By: Derek Madlem

So we had a Pro Tour this last weekend and we’re all wondering which cards were amazing and how much money we’re going to make off of them.

Our first instinct is to look at the top 8 decklists and place all of our bets there… but that might not be the best method here because of the Pro Tour’s tournament structure. The Pro Tour’s split format results in a number of scenarios where a slightly above average constructed deck makes the top 8 based on a player’s strong draft record or situations where decks that are extremely successful in constructed don’t make the top 8 because their pilot was terrible at drafting. Luckily for us, Wizards provides us with a list of all decks that finished with 8 wins or better.

The Winners

For this article we’re just going to focus on the Magic Origins cards because their prices are still in a state of flux

9-1
Red Green Devotion – 0 cards
Mono Red – 4x Abbot of Keral Keep, 4x Exquisite Firecraft, 2x Scab-Clan Berserker
Green White – 4x Hangarback Walker, 2x Evolutionary Leap, 2 Tragic Arrogance, 3x Nissa, Vastwood Seer
Mono Red – 4x Abbot of Keral Keep, 4x Exquisite Firecraft

8-1-1
Blue Black Dragon Control – 2x Languish, 3x Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy
Red Blue Ensoul Artifact – 4x Hangarback Walker, 4x Chief of the Foundry, 4x Whirler Rogue, 4x Thopter Spy Network
Red Blue Ensoul Artifact – 4x Hangarback Walker, 4x Chief of the Foundry, 4x Whirler Rogue, 3x Thopter Spy Network
Abzan Control – 2x Languish, 3x Nissa, Vastwood Seer
Abzan Control – 3x Languish
Jeskai Aggro – 4x Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy, 2x Clash of Wills
Abzan Control – 2x Languish

8-2
Red Blue Ensoul Artifact – 4x Hangarback Walker, 4x Chief of the Foundry, 4x Thopter Engineer, 2x Pia and Kiran Nalaar, 1x Whirler Rogue, 3x Thopter Spy Network
Red Blue Ensoul Artifact – 4x Hangarback Walker, 4 Chief of the Foundry, 4x Whirler Rogue, 4x Thopter Spy Network
Mono Red – 4x Abbot of Keral Keep, 4x Exquisite Firecraft
Red Blue Ensoul Artifact – 4x Hangarback Walker, 4x Thopter Engineer, 3x Chief of the Foundry, 3x Thopter Spy Network, 2x Ghirapur Aether Grid, 1x Whirler Rogue
Mono Red Goblins – 4x Goblin Piledriver, 4x Subterranean Scout, 4x Goblin Glory Chaser
Mono Red – 4x Abbot of Keral Keep, 4x Exquisite Firecraft, 1x Fiery Impulse
Red Blue Ensoul Artifact – 4x Hangarback Walker, 4x Chief of the Foundry, 4x Thopter Engineer, 4x Whirler Rogue, 3x Thopter Spy Network, 1x Foundry of the Consuls
Jeskai Heroic – 0 cards
Red Blue Ensoul Artifact – 4x Hangarback Walker, 3x Chief of the Foundry, 4x Thopter Engineer, 1x Whirler Rogue, 3x Thopter Spy Network, 2x Ghirapur Aether Grid

Go ahead and take a moment to digest that list, notice anything missing? I’ll give you a hint:

There was a lot of hype about Demonic Pact this weekend, the price went as high as $15 Sunday night (and has since come crashing back down hard and fast). The problem with investing in Demonic Pact was that it looked neat on camera and deck techs but didn’t necessarily put up a strong performance in the event. While we don’t have access to the 7-3 and worse decklists to see where the best Demonic Pact deck finished, we can see it didn’t crack the top twenty decks.

The problem with Demonic Pact (and cards like it) is that it almost always requires you to have something else to go with it. We had similar issues with Abyssal Persecutor during it’s time in Standard… you had to kill your opponent AND kill your Persecutor to win. The chief difference here is that when you can’t get rid of Pact, you actively lose rather than just not winning. While Demonic Pact is clearly a powerful card, there will also be some percentage of games where you lose the game because of it.

