I have written about how in the last couple of years, I’ve gotten burned pretty badly by moving in too soon on cards I want to spec on. It used to be a three-month timeline for cards to find their floor, but now it’s more like six months. 

With that in mind, let’s look at a few Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty cards and dive in on a couple of bricks. For the most part, I’m hoping to buy at least several playsets, with the intent of selling them all to a buylist when the prices go up. Yes, you get less money per card, but when your profits are already solid, you get a good return and save a lot of time and energy on the shipping.

I don’t like to buy these sorts of cards in small quantities, I’d much prefer to take down a big wall all at once. If you’ve got the patience for opening all the envelopes, go for it.

The primary metric I want to use is EDHREC inclusions, because most of these cards haven’t been in preconstructed decks. These numbers are the tip of the iceberg, coming from the most connected and optimizing players, but it’s good to know what people’s favorite cards are. Commander is the main engine of value these days, but if a card has a lot of Modern or Pioneer play too, that’s a lovely bonus.

I want to make clear that for most of these, I want the cheapest versions, unless the more premium printings are also quite cheap. In some cases that’s possible, and in others it’s totally farfetched. Also, I haven’t bought any of these yet, just for full disclosure.

The Channel Lands (cheapest is $2.50, most expensive is $63 for Borderless foil) – By far the most popular EDHREC inclusion is Boseiju, Who Shelters All, in 61,000 decks online, and the price chart shows a remarkably consistent price for an in-print rare land.

The lands are the most popular cards in the set, with Farewell being more popular than Eiganjo and Sokenzan. It’s not hard to see why all five are so popular, the effects are good and worthwhile and are difficult to counter. 

The only thing holding me back from a big purchase of any of these is that the full cycle is an excellent candidate for a future Secret Lair. That set wouldn’t hurt too bad, as we’re getting in at good prices, but it would take that much longer for the regular versions to get there as a result.

Secluded Courtyard ($1 to $7.50) – The most expensive version of this is the Promo Pack version, which has the Planeswalker symbol frame, but this land is strictly better than Unclaimed Territory, a card in more than 66k decks and has been reprinted several times. Courtyard is in 23,000 decks and again, we’re weighing reprint risk. This is absolutely an uncommon that can make it to $4 retail, giving us a profit of $1-$2 per card when selling to a buylist, but inclusion in a preconstructed deck would sting and slow it down.

Going after the more premium versions is safer, but more expensive to start with. Those are probably the safer play, but require both more capital and more time to open the singletons you’re sent. 

Farewell ($6.50 to $17) – The most popular nonland from the set, this ‘best board wipe ever’ is already expensive from being in 44k decks online. It’s not hard to see why, given the modular nature and the exiling. This is tough to evade and especially for annoyingly recursive decks, represents a total shutdown.

In fact, it’s entirely possible that we’ve already seen the floor on Farewell and it’s only going to trend upward from here. I want to be in on the basic versions, with a greater percentage in growth over time.

The Reality Chip ($2 to $9) – The foil Showcase version of this is already pretty expensive, but the foil EA can be had for close to $4 if you want a more premium version with less of a buy-in. This is a phenomenal card advantage engine, and is even showing up in Modern as a one-of in some Hammer Time decks that tutor it up with Stoneforge Mystic. 

More than 16,000 players have listed the card in their decks, and with a price gap like this, I really want a brick of the most basic versions. I’d be looking to get $4-$5 per copy from a buylist within a year.

Atsushi, the Blazing Sky ($5 to $22) – Almost exactly 16,000 players have added this to decks, and not all of them are Dragons players. This is quite a deal at four mana, and you almost want it to die to effects immediately. In this case, I’m most likely to look at the Borderless foils and hope for an increase to $40 or $50, and that feels pretty reasonable when you remember how many NEO Collector Boosters needed to be opened to get one of these. 

It also helps that right now on TCG there’s only one person with four or more foil Borderless versions, and only about 100 copies total.

Mirror Box ($1.50 to $4) – If you’d asked me how many decks played this card, I wouldn’t have guessed this was the 12th most popular nonland from the set, put into 10,000 decks in the last six months. People absolutely love copying things, though, and Mirror Box enables a very high level of shenanigans. It’s also handy for a boost to all the things you’re playing, and if you copy something multiple times, the boost really grows. There’s a case to be made for any of the versions, but given the higher quantities you can get of the regulars, I think that’s where I want to be. 

Don’t forget that buying all the copies someone has of a card can really lower your cost per card if they went low on price but high on shipping. Here’s an example, from regular frame, nonfoil Mirror Box:

The first vendor, you can get four copies for $10 or six for $15. The second vendor lowered prices but has a higher shipping. If you buy all eight copies, you’re spending $9.75, basically getting two free copies compared to the first vendor. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

We were given a hint of Dominaria United, and there’s been some leaks, but the more notable news is that some Secret Lairs have shipped with Foil Extended Art Slivers!

If you’re new to that creature type, that’s okay. We haven’t gotten any new Slivers since Modern Horizons 1, so it’s been a few years since the tribe of tribes has gotten some love.

However, if we’re about to get new Slivers, the world is about to go wild.

