Readers!

Stranger Things cards are announced as contents of New Capenna. This is great news not necessarily from a finance perspective as it sort of reduces the value ceiling for the Stranger Things secret lair cards in the short term and otherwise doesn’t matter a ton to us. I think if the creatures in New Capenna (not the set? But just in the packs? I think?) are popular, it means that there is long-term value in the “ideal” versions of the cards, which means the Secret Lair Stranger Things version in most cases. The cards are getting a chance to make a case for themselves in the context of a set, they got the Godzilla treatment rather than the Walking Dead treatment and people seem less ideologically opposed this time around. I think WotC miscalculated how popular Stranger Things is, or maybe this was a nice thing for Magic players rather than a cynical attempt to get money from fans of not Magic like the did with Walking Dead. Regardless, the decks are here, we have a lot of data before the cards are even really spoiled and there is money to be made. There are a lot of cards so I’m picking one spec per commander.

I tried to fit more in above the fold, but I’m honestly just sort of champing (it’s not chomping, look it up, if I have to know that, so do you) at the bit here, so let’s just do some mtg finance and worry about the paywall break later, shall we? Let’s get strange.

The order doesn’t matter a ton here. This is Sophina AKA Jim Hopper.

It’s tough to isolate just Sophina decks because it’s usually paired with something like Elmar (Max (the redhead)) but every deck I have seen has Gisela and, if the deck builder can afford it or is willing to lie about being able to afford it, Aurelia. Gisela is much more affordable – it’s currently $1 for every mana it costs. That’s a bargain considering it was never 25 mana.

Elmar aka Max aka Riley Escobar aka Left-handed handshake is a good pairing for some of the other friends forever commanders but also with shenanigans. Here’s a card not to leave home without.

Coolstuff definitely has $7 copies of this card, I checked. This is on its way to $12 on Card Kingdom, that’s enough for me to pull the trigger at $7, but I’ll let you scoop copies first.

Mike, the Dungeon Master is one of the more exciting Commanders from this set.

Sevinne’s Reclamation was in the same precon as Dockside Extortionist, which means a lot of these got buylisted. Walls will be high on retail sites, but when the dam bursts, and it will, they will be slow to restock. This has the potential to double and I’m into it. It’s a VERY good card in a lot of decks and with them committed to making White suck less, more decks will be built that can use this.

Eleven is the sort of obvious Grixis combo deck that runs like 90% of the same cards as Kess, but there is one card I think bears mentioning.

This will be actual money in 18 months and everyone will be shocked. This doesn’t go in EVERY spellslinger deck, but it should go in every deck where the commander is a Wizard OR Shaman, which will almost always contain Red and will keep getting printed. This card is very good but so is every card in the set it’s in and that still matters while the set is in print.

So we clearly need more data.

I don’t think you can go wrong snagging these under $5. They go in just about every deck – it’s always good. Deck makes only food? Well now it makes value. Clue deck? Have some mana. Treasure? You’re going to win anyway because every Treasure deck is stupid and busted. This card rules and like $3 for the extended art version is robbery.

This card is my shit – this is everything I want to do in EDH. It’s bad on webcam, but luckily America decided they were bored letting the truckers and Flesh and Blood players have all the fun and soon we’ll all be giving each other Covid at the LGS playing a long, tedious game of EDH with people we barely know like before Covid when we pretended that was something worth missing.

Unique effect, EDH-specific given mana cost, high degree of relevance in a new deck, previous big spike, low supply, hard to reprint. This seems like a slam dunk to me, but this is also a pet card of mine so I’m biased. That said, I was biased toward Helm of Possession and Ben Bleiweiss just wrote about it so you could be in a position for that to pay off, too.

This is barely Lucas-related, but the price on Thousand-Dollar Elixir has come down quite a bit and I’d say it’s at its bottom. Good time to scoop some.

Uhhhhh. Why would anyone want a worse Dalakos? Now we have 3 versions of this card and they all suck.

Anyway, this card is bad but the specs might not be.

This hurts because I got in at bulk and got out at $3. I must have read “leave the last 10% for the next guy” and added an extra 0 by mistake. No matter, this card is on its way to the moon so buy in at $5 and feel my pain when you sell too early, too.

That does it for me, readers. I think these decks will get built, especially with the cards being in New Capenna packs. Be on the lookout for EDHREC data for every commander soon and the new EDH deck previews start Thursday. Yes, I’m serious. Even in hell the damned get no rest. Until next time!

Readers!

New Capenna is close enough for Wizards to reveal that they’re giving everyone fake crank to pretend to do bumps of between rounds, so you know that that means! It’s time to play the baseless speculation game!

It looks like some of you are already playing it already.