Let’s say that you only lose to Demonic Pact 1 in 10 times you play it. That’s still a 10% swing on your results, which is often the difference between a winning record and a losing record. When you spread that out over the course of a long tournament, like a Grand Prix or SCG Open it’s going to likely cost you at least one round over the course of the weekend, and likely more. How many tournaments would you sign up for knowing that you HAD to start 0-1, because that’s essentially what you’re doing playing cards like Demonic Pact.

Demonic Pact is a card that can comfortably and reasonably hold around $5, but anything higher than that is probably not a realistic number long term. The only situation where this changes is if we see a widespread mechanic that involves sacrificing your own permanents to fuel more powerful spells, something that is unlikely within the current state of design.

Abbot of Keral Keep showed up in numbers across a number of mono red decks, including all three that eventually made the Top Eight. I’ll take a moment here to thank all of you that told me this card was garbage over and over again, that only makes calling this card a winner that much sweeter.

But realistically, any conversation that includes Abbot also has to include Exquisite Firecraft. Both of these cards showed up in the same numbers in the same decks. I’m still not wild about Exquisite Firecraft as a long term hold as it does almost nothing outside of Standard but the pair of these cards are both hovering in the $9 range today and I’m fine with advising to sell either.

While I still believe that Abbot of Keral Keep has great potential in Modern, I’m also fine with taking the gains now as this card is likely to plateau for a while until we see further innovation outside of just mono red decks.

Thopter Spy Network feels like a “win more” card, but it’s likely going to be the crux of the mirror match between these Red Blue thopter decks going forward. It’s only a matter of time before green or white are slotted in for enchantment removal to combat opposing Ensoul Artifacts, Spy Networks, and to a lesser extent Ghirpur Aether Grids, especially considering we already have the land base in place to accommodate Jeskai and Temur builds of this archetype.

Spy Network seems like the less exciting of the two marquee rares in this deck as it’s relegated heavily to the sideboard and Hangarback  Walker can slot into any color deck easily as a colorless creature. If you’re going to play this card – hold onto it, if you’re not looking to play Thopters for the next couple months, then now is probably the time to cash out as only so many rares can hold the value of a set.

When I look at this card, I’m filled with disappointment in myself for missing it initially and then denying it’s quality when Jeff Hoogland put up solid results with it at the first SCG Open. Hangarback Walker is pure card advantage, it’s almost always going to take at least two cards to rid the world of this creature and it has the bonus of being colorless so it can slot into any colors.

Hangarback is already closing in on the $20 mark, which should pretty much be the ceiling on this card for it’s time in Standard as it’s hard for rares these days to pass that mark. Since the inception of Mythic rares, the only rare that I remember passing $20 is Snapcaster Mage, and this is no Snapcaster Mage. If you bought a big pile of these to cash in on, this is your time. If you’re looking for a Standard archetype to carry you through the next year+ I might look elsewhere as this deck is losing a lot in Ensoul Artifact, Shrapnel Blast, and Darksteel Citadel this October.

I’m still in shock at the success of any of these flip-walkers and if I had to place my bets, I would not have placed them on Jace. Hovering around $30, Jace’s price is probably a little over-hyped at the moment partly because he’s a fan favorite character and partly because of we saw some pretty high prices on the hot lists two weekends ago at GP Dallas. I don’t really think this price is real or sustainable, but I said the same thing at $20. Realistically there’s going to a slow unwinding on this price of this card as many vendors had to pay so high just to get these in stock the last couple weeks and they’re unlikely to be anxious to lose money on those cards, expect buylists to creep down as Jace only appeared in two out of the top twenty decks.