So far, I’ve been able to find pictures of six Sliver cards, including their collector numbers:

617: Ward Sliver

628: Winged Sliver

646: Two-Headed Sliver

649: Horned Sliver

657: Tempered Sliver

668: Sliver Hive

This tracks with the usual arrangement of collector numbers: WUBRG order, with lands last. It’s those five colors, then multicolor, then lands. Secret Lair has been different, with collector numbers starting at lands and going sort of chronologically. The Left-Handed Lair started at 9999 and worked its way downward, for instance.

In terms of how many Slivers there might be, we’ve got a big frame. Before Ward Sliver, the last SL collector number we see is 609 for the Hawkins National Lab and then 676 for the Pyrite Spellbomb from the Fortnite lair.

The big deal here is that there’s a LOT of Slivers left to go…and also, not too many. If there’s a new round of Slivers, we know full well what happens to the existing ones: the prices go crazy. Let’s get into some examples.

Sliver Queen is on the Reserved List. We aren’t getting more. I don’t put it past Wizards to print Sliver King as WWUUBBRRGG and have some ridiculous way to make a horde of Sliver tokens, though. The graph here doesn’t do the spikes justice, as copies sold for just under $600 during the most recent spike last year.

However, being an already expensive Reserved List card is going to make the Queen go bananas again. Near Mint Copies are currently in the $275 range, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see NM Queens break $500 with a new Commander or a new batch of Slivers. Keep in mind that Sliver Queen has some interesting offshoots: The oversized Commander’s Arsenal version is more than $100 and the Duel Masters version should see a jump too.

But if you want to make money without buying high-end RL cardboard, we’ve got other options.

Sliver Overlord is at its lowest it’s been in some time, with all three printings in the $30 range. The Scourge foils with the old border are up there in price, but with so few copies moving around, I’d expect big jumps there. The other versions should at least hit $50, given that Overlord has always been the most logical Commander for the tribe, given those two amazing abilities.

It’s entirely possible that for minor Slivers, that we get a FEA version tossed into Secret Lairs. I’m inclined against the big ones being in there, because we already got Overlord and Hivelord, but most of the useful ones will possibly make an appearance. 

The First Sliver and Sliver Hivelord are pretty safe, I think. Both are wonderful inclusions in the deck and are worth evaluating in their premium versions. The First Sliver in retro foil at $22 is the most appealing, but there’s also etched versions out there too. I definitely like the retro versions over the pricier original MH1 versions in foil, but the big risk is both the SL yet to come and what version might be coming in Dominaria itself.

Sliver Hivelord should be pretty safe, as there’s already been a SL version in the Thomas Baxa Lair. The cheapest foil version of Hivelord is the SL version, as the M15 version is $100 and will go crazy indeed in the new wave of Slivers. Right now there’s a few foil SL versions under $20, but it ramps pretty quickly to $25 and beyond.

Lavabelly Sliver as a MH2 retro foil is probably not going to get a reprint, but Cloudshredder Sliver in retro foil as part of Time Spiral Remastered is much safer. The TSR print run is done, we’re not getting more and frankly, we didn’t get a huge amount of what there was. TCG has only 38 foils listed for the retro foil, most in the $20 range, and considering what abilities you get, most Sliver decks want to have a copy.

It’s worth mentioning the FNM Crystalline Sliver too. There’s not a lot of this available, and Shroud is an ability that can have downsides, like no equipment or untapping. Still, if the wave breaks, I wouldn’t be shocked if this 20-year-old FNM promo broke $100.

I do not think Morophon, the Boundless would end up in five-color Sliver decks. While it’s a neat trick, it’s a lot of mana to pay for not a lot of effect. What I am very interested in, though, would be other tribal enablers. Guardian Project is a great one, but don’t overlook things like Herald’s Horn and my favorite for Slivers: Reflections of Littjara. 

Reflections is dirt cheap right now, both in FEA and the bundle version with alternate art, but Slivers more than most other tribes would really benefit from doubling each one that comes into play, since so few of them are Legendary. Plus, doubling up on static effects or ETB abilities gets out of hand real quick. Dormant Sliver is a strong contender to be an EA inclusion, but if you want to really get nuts with the card drawing, you want Kindred Discovery. 

I don’t think the current price of $6 is the bottom for this card, either. We’re on a good track, but in terms of a long-term spec I fully expect this to dip to $5, but with every tribal deck that can play blue, this should be one of the first inclusions. Not only does it trigger with tokens, there’s no size restriction (such as Temur Ascendancy or Garruk’s Uprising) and if you run out of things to play, then attack and draw some more cards! 

While I’m leaving out mention of most of the possible SL inclusions as FEA versions, there’s one Sliver that rises above the rest for me and deserves special mention: Hibernation Sliver. This stupid card is so dang backbreaking, as it allows Slivers to escape all sorts of situations. It’s an odd one, in that the original nonfoil from Stronghold is about $4 and the shiny Premium Deck version is a couple bucks more, but neither has a lot of copies online. This is the Sliver that every deck wants to have in play, an emergency exit in case of board wipe, and the one I’m going to buy up fast if it’s not reprinted.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

I am remaining steadfast in my stance that I’m not going to let Double Masters 2022 get me. I still want to buy some staples, and frankly a lot of those staples, but the prices are going to trickle downwards for a while yet. My research has indicated that six months is new the sweet spot, at least for the basic versions of cards. We’ll see if this holds true to premium versions.

