a fit of hope and speculation. Descendants’ Path is one example, where people decided that they could use Conduit of Ruin to set up for a free Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. This seems awesome, but it hasn’t translated to a deck yet, or at least one with measured success. The card itself hasn’t come down in price yet, and that’s the key for people that were playing and drafting way back in 2012: it was bulk, or just about that price as an EDH card good in tribal decks. Now it’s a $7 card and the time has come to get rid of all the ones you have.

Shadow

This is different. First of all, it’s from Worldwake, a set that was opened in ridiculously small numbers. Think about it: Zendikar is the most popular set ever at the time (2010!), and the draft format is ZEN-ZEN-WWK for three months before Rise of the Eldrazi came out. There’s not a lot of this card around, and there are decks doing very well with it. Until it’s reprinted, it’s got room to grow but if you have some of these I’d get rid of them now.

Finally, I want to point out that new formats offer unparalleled opportunities. Just in the last couple of years, we’ve seen Tiny Leaders take off (and crash, to some extent) as well as 93/94, also called Old School, and those cards have seen significant growth. Who knows what the next format will be?

Keep everything. Once it spikes, let it go, but until it does, store it all in a safe, dry, and cool place.