Nissa appeared in the same number of decks as Jace, but with one less copy total. Nissa did not show up in any of the Green Red devotion decks but did make an appearance in Sperling’s Abzan Control deck and in Kibler’s Green/White deck. Nissa was another card that came out of the gate strong and went on a bit of a run but has since cooled. Sitting at $26, we’re already North of any kind of price this card can maintain. We’ll see how the format settles out over the next few weeks but I’m doubtful that Borderland Ranger is where we’re going to want to be in what appears to be a very aggressive format.

Traditional Control decks did not fare well at the PT this weekend. Languish showed up across a handful of decks that included Abzan and Dragon control decks. Languish showed up as a 4-of in zero of these decks with each of the decks running 2 or 3 split between the main deck and sideboard. These are not the numbers that create a $10 board wipe card. Take a look at any board wipe from the last seven or eight years and you’ll see the same thing, a peak at $7+ while supplies were low and then a significant decrease in price from there. I think the price of Languish is going to…well, languish. Ship these now if you’re not playing them, there isn’t any real upside from here.

Flash in the Pan

My overall suggestion for any Magic Origins cards that saw action this weekend is to get rid of them. The price on all of these cards is at or near enough to their peak that there’s just not much room to make money on these cards, but plenty of room to lose.

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By: Derek Madlem

There’s been a lot of comparisons over the years between #mtgfinance and the stock market. Weekly fluctuations have become daily or even hourly fluctuations at this point and some sites even have a crawling price ticker to keep you informed on up to the minute changes in the values of everything.

We look at Magic cards like investors look at corporations. We’re trying to target the most successful cards to acquire just like a stock market investor targets strong companies to acquire stock from. Some cards pay us dividends in the form of improved tournament results while others we target purely on growth potential. We even use the term “blue chip” to refer to longtime strong performers, just like we would in the stock market.

You know what else the stock market has in common with Magic cards? Indexing.

With the stock market, you can theoretically get lucky and pick only winners but that’s rarely the case. Even the best investors have a hard time beating the growth performance of the market average consistently. In stock investing, picking single stocks to go all-in on is a trap. You’ll find very few people without a time machine that would advise you not to diversify. Buying into a little bit of everything spreads out the risk and assures you a steady growth rate over time.

We fancy ourselves savvy investors, but if we’re so savvy why do we constantly fall into the trap of picking individual cards to invest in? For many it’s likely just a knowledge gap, and I’m here to bridge that gap.

I confess that a lot of my success in Magic finance was discovered almost purely by accident. When I was deciding where to park my funds over the years, I didn’t realize what I was actually doing: indexing Magic.

I started out just trying to expand my collection to something operable, I wanted to play formats other than Standard so I first started buying into cheap decks for Extended and Legacy but quickly realized that I didn’t want to limit myself to those budget decks and started acquiring more cards for more decks and eventually more formats. Now I have multiple decks in Standard, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, and Commander…I even have a completely foiled-out cube that features only cards from the two Ravnica blocks, so I’m into a little bit of everything at this point.

Origins

My first Legacy pickups were Wasteland and Aether Vial. Why did I pick these two cards? Because they could be played in two relatively inexpensive decks: Goblins and Merfolk. As I finished these decks I looked to the next decks that I could complete in short order and started picking up dual lands (this was around the time of $75 Underground Seas). As I acquired more cards, more decks became within reach and filling in the gaps became very easy. The side effect of filling in a master list of basically everything playable in each format was that I didn’t miss any of the huge gains. While I could have made a ton of money buying only Force of Wills and dual lands, I would have missed out on all the other increases on cards like Flusterstorm, Stoneforge Mystic, Gamble, City of Traitors, Lion’s Eye Diamond, or Omniscience. Even Modern staples like Serum Visions, Path to Exile, Inquisition of Kozilek, and Kitchen Finks were big winners for me, as most of these were acquired for less than $1.

I even got into Vintage all stars like the Power Nine and Mishra’s Workshop before the double up that the last couple years gave us. At the time I was acquiring them I didn’t have any real ambitions to play Vintage, but figured I should get them “just in case” I was ever interested… and I still haven’t played vintage to this day.