Is this because it’s on the Reserved List (yes) or is there something else going on? People who speculate about speculators have speculated that speculators are speculating on Wandering Mage because it’s New Capenna shard colored and there will be mages in New Capenna? Because Wizards are known to hang out in cities? And one of Wandering Mage’s 3 absolutely abyssmal abilities references Wizards directly? I don’t know, I think this is one of the dumbest rationalizations I’ve seen anyone make for a Reserved List card going up a few bucks. Anyway, let’s do the same dumb things.

We already got the first set of Triomes in Ikoria, so we know that since they’re finishing the cycle (Gavin said so but I don’t remember where – it literally might have been a thing he said to me when he was playing EDH on our stream), we’ll have the Alara Shards colors in Streets of New Capicola.

We don’t have a ton of info beyond knowing some of the creature types represented in the tribunal of “brokers”

If I were a complete dumb@#$% I would probably be buying up every Bant Rhino card and making a mint but my brain doesn’t work that way. I don’t think that every time a creature is featured that a tribal deck will come of it, I don’t think random old rhinos will be played in the deck if it materializes and I don’t think I have enough time to get out of them or want to cast a wide enough net to hit everything. I’ve been left holding the bag a few times in my Mtg Finance career, and while that isn’t the end of the world, it’s still avoidable.

I don’t think I want to say to buy Rhino, Bird, Cat and… I want to say Flapper Elspeth (?) cards, but maybe you should – not because they’ll get played in a deck, but because we’re like 2 weeks away from people with more money than sense having the conversation we’re having now. Depala can make people dig through bulk bins at the LGS for Dwarven Thaumutergist, but can’t make people actually play the card.

What I WILL do is look at the 5 Shards’ most-played cards and comamanders to see if anything sticks out.

Esper

Esper doesn’t look super Artifacty – there’s no real guarantee they’re doing artifact stuff again.

I won’t lie and pretend I’m not jazzed to have Fritz Lang’s Bioshock as a Magic setting. That said, the top Esper cards are very much format staples.

The top Commanders tell us some things, though.

If I had to pick any card to speculate based on what Raffine’s gang likely uses in what I assume is a deck based on Raffine (there will be 35 Legendary creatures in this set but there will be a gang leader that will be popular for flavor reasons), besides Esper Sentinel, I’d say this.

This is starting to go, and since it’s a Brawl deck card, it might be a little tougher to reprint or at least mitigate the drain that demand will cause on the meager supply. This has demonstrated the ability to hit $10 before and I think it will again.

Grixis

This feels like a bit of waste of time. There’s nothing to glean from this art. I don’t know what I was hoping to see, but this isn’t it. Also, I hate these full-art Triomes, which sucks because the Ikoria Triomes are the best-looking Magic cards ever made and these are them squandering the entire concept of art deco aesthetics which are objectively incredibly pleasing and, I would have assumed, difficult to screw up.

Grixis before was “Undead” and I can’t imagine anyone built an Opulent Lounge to let the dead hang around in. Is that a stretch? Look, I am very aware of how hand-wavey this is, but at the same time, I feel like it makes sense and therefore I’m relying on it.

Grixis is bound to have a treasure theme, Ken and other Secret Lair cards might make use of this in 6 months when we get our Street Fighter secret lairs, and this has flirted with $4 before. It’s reprintable but if we didn’t want to live dangerously, we would have bought basketball cards 2 years ago and retired.

Jund

Jund seems like there will be fighting. Let’s check out the fight theme on EDHREC.

As you can see, it’s already a thing.

It’s cheating to pick Ignoble Hierarch, but buy those for sure.

EDH players LOVE Brash Taunter. This is a $15 card waiting to happen, and the extended art treatment mitigates a bit of reprint risk. I love this card, and I love paying basically buylist on them right now.

Before you ask, I always check.

Can’t beat it.

Naya is garden-themed? I won’t pretend I can figure out more than that, but I assume wild animals. Not that tame animals aren’t in the Bant mafia. This set would be weird even if they didn’t pass out fake mob planet meth at the prerelease.

I can’t think of a single deck that doesn’t want Mirari’s Wake in Naya since it helps you do both things Naya is good at better, and I can’t think of a better time to buy than when it’s at its historic low. I just hope they stop printing it.

Bant

I did Bant last because we have a card to speculate based on.

