Readers!

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, this is an article about specs that I think could come out of people building with the Secret Lair Street Fighter cards. I usually like the have some more copy “above the fold” so to speak but there isn’t much to say here. They made a Secret Lair that has Street Fighter 2 characters and it’s going to be pretty popular and we should get the stuff that goes in the decks now. It’s going to be… I actually don’t know how long until we get our sets in the mail and people will wait until then to build. That said, we don’t have EDHREC data because no one has built yet but, and I don’t think I’m out of line saying this, as someone who has written a column about building EDH decks for 8 years, I think I understand how the format works to an extent and I’d be delighted to make some predictions based on the cards and how they work. I’m going to show each Street Fighter and a couple of cards I like in that deck and call it an article. This is for you, guy who always asks “Did this need to be a whole hour” in the comment section of every Brainstorm Brewery episode. It does NOT need to be an hour.

Zangief is a beast, as you might expect of a guy who wrestles bears. Unfortunately for spec purposes, a creature with Lure on it isn’t super new, but making them sac stuff when you kill a creature they were forced to block with is pretty new and I have some ideas about how I’d build.

This is basically the floor on Augmenter, a card with a very clear corollary.

I don’t think Augmenter hits the dizzying heights Protector got to, nor is Hexproof quite as good as Indestructible, but I think we are still good buying in at $2.

A lot of the other stuff I like for Zangief is uncommon – pull Nemesis Mask and Tempting Licid out of your bulk, I guess? I don’t know, we have spent too much time here.

The big butt Doran decks have a decent amount of tech for this, but Reach tribal is a new one.

This guy seems way too fair to me.

Of the 104 cards that reference Charge Counters, only Coretapper can put them on Guile and only if he’s an Artifact creature at the time. I bet this gets built like a really dumb “attack with creatures” deck. You can’t even combo off by removing a lot of charge counters at once – it’s only when they’re removed the slow, one-at-a-time way. I hate this card. That doesn’t mean one of the most popular Street Fighter 2 characters won’t get played at all.

TCG Market is literally half of what they’re charging on Card Kingdom, this is already a good spec.

Samesies.

Ryu seems really weak and being stuck in Boros is not ideal. That said, if you want a Training-based deck, there are ways to make it OK.

‘member these were $10 and I wondered what was taking so long for it to go up? It went up. It took 2 and a half years, but it got there.

Stacking a lot of counters on him is sort of boring, but the deck is sort of boring, honestly. They don’t all have to be gems, I’m sure someone will build a very good version of this despite my evaluation and I’m sure I am OK with that.

We have a second toughness-based deck. I think this goes in the 99 of Dhalsim, making it potentially a bit more playable but not much.

This card is worse than you think – all of the stuff from the Doran toughness deck like Assault Formation is Green and you can’t play it in a Honda deck. It also doesn’t let creatures with defender, your best big-butt creatures, attack, something a real toughness commander would do. This is just a really bad Arcades with less than 1/3 of the relevant cards. You don’t have to spec on this.

This card is money, but it also lends itself to a really generic goodcombostuff build. That’s fine, but it really makes it tough to narrow down what to speculate on. I also think Chun Li is likely… basically exactly the stock Taigam list.

When this is what the High Synergy section looks like, you know you’re in for a bad time. Dovescape and Seek the Truth are the only remotely synergistic cards and I don’t think they’re as good in Chun Li. Yikes. You’re not on your own, but you’re going to find it’s tough to spec on a card that is just basically “control deck.” The real question is do you play Snap alongside Frantic Search or just Frantic Search? Riveting stuff.

I’ll keep an eye on this because the most popular deck (and this will be) can drive stuff the lesser decks can’t, but I don’t see anything unique to Chun Li online yet and I can’t think of anything. Can you?

Ken is better than Ryu, I guess, but it’s also a Boros Commander and it doesn’t partner with Ryu which is basically the only way I’d play either. Ken is an extra turn spells commander that seems clunky to use until you realize he doesn’t need to hit the opponent, just deal damage. That’s pretty useful and the spell you cast for free may change depending on how they block. I’d build a Sunforger deck, personally, but I write articles rather than make YouTube videos so no one knows any of my opinions.

Other than extra turns cards, it’s all pretty standard stuff. Here is an example list. I don’t see much here, but you might.

Now THIS I can get into. Of the cards in the set, Blanka is the one I have the most potential specs for. “Target yourself tribal” is a mechanic that can give us a ton of cards from the old Infect days, starting with this one.

Lash got so cheap, most sites stopped tracking its price because it was bulk. Even Card Kingdom wants under 50 cents for it. The foils are spicier.

I am so ready for the bottom on this one, which might be now – stock is drying up.

The lack of a blue line means this has never been on a buylist ever. The red Wisps is $5, I’ll let you decide if these are worth pulling out of bulk. Check out Zada’s page for more ideas.

That does it for me, nerds. Thanks for reading and keep your eyes peeled for more Street Fighter tech weeks before the cards sell out. It may be too late for Will Byers (or Deb, yikes) but there is some M Bison money to be had for sure. Until next time!

Readers!

I heard you like data! Well, technically, I heard you heard I like data. Well, technically, I really didn’t hear that. But I heard that I like data, and now you have heard that, too. Data makes my job easier, and while there isn’t a ton of it, there’s enough to start sifting now and keep sifting as decks get added. There are just too many EDH picks for me to track all of them myself, so I’m doing what I typically do and just explaining my thought process so you can decide for yourself. It will be fun, trust me. Let’s look at this set already!