Almost all of these cards appreciated over time. Sure I lost on cards like Standstill and Manabond, but gained just as much on Grove of the Burnwillows and Show and Tells. I owe almost all of my collection’s growth to the simple strategy of owning quality cards over time.

Where to Start

Identifying where to start is pretty easy. The first thing to do is pick which format you want to index. Then you want to break down possible targets into three categories: staples, role players, and everything else. How do you tell them apart?

Staples – these cards show up in a variety of decks in the format and are not dependent on other cards for their power. Great examples include cards like Force of Will, Tarmogoyf, Snapcaster Mage, Liliana of the Veil, and cards of this caliber. You’re never going to have a hard time getting rid of these cards and they’re the most likely to pay dividends as long as you own them.

Role Players – not to be confused with people dressing up and fighting with foam swords in parks or sitting around a table rolling dice while talking in character. Role players are cards that make great decks work, usually by a combined synergy with other role players. The perfect examples for this type of card is Lord of Atlantis. Lord of Atlantis (and his fishy brethren) are typically abysmal on their own but create an extremely powerful force when played within the same deck.

Everything Else – these are cards that are “great in draft” or just have no remarkable or unique abilities. Sure, people may become personal intrigued by these cards, but it’s unlikely that a card like Mahamoti Djinn is ever playable in a constructed format ever again.

Staples

Staples are the cards you see people filling up page after page in their binders, these cards almost always only have on direction to go, it’s just a matter of time. Fetchlands, shocklands, Snapcaster, and Abrupt Decay are great examples of this. These cards will always be needed in just about any deck of the appropriate color for as long as they’re legal… or until a card comes along that outclasses them completely (extremely rare).

The great thing about staples is that they’re subtle and steady, often with small incremental growth that doesn’t even show up on the daily movers pages, allowing them to exist somewhat under the radar. These cards are low risk, pay dividends in increased tournament wins, and don’t spike nearly as hard as other cards unless a major retailer makes a move (like advertising a strong buylist price).

Role Players

These are the cards that only fit into one or two decks but do some serious work within those settings. Our previous example Lord of Atlantis is terrible in Grixis Delver despite being a powerful blue card, but is the bee’s knees in Merfolk thanks to the synergy with all the other fishlords.

Role players can be wild cards from a financial perspective. When an archetype dominates a single weekend, we can sometimes see a strong response in the market, like we did with Tron pieces recently after the deck took first place in both the SCG Open and the SCG Invitational all in the same weekend. When a deck containing Snapcaster Mage gets first place we respond, “of course it did, Snapcaster’s awesome,” but when Oblivion Stone and friends show up in first place we get excited and buy all of the Tron things!

If you’re able to time your buy-ins and cash-outs correctly, you can make some pretty decent money off of these cards. These cards often settle into cycles where they’ll spike and slowly deflate from there. While these cards mostly climb over time, it can take a few spikes to really hold any increase.

Take a look at Food Chain as a great example, this card languished at $3-4 for over a decade. With the printing of Misthollow Griffin in Avacyn Restored we saw a brief uptick but it rapidly deflated until later in March 2014 after putting up a 4th place finish in an SCG Open. The deck’s surprising finish combined with casual demand from Prossh players pushed it up all the way to $19. Since then it’s slowly creeped back down to $16 and will probably continue a ponderously slow downward slide until it hits center stage again.

Everything Else

Simple: don’t buy it. Unless Wizards decides that some day to create a card that that is simultaneously really powerful and says, “If you have a copy of Mahamoti Djinn in your hand, you may discard it to search your library for this card and put it into your hand,” we’re just never going to see Mahamoti Djinn being actually worth money, no matter what some cheeky folks did to manipulate the TCG price.

Indexing for Players

While picking specific winners is hit or miss, acquiring a good mix of staples and role players will yield you great results over time and the easiest way to do that is just acquire all the cards to play as many decks as possible. This gives you a greater access to the game while simultaneously diversifying your “portfolio” across a strong base.