What came out six months ago? Innistrad: Double Feature! I especially love the Silver Screen foils from this set, and the massive multiplier for these cards indicates how little of the product was opened and how rare these foils are. Most of these cards have a pretty low supply, mainly due to the lack of interest in the cards, but also because the set had double the rares and mythics. Each card is that much rarer, and especially in foil.

Also, there were no Collector Boosters of Double Feature. No increased drop rates of anything. Just draft booster packs and 1-3 foil rares per box, the way Richard Garfield intended!

So here’s a list of the cards that have the right intersection of low price, good demand, and limited supply.

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Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

We’re a couple of weeks into Double Masters 2022 and prices are all moving downwards from where they started, and that’s good! That’s the entire point of the set, frankly, to put more copies in circulation and let people buy cards that they couldn’t have gotten before this reprint set.

One of the hardest things to do at this moment is to be patient. We’ve only had the set in hand for a couple of weeks, and while distributors are certain that we aren’t getting any more huge waves of product, we’ve still got a lot of packs left to open. 

With that in mind, let’s talk about ‘the dead cat bounce’, and what it means to us as Magic speculators.

The phrase ‘dead cat bounce’ is a stock trading term, used to indicate a time where prices go up for a little while, even as the total trend is downwards. I think we are in the process of seeing this on Imperial Seal:

Yes, that’s a graph that’s trending upwards, but it’s also a graph that is only showing two weeks’ worth of data. Let me give you an example of this effect in a true staple, Doubling Season:

This is the Double Masters from 2020 edition, and you can see how the price has gone back up over time. The dead cat bounce is not the big jump in price just before April 2021. It is a small bump upwards at the very beginning of the graph. Let’s circle it, make it easier to see what I’m talking about:

 Yes, that’s a small bump near the beginning of a big price graph, but this is what I’m talking about. A small upward trend in the midst of an overall decline. Let’s zoom in on the circled area, and see what the graph looks like.

So yes, it went up $5 in a couple weeks, and then down again, bumped back up, and within a couple of weeks was at $35 and at $45. Of course, because Doubling Season is its own level of staple, it eventually recovered and got expensive again.

My point here is that the graph for Imperial Seal is not something that makes me want to buy in. I said that this card would get cheap, and I still believe it will. We know exactly what the card is, and what the usage for it will be, as a second copy/strictly worse version of Vampiric Tutor. That card, amazing as it is and widely available thanks to Eternal Masters into Commander Legends, is in 145,000 decks on EDHREC, where the most invested players make sure to optimize lists and share them out.

Because we’re all trying to make sure we buy copies before they get expensive, our very eagerness causes the Dead Cat Bounce. It’s not that Imperial Seal is three to four times better, but it is rarer. Seal is only listed in 28,000 decks, that’s a lot of people who are going to add Seal into their decks. That’s a lot of copies that never make it into circulation, and instead get put right into decks.

I still think Seal will go below $100, and possibly below $75, but every time we flinch and buy copies, it makes the decline take that much more time.

We can’t overlook price memory here either. This phenomenon has to do with a belief that a card is worth a certain amount, even if the actual price is different. Let me give you an example from early in my Magic career.

It’s 1995. I knew Ice Age would be coming out soon, though I didn’t know exactly when. There were no emails, no Internet, just Scrye magazine giving a price guide and vague release dates. Prereleases weren’t even a thing yet! So I stroll into my local shop and there at the front is a double-row box of Ice Age cards for a quarter each. I’m super stoked and start looking through these cards, thinking that I wanted to find new sweet cards for the decks I had, and there it is, staring at me: Counterspell.

To this point, Counterspell had been uncommon in Revised and earlier, but was something like $8 at the time. And here it was, mixed in with a bunch of quarter uncommons! So I frantically searched the box, and bought probably a dozen copies, all the ones I could find. 

Then I went and found my gaming friends, and said, ‘Look! They mixed these with the commons! I just got like a hundred bucks worth of cards for three dollars!’ To which they replied, ‘Sorry, Cliff, it’s common now.’ So I bought cards thinking that they had the same value as what I remembered, but actually, the market and the new rarity had spoken.

I imagine there’s a lot of people out there thinking ‘Holy crap, this is a $1500 card and I can get it for $150!?! Take my money!’ and I get it, I do. But we have to compare apples to apples, not apples to previously gilded fruits of legend. We know that P3K reprints come way way down in price, especially on the second reprint like Imperial Recruiter did. 

Warrior’s Oath is down to $20 or so, and given that Final Fortune is also $20, I don’t expect Oath to go much lower. I do expect that the recent minor upticks for prices in Phyrexian Altar, Smothering Tithe, and other staples doesn’t reflect the final price that those cards will be at in a few months. Be patient, as hard as it is, and you’ll get your value.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.