I don’t think that there will necessarily be a Superfriends Legendary creature, even with 59 legendary creatures in the set. However, Superfriends is primarily a Bant (well, Atraxa, which I like to call “dirty Bant”) thing, with Black and Red contributing nothing but Planeswalkers. However, there is no Bant commander that lends itself to Superfriends, and we don’t have a data set on EDHREC. We do have a general Superfriends page, though, and it’s not like Atraxa decks won’t just run Brokers Ascendeancy. I am going to put an apostrophe in Brokers that shouldn’t be there every single time I try to put this card in TCG Player, aren’t I? Why isn’t it Brokers’ if not Broker’s? Whatever, if I could change one thing, it wouldn’t be an apostrophe, it would be making the other 4 Triomes look as good as this one.

This is at a historic low and it is already starting to creep up. This has never been above $5, but if it spikes, it will not be doing so for the first time and it seems very likely we could see $5 minimum. I’m excited for what this does.

Are these 5 cards 100% justified by what few Streets of New Leave The Gun Take The Cannoli that we’ve seen? No, not really. Are these 5 cards I believe in and I’m grateful for the excuse to highlight them? Yes, and that’s a good article in my book. You’re welcome OK, maybe that’s too aggro. I should get out of here anyway. Until next time!

Readers!

On the Brainstorm Brewery podcast, we do 2 segments because, like an invertebrate, we would literally collapse without the structure they provide. In the first, we highlight a card that’s worth around a buck but people don’t think to pull from bulk, or it’s a card we find out later was worth money and we’re 100% sure we bulked out and we’re mad about it (Well, DJ and I bulked it out, Corbin probably left it in a 5 row in his office and it was destroyed in a flood). The other is where we highlight a card we think could go up based on knowing how MTG Finance works and assuming our audience would rather reserve the mental effort that we put into learning that stuff for teaching their kids to read or getting some of the new BS words the New York Times started putting in Wordle.

Sometimes I conflate the two and pick a card in bulk that I think will go up. That’s me doing both segments wrong, but am I doing the audience wrong? I maintain it’s a service to tell people not to bulk out a card that could potentially go up 10,000% and to make sure they have them set aside for when people first want them. Some picks are easy – Chain of Acid when Chain of Smog went up. Some are less obvious but I think I have the justification for about 5 of them here today.

I am pretending to think you want to know “Jason, what if I don’t have bulk laying around, what good is it to tell me to pick bulk I don’t have?” and my answer to that is to check LGSes. If you try to get a $0.05 Whip Silk, they’re going to look it up on TCG Player and be cross with you for trying to “get” them, but if you pick up Mourning, a card for the same deck, you’ll get them for 9 cents. Is Mourning as good? No, but a lot of people play both and with Mourning being less obvious, there is time to snag them. Do they have the same trajectory? I doubt it, especially with Green being played more in Enchantress right now than Black, even with Tatsunari being so popular. That said, I think less-built Kami commander decks and Street Fighter decks are likely to do some predictable things to literal bulk. The obvious ones have popped, so let’s look at less obvious.

Card – Viridescent Wisps

Culprit – Blanka

I’d like to look at a card that also goes in Blanka and has popped previously for other decks like Zada.

We had a short window to get literally $4 for our 5 cent card, but with other Wisps, we can buy in at a dime and wait a while for Street Fighter decks to actually come out. Will Blanka be as popular as Zada? Is Feather helping Crimson Wisps? Those aren’t the questions – the questions are whether you want to buy a pile for a dime and buylist for 58 cents whenever the Street Fighter decks come out to Card Kingdom and buy a Tropical Island.

Card – Crown of Flames

Culprit – Kaima

A lot of trash could go up on the basis of Kaima, but this could be the set that makes Crown of Flames start to do a bad impression of Whip Silk. A bad impression is all we need.

Crown of Flames is also in Tempest so there is more supply, but not as much as you might think. Non-Green enchantment-fall cards don’t have as much pressure on them, but there is pressure, if only from Kaima.

Kaima is also responsible, I hope, for this beauty.

Even older than the second Crown of Flames printing, Bequethal saw a bit of a boost to 80 cents last year. It’s still gettable in bulk and once that wall on sites like Coolstuff evaporates, there’s money there. You’d need a more sustained push than it got last time, though, since the buylist price merely doubled (“merely”) though.

I have less confidence in Bad Rancor over here, but it is similar to the cards I am more confident about.

Card – Blood Speaker

Culprit – Unnanounced new New Capenna Demon

I don’t know anything you don’t, I just assume there will be demons.

This feels a little like cheating, but if Bequeathal wasn’t, then neither is this potential second spike. You can’t scoope these for bulk necessarily unless your LGS doesn’t own a computer, but if you have Kamigawa bulk, you have copies of this card so yank ’em.

That does it for me this week. I think there are likely to be more “penny stocks” like this and if this is well received, I could consider doing this again in the future. If you think I should not, tell me that, too.

That does it for me – until next time!

Readers!