This has the additional advantage of protecting you from risk. Cards like Deathrite Shaman seem like such easy calls to make, the card was so obviously good in basically any deck that could cast it that many players bought in big, buying up dozens or even hundreds of copies; but how much money did all of those players make? Spreading your risk out over a variety of investments lightens the blow when a single investment is affected. If those players had instead bought a cross section of Modern staples and role players instead, they’d be very happy with their investment right now.

Diversification is key when investing, regardless of how you choose to invest. While you might feel like you missed out when you see the guy tweeting pictures of the 500 Sphinx’s Revelations they preordered at $5 each, you’ll feel a lot better when you see the guy tweeting pictures of the 500 Aurelia’s Fury that he preordered at $5 each.

Shameless Self Promotion

I’ll be working in my home town this weekend as a buyer for MythicMTG booth at Gencon then I’ll be hopping on a plane a couple days later to work with the Aether Games crew at Grand Prix San Diego.

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By: Derek Madlem

For those of you unaware – Magic Origins was released last Friday. While I’m not sure how you could simultaneously be unaware of that and still reading this, I’m sure there’s one of you out there. You’ll also be stunned at the news that an SCG Open was held in Chicago, giving this latest and final iteration of the Core Set a grand stage to display it’s powerful contributions to the Standard metagame and boy-howdy was it… lackluster.

Pro Tip:

The first week after a new set is released, it’s often better to play a well tuned deck with very few new cards because it’s going to perform better than a brand new archetype in a vacuum.

The Desks that Weren’t

Coming into this event we all expected to see some sweet Elf on Goblin action… two enemy tribes that have been locked in an eternal struggle ever since they decided to start making Duel Decks.

We were not disappointed. Ok, maybe we were very disappointed. Goblins fared better of the two decks, posting an 18th, 24th, and a 39th place finish… hardly a second coming. Elves… well they did a lot worse, posting a single copy in the top 64 at 41st place. As many commentators of old would point out, a ham sandwich could get a 41st place finish in the right hands.

Outside of these failed archetypes, what’s making a splash?

Abbot of Keral Keep only showed up in two mono-red decks, one with a 20th place finish and another in 49th. While this is hardly an impressive finish, it’s almost enough to overshadow all the attempts to run Ire Shaman thus far, a card that has been used to gauge Abbot’s power level.

Woodland Bellower? Nope. Zero. While it’s not a resounding endorsement of playability, it will likely give us a little bit of a downward push. I’m still a fan of this card and look forward to picking them up on their way down with hopes of a big payoff on the horizon.

The Archangel here did manage something that none of the cards discussed so far were capable of: cracked the top 16. Showing up in the 14th place mono-white devotion deck, the Archangel joined a laundry list of value-adding creatures like Brimaz, King of Oreskos and Wingmate Roc to overwhelm opponents. This deck took great advantage of the absence of control decks, an archetype that would have normally tear it apart. With multicolored mana so easy to come by, this strategy just doesn’t seem worth the restriction… on the plus side, I’ll have a little more time to get rid of these Archangels I opened.

Erebos’s Titan – Conditionally powerful card with a prohibitive casting cost? Zero. None. I’m obviously still cold on this guy for reasons I’ve already discussed. Maybe there’s still a chance for this guy and his friend Gray Merchant of Asphodel to stake a claim on Standard, but they didn’t pull it off this weekend.

Evolutionary Leap – My pet card, also a no-show in the top 64 decklists. I’m not at all surprised this card wasn’t broken within the first week, it’s going to take a brewmaster to crack this one… I’m looking at you Sam Black and Conley Woods. Though, I admit I am more than willing to settle for a Travis Woo brew just to get the ball rolling. I’m still going to be trading for every copy of this leper that I can get my hands on, it’s only a matter of time.

Liliana was destined for great things, like showing up as a one of in Modern Collected Company decks or greedy Rally the Ancestors decks in Standard. I’m still not impressed with Liliana, especially for how much hype she was getting before this weekend. The fact that this card is within $2 of Nissa, a card that fared much better, still baffles my mind. I’m either greatly underestimating the casual appeal of these cards or there’s a lot of people that are going to feel bad about their $25 copies of Liliana going forward.

