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.

Our second weekend in of Eldritch Moon Standard and we continue to find ourselves in bant company.

After the cut, Bant made up something silly like 50% of the metagame. What’s really impressive about that is that nobody showed up not expecting to play against the deck. Everyone sitting down Saturday morning had a plan for Bant, and apparently that plan was “play Bant.” When a deck does this well in the face of a well-informed and readied opposition, it’s telling that things have gone wrong. This coming weekend is Pro Tour Eldritch Moon, where hopefully the pros will have found a strategy to crack Bant’s dominance.

Dissenger’s GU Crush of Tentacles deck looked like it may offer some relief from endless Company mirrors. It may be that any solution is going to require going well over the top of anything they’re capable of. Casting a sweeper or two may not be sufficient; establishing a true lock over the game state may be what’s required. Control decks typically don’t include such an air-tight (and resource-intensive) end game plan. Perhaps that will need to change.

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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.

Last week, we talked about cards to keep an eye on as we got ready to kick off post-Eldritch Moon Standard, with our eyes on the Pro Tour. Our goal was to identify cards that had a lot of potential to be realized by EMN additions. We’ve already seen some appear this past weekend at Columbus. On the whole the tournament was disappointing — Bant Collected Company mirrors were everywhere, with some fairly outrageous statistics. Here’s the top 64 breakdown, weighted by finish:

Yep. 44% of the meta was Bant Collected Company. Nearly half the decks in the room on Sunday were the same damn thing. I’m not even sure Pack Rat was this bad.

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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.

Hey everyone. It’s been about a month since I last wrote or appeared on a podcast, a month during which I took an extended vacation. I hesitate to use the clichéd compound adjective “much-needed” to describe it, because honestly, I didn’t really need the vacation. Others need a vacation much more than I did. My girlfriend and I both finished our graduate degrees and decided it was a good excuse to take a trip, so we went. Although I suppose can’t call her my girlfriend now, as she has since become my fiancée. It’s a great life choice overall, but man, getting engaged and subsequently married is probably the second-worst EV decision you’ll ever make, with procreation being the worst. After looking at wedding venues, there’s something to be said for lifelong bachelorhood.

Quite a bit happened in #mtgfinance while I was gone, something I hadn’t counted on. These months are typically the quietest for our little hobby, and instead of three sleepy weeks where the largest gain a card managed to pick up was 30%, half the reserve list was bought out and a burgeoning supervillain of the pharmacy industry waded into Magic. Thanks for saving the juicy stuff until I got back you guys.

A lot has been said, typed, and scrawled in blood on these topics so far, so I’m going to let them be for the time being. God knows they’ll all resurface in time, and I can piss into the squall right along with everyone else when that happens. In the meantime, I would encourage any of you that have been considering purchasing any cards on the reserve list with greater conviction than idle desire to act posthaste. With how few copies are out there of any given card, you could wake up one morning and find that the Polar Kraken you had your eye on for your “things that look like slugs but are actually monstrous sea creatures” EDH deck has risen in price by 2,000%.

Instead, today I’m going to focus on what promises to be an exciting event: Pro Tour: Eldritch Moon. EDM is set to cast its shadow over Standard shortly, and it enters a dense and high-powered format. Until October, Standard will consist of Dragons of Tarkir, Magic Origins, Battle for Zendikar, Oath of the Gatewatch, Shadows Over Innistrad, and Eldritch Moon. For the first time we will see six concurrent sets in Standard. While there won’t be considerably more cards in the format, the complexity is undoubtedly higher, with more themes and mechanics at play than we’re used to. This sets the stage for more breakout decks, especially when you remember that mechanics you’ve long forgotten about are still legal — like dash, which is especially intriguing in the presence of emerge. (Spoiler: there are no good dash cards.)

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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.

Some weeks are easier than others. There are periods where I’ve got multiple articles in the chamber, and I end up waiting a month or two to finally get through them all. Other weeks…well… My article idea list has got a good 10 or 15 bullet points on it, but all of them require a considerable investment of time, something I have in short supply this week. After turning to Twitter for any suggestions and getting several that are not-quite article length, I figured I’d address several at once. You guys get lots of information, and I don’t need to be creative. Works for everyone!

A quick note: you won’t see any content out of me for awhile. I’ve got a long vacation planned, and then return to two busy weeks at work. I’m not setting any hard dates, but I probably won’t be writing here or participating in the MTG Fast Finance podcast with James for a few weeks. (Though he may grab someone to fill in for me.) I’ll be back eventually, probably before August. Don’t think I’ve abandoned all of you; I’m just on vacation.

Ok, onward to useful discussion.

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