The very second a new commander from Kamigawa: “I’m out of cyberpunk references because I am not that familiar with the genre except the stuff everyone has read like Neuromancer” was spoiled, everyone rushed to buy out a dumb rare from Apocalypse and while that’s cool and also a good thing and also I had a bunch of them but I also sold more as bulk rares 8 years ago.

Older rares are going to pop more, but what is really going on here is that a card will get latched onto by Twitter or reddit and it’s very easy to buy it out because it’s old. That life is stressful to me – you’re competing with a ton of people for a small number of cards and by the time your copies come in, there is no guarantee you didn’t miss the sell window. I’d much rather let people show me what they’re actually playing and decide that way. So what Apocalypse bulk rare am I talking about? Only this guy.

At first it was like

but then it was like

And who is the card that made this card do the thing? Why, General Obi Won Kenobi, of course.

Isshin triggers Fervent Charge twice when he attacks, giving your attacking creatures +4/+4 which sounds amazing if you have literally never played a game of EDH in your life. Seriously, imagine paying $30 for a bad version of Beastmaster Ascension that only works when your commander is out.

I think there are better specs for this deck. Why this deck? Surely it’s not because I’m bent out of shape about Fervent Charge (don’t check to see if I tweeted about it, I absolutely did, and while I should have been finishing this column). Rather, it’s because I decided to check which commander was the most built on EDHREC in the last week. Atraxa? Sythis? Marchea? Nay, it is none of these, it’s a most surprising result.

It would have bee surprising if I hadn’t told you what it was beforehand. You, if you’re like me, likely expected Go Shintai, Tatsunari, Hinata or not Isshin to be #1, but people can’t get enough of this nutty jedi. Let’s look at the not Fervent Charge cards people aren’t going nuts over but maybe should.

Fervent Charge is in the 4th highest percentage of decks, but I like a few of the cards that are in more. Etali will get reprinted again, but Brutal Hordechief? I’m not so sure.

The reprint hurt this badly, but it can absolutely flirt with $5 again. A ton of use in Isshin is important because Mardu cards are hard to slot into decks because they go in Mardu decks and Mardu sucks, or they go in 4 and 5 color decks and 4 and 5 color decks don’t attack with creatures. This isn’t exactly doing a ton in other decks, but this is a high synergy card not a top card.

If you want a high synergy card played elsewhere that’s already on the up-swing, look no further. Basically impossible to reprint because it has meld, this is useful in Legacy, a format that used to exist, as well as some fringe Modern decks. The foil doubled this month, owing to Isshin, so the non-foils will be slower but we have every reason to believe they’re going to go. The wall was just higher – no one building a durdly Mardu combat deck is foiling it out. Not with foil Fervent Charge going for $75.00.

The “not Isshin staples but in a lot of Isshin decks” cards are predictable but there is some food for thought here.

This has spent the last year slowly doubling. I’ve mentioned it in at least 2 articles since then, but if you missed it, I like this card a lot. It’s not fair. If someone cast this against me, I would key their car. Is this easy to reprint? Maybe, but with them printing 10,000 new cards a year, where is the pressure to reprint a $5 card even coming from?

This is the part of the article where I have to divorce my training as a builder from my training as a financier. If you asked me to pick 5 cards that would see a ton of play from Isshin, I would have said Lightmine Field, Crown of Doom, Ilharg the Rage Boar, Grave Titan and Adriana, Captain of the Guard. Those cards are seeing play (except Crown of Doom which isn’t played enough to show up on Isshin’s EDHREC page because no one held the community’s hand and played Crown of Doom on Game Knights). I THINK Lightmine Field is a great pickup, and I’d play it if I built Isshin (I won’t – my current project is using Helm of the Host and Double Major to make non-Legendary copies of Tatsunari’s Frog so I can make lots of copies and endanger everyone’s lives) but no one cares so I have to not care.

What people ARE actually playing is kind of boring compared with the stuff I like to do, but there is money in doing what people are doing. I’ll save reinventing the wheel for my coolstuff column and do boring old finance here, I guess.

Magic players love doggies and kitties, and being a kitty matters 1,000 times more than being good in Isshin matters, but that doesn’t mean being in Isshin doesn’t matter. I get these in bulk sometimes because no one thinks this is worth anything. It is.

Didn’t have this pegged as a massive gainer when it was spoiled but people love to draw cards. Every EDH artifact says “draw a card on it” now but people love this one. We used to play Mind’s Eye for the love of God, I’m grateful for the upgrade and part of why I never bought in was that I expected this to be obsolete by now.

That does it for me this week. I feel very good about these pickups and I urge you to watch Game Knights to find out which terrible bulk rare is going to hit $30, or do what I do and stay out of it. Plenty of meat still on the bone. Until next time!

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