Jace was one of two walkers to show up in force this weekend. As it turns out, Merfolk Looter is really good alongside Jeskai Ascendancy…landing this Jace in the top 8 with a 6th place finish. Some non-ascendancy Jeskai decks also featured Jace and round out the top decks with 17th, 30th, 31st, and a 34th place finish. Combining the looter effect with delve spells is proving to be a very powerful combination, especially when Super Sayain Jace starts flashing back Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time. While his inclusion in these decks is impressive… being limited to one archetype is generally not enough to maintain a $20 price tag. As supply continues to enter the market, expect Jace to start winding down to a more maintainable $10 price point.

 If there was a clear winner based on overall inclusion, it’s gotta be Nissa. Apparently Borderland Ranger is an effect that’s welcomed in the plethora of Abzan decks (and few G/R) that Nissa made an appearance in. The ability to ensure that a turn four Languish or Siege Rhino resolves appears to be more than enough to trump the forest-only limitation.

In total, Nissa appeared in twenty of the top 64 decks at this weekend’s open, just under 1/3rd…a fairly impressive number. This is the point in the article that I admit to totally misjudging this card. Nissa’s presence in so many decks is a clear sign that this card has struck a chord with the player base and is going to continue showing up in the top decks, especially as long as so many powerful green cards exist in the format. If Nissa posts a strong finish at the Pro Tour, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this spike up to the $35 range as players scramble to acquire copies while supply is still relatively low. Six months from now I expect Nissa to be somewhere between $15-$20, so I wouldn’t hold onto this card past a spike if you don’t plan on using it.

The quiet breakout hit of the SCG Open is not a new card, but a forgotten friend returned to us. Gaea’s Revenge ruined a number of games for Jace players back in the day, dodging countermagic and spot removal gave this card a huge advantage against the blue decks that only had one real answer: Day of Judgment, and many times it was already too late as Gaea’s Revenge has that whole hasty giant fatty thing going for it.

Currently listed under $1 a piece, there has to be significant upside to this card… keep in mind that the first time it was printed it was at Mythic, so the existing supply is not even that extensive. Gaea’s Revenge will be exceptionally powerful going forward as it’s going to require a Crux of Fate or an End Hostilities for control decks to take it out…Languish just isn’t going to cut it.

Day’s Undoing did make a couple of appearances at the SCG Open this weekend. One in the latest iteration of everyone’s least favorite deck: Turbo-Fog and another couple of Legacy decks: Affinity and Omni-Tell, both of which managed to crack the top 8.

We were already warned about some of the sicko affinity hands that could dump and reload thanks to this card, but as it turns out: that strategy actually worked. It also turns out that this card was powerful in the Omni-tell, a great way to rebuy those Show and Tells and cantrips, or just refill after sticking an Omniscience.

The Turbo-Fog deck took advantage of the “free refills” this card provided despite the counter-intuitive interaction with it’s main win condition: Sphinx’s Tutelage. Reloading with a fist full of Fog effects wasn’t enough to crack the top 64, I imagine due to the reality that Fog doesn’t work very well against a fist full of burn spells.

Day’s Undoing is clearly a powerful effect, but how pervasive will that effect be? That remains to be seen. This price on this card has already mellowed from that $20 preorder to a more reasonable $15, but I imagine that number will continue to shrink as more and more Standard players finding themselves asking, “What the hell am I going to do with this?” I’m on the same train as a number of other writers with this one: I’m not excited at $10, but if it hits $5 you can bet that I’m a buyer.

Caution: Wet Cement

The format is far from solidified. We’ve come a long way from the days when a new brew was sure to tear up the first big tournament. Much of today’s innovation comes from MTGO and those results transfer to paper on a slight delay, which is unfortunate because Magic Origins isn’t even out on MTGO yet.

While we have an initial sampling, it’s clearly not time to panic sell yet. There should still be a fairly substantial shift in the metagame coming as players are able to acquire and try out more of these cards over the next couple of weeks, culminating in a grand hurrah at Pro Tour Magic Origins in less than two weeks.

Shameless Self Promotion

I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead of me, I’ll be attending GP Dallas this weekend working with those Aether Games folk followed by a four day stint at GenCon in my home town of Indianapolis at the MythicMTG booth and finally at GP San Diego with Aether Games. Like always, I hope to see you guys there and make sure to introduce yourselves when you come up to the booth.

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By: Derek Madlem

I think the title of this article is pretty self explanatory, what could be clearer than a triple negative? What I’m saying is that a lack of news doesn’t mean that there is no news… quite the opposite really. Often times no news is news of nothing, in this case that of course refers to the banned and restricted list changes which are announced the Monday before every new set’s release.

Banned and restricted list changes have become a main attraction within the #mtgfinance community ever since we saw our dear friends Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind Sculptor get kicked out of Standard. Since then we’ve watched the B&R changes with an eye for opportunity. With the flick of a switch, Wizards is capable of propelling an archetype up from tier 3 to being an actual contender or propelling a struggling prospect to format staple. Like what for example?

Remember when this guy rotated? He was a “sure bet” as a card that was going to go up. We all held onto our Snapcaster Mages. Those of us that had extra resources to devote to parking cards in binders acquired as many copies as we could get our grubby hands on, after all it was a sure bet. But what we didn’t realize was that Snapcaster had an enemy that was even more pervasive in Modern:

While Deathrite Shaman was leading Jund, and eventually Birthing Pod decks, to oppressive victories in Modern it was also having the peripheral consequence of making Snapcaster Mage a lot less powerful in Modern. When Deathrite was banned, we should have seen the signs, within a couple of weeks Snapcaster jumped up over 60 percent.

No Changes

No changes to the Banned and restricted list is sometimes as telling as the words “Deathrite Shaman is banned”. For weeks we’ve heard a rumbling crescendo of players calling for bans in Modern. The three main offenders were Splinter Twin, Goryo’s Vengeance, and Amulet of Vigor.

We’re fairly safe in assuming that Wizards has no intention of banning Splinter Twin after including it in Modern Masters 2015 and even going so far as to add another creature that combos with it in Bounding Krasis. In addition to that, the reality is that the deck just slots in Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker to do the same job as most Twin decks aren’t hard pressed to kill on turn four every game.

Amulet of Vigor is a deck that received a lot of high profile attention, mostly due to the efforts at one exceptionally adept pilot… that happened to be cheating. Combo decks generally perform much better when you get to pick your starting seven. Despite being an “impossible to stop” combo deck that wins so easily through countermagic, this deck hasn’t really put up any real results. Amulet of Vigor is akin to the Second Sunrise decks we saw a few years ago, too complicated for most players to play… but this time we have the benefit of it not taking 30 minutes for our opponent to screw up the sequencing.

Goryo’s Vengeance is a Magic card. It’s been around for a few years with various builds floating in the wild. It wasn’t until recently that the Nourishing Shoal tech was added into the fold. This ensured that players weren’t required to successfully attack and cast Fury of the Horde repeatedly to win the game, now you just give some lands to your favorite cyclops friend and he’ll throw them at your opponent’s face. Despite Goryo’s popularity (it even has it’s own hashtag #Griselbanned), the deck hasn’t won any major events and has merely showed up in some diverse top 8s and top 16s.

The argument that’s been made about these last two decks is that the deck’s are “too fast” for Modern because they’re occasionally able to win as early as turn two. But if that’s our only metric for banning, expect a lot more in the pipeline. Glistener Elf is quite capable of ending things on turn two, and there are a lot more combinations of cards that get there in infect than there are these other two decks.

By declining to ban anything with this announcement, the fear that some of these cards will be banned is lessened; that would theoretically open up some room for upward growth on the key components of these decks. Unless…

Pro Tour Coverage

The other prevailing theory is that Wizards is just going to tie (un)bannings primarily to the Modern Pro Tours. Many claim that Modern just isn’t a compelling format for Pro Tour viewers and that the only way to “keep it interesting” is to cause a shakeup right before the event with (un)bannings. I disagree that shaking things up right before the Pro Tour leads to any kind of real innovation, it’s generally going to lead to players retreating to “safe” decks rather than attacking an established format from a new angle.

Ultimately what this translates to is the operating theory that Goryo’s Vengeance and Amulet of Vigor are going to be banned at the next Modern Pro Tour. While I don’t think there’s a compelling case for either of these cards to be banned in Modern, the reality is that Wizards does what Wizards does and it doesn’t always make sense. It would be incredibly easy for Wizards to simply just make all Pro Tours feature both Modern and Standard alongside draft to ensure new cards are going to be showcased and still support all their competitive formats.

Bottom line: you have at least three months to play with these cards if you want to acquire them, and you have at least three months to deleverage these cards if you’re looking to sell. It’s highly unlikely anything in these decks sees any dramatic movement, but the prices are likely to remain stable and grow incrementally from here on out.

Modern Masters

There hasn’t been much talk about Modern Masters 2015 lately either, other than the false notion that prices are on the decline. A quick look at the last week’s biggest gains and losses shows basically nothing from the set moving one way or the other. Stability. If your local game stores are anything like mine, Modern Masters drafts are long over… leaving any influx of new product solely to “lottery ticket” fans. Pack supply is very slowly going to wind down as shops sell a couple dozen packs a week until it’s mostly depleted.

What does this mean for you? It means that the price of cards in Modern Masters has pretty much stabilized and that you can expect slow upward growth from here on out for the set’s best cards. There’s just not going to be another massive influx of new product to push prices down any time soon.

Magic Origins

Another set that’s been relatively quiet this week. Typically at prerelease events we get to see new cards in action for the first time and have a better chance to evaluate them. Simply walking around watching games between rounds can give you a general idea of whether or not a card is going to strike a chord with the general population.

I saw zero people playing Evolutionary Leap this weekend, which is of no real surprise to me as this card is just extremely complicated in the abstract, especially for casual players.

“Why would I want to kill one of my own creatures?”
– casual player, 2015

I stand by my theory that this is a card that will require someone to show us the way before it can really take off. This means that the price is likely to continue slipping, which could make the payoff that much sweeter once it does finally break out.

Abbot of Keral Keep was a card that I had my eyes on, especially after opening it as my prerelease promo. I won a number of games on the back of this card and my opinion of it only continues to grow. I’m especially interested in playing this alongside Courser of Kruphix over the next few months as knowing what the top card is before you cast him only makes him more powerful. Even watching other players playing the Abbot gave me a sense that even when he’s really bad… he’s not that bad. If this card didn’t have prowess, we’d be having a completely different discussion; but the extra damage makes him worth a little more than a bear.

The Planeswalkers were all pretty impressive, in limited. I’m still having a hard time seeing these in constructed play going forward. At the top tables of the prerelease there was a noted absence of Planeswalkers, the only one that I did see was Jace and the pilot said numerous times that they wish they didn’t have to flip him. “It’s better as a Merfolk Looter” is not a ringing endorsement for constructed play.

Eyes on the Horizon

This weekend we have the usual method of unveiling the new hot fire: an SCG Standard Open. All eyes will be on Chicago this weekend, so make note of what types of decks are showing up in coverage and be sure to pay extra attention to what shows up in the top 32. Many of the format’s new archetypes are going to be in a refinement phase this weekend so tread cautiously. Slotting a Goblin Piledriver into an existing goblin deck is easy…it’s when you get to crafting complicated machines with lots of moving parts that things start to get really interesting.

My advice is to see what hype is generated this weekend but don’t get too trigger happy, the second wave of hype will come the weekend of the Pro Tour so your best bet for high prices will be then.

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