We don’t have decks for every commander, but we have quite a few. I won’t belabor this article with Umezawa picks since he got his own article a while back and nothing there has changed much, but there are some interesting decks being built.

Tatsunari is super interesting because while Grolnok proves there really haven’t been enough Frogs to do a decent Frog tribal deck, a Frog/Enchantmentfall hybrid can work if there is some synergy. The deck looks like fun, and it’s pulling specs out of two different buckets which rules hard. I don’t know if this will stay #2 with the addition of the EDH deck exclusive commanders, but it’s doing well for now.

This is an important aside about EDHREC that I think you will want to not skip over so you can scroll down and see my picks. Some of the Enchantress stuff took a hit, but most of it didn’t. Remember, this first list is the high synergy cards, cards that appear in this deck but not too many other places. I think that the recency of Grolnok decks have obscured how relatively novel Frog-focused cards are. Any Frog tribal card is in Grolnok because there aren’t enough and it needs to play all of them to have an entire deck. Some of the stuff from the High Synergy cards on Grolnok’s page would be here if not for Grolnok, and that’s important to remember. Don’t miss out on checking there.

I don’t love reminding people to pick bulk because it implies I think everyone has bulk, but I wasn’t picking some pretty decent cards that are very much not bulk and should have been. You’ll find Shimmering Wings, Whip Silk, Mourning, Lignify, Oath of the Ancient Wood and some other stuff in bulk. The older stuff likely goes up and stays up – Whip Silk is potentially already a thing and I won’t admit I don’t know why because it will look like I don’t pay attention to pauper (I don’t, but I don’t want you to know that).

Copies of this under $20 basically don’t exist at this point. This would have been an excellent time to reprint this, but I guess they figure since they have Estrid’s Invocation, demand for this is low enough?

It’s not above the fabled 10k mark we all like to pretend is significant, but it gets some play and will get more play as decks from this set are built. This seems like a slam dunk to me, even at a $15 buy-in. Reprint risk seems medium-to-low with cards like this increasingly ending up on The List rather than getting proper reprints.

Blood Funnel is very good here. You sac Keimi to play an Enchantment that has its cost reduced and when that Enchantment resolves, Keimi comes back into play. It is better to sac another creature, but you always have one. This isn’t high synergy but it should be, and at bulk, it’s a 0 risk spec. Stock is pretty low of this, probably because it was bulk and bulk migrates into boxes and binders then spikes hard when the inventory is gone. How much inventory, you ask?

None, that’s how.

Baneful Omen is a slam dunk, imo.

There has never been a better deck for Baneful Omen than Hidetsugu. You didn’t want to be ripping cards off of the top in Yuriko so this card never saw play then. This is a RoE non-mythic which sounds rough, but RoE has some real gems.

If Keening Stone can be $3, so can this. That said, Realms Uncharted crashed back down to $5 so get out fast, imo. A sextuple up is very tasty, and if supply crashes in a chaotic day of trading, you’ll have copies for the people paying $12. I like this.

Supply on this is drying up, and it’s not just Hidetsugu doing it. Remember last time I brought up Draco and said there was a deck in another format using Draco to dome people when they reveal it on top? Remember how I said I’d figure out what deck that was? I didn’t, sorry. Maybe there is no deck. All I know is that there are also no copies of Draco, just about, so go nuts.

These are playable in WAY FEWER decks than Illusionists’ Bracers, I’ll grant you that, but $2 for the extended art version of a card that is similar to one that grows like this deserves a mention.

That does it for me! Next week I’ll be back for more decks and more data. Until next time!

Readers!

I have wondrous news! Decks are beginning to populate decklist websites, and in their wake, the EDHREC serpent hoovers up their luscious contents and regurgitates them on your carpet like a dutiful pet. Is it a gift or a warning? You don’t know, you don’t speak serpent language because they don’t have one. Serpents don’t have vocal cords, you idiot.

I’m here to poke around in the entrails and divine any information I can. Let’s get our hands dirty, shall we?

There isn’t a ton, and it’s mostly in “order these cards were spoiled” order for now, which is fine. We knew we’d get a ninja, and we have known that ninja was Satoru for what feels like a month. Hidetsugu, too. So is there any meat left on the bone considering people could have been tinkering with builds for a while? Let’s look!

Satoru Umezawa

Seems like there is a split between big creature to ninja in for 2BU and ways to make sure you get through unblocked. High Synergy cards aren’t always the best specs, but it is where we find picks that are more specific to this deck than to others. Anything stand out?

I started with the card I think has the least room to grow. I liked this initially under $10, and while I still do, I wouldn’t pay $10 for this, which means my gut says it likely won’t hit $20. Would you buy at $10 trying to get out at $12? No. What about $8? If you would, this is under $8 for now. It has multiple printings but that hasn’t stopped its price climb too much. I like this, and I like other specs even more.

$20 on CK for a card in barely 6,000 decks in the last 2 years? I have a feeling its inclusions may be more historical (think Kaalia decks, etc) but EDHREC doesn’t display that data.

Yet.

I don’t love this as a spec, but even with its high price, it’s primed to move. Check out CSI’s stock.

This graph for the Jumpstart version is WILD. This is about to hit a historic low, but there are lots of printings. This needs help from more than just Satoru, maybe, but it also opened at 25, went down, then got above 25. This can’t tank forever, and with copies at $12, I like it.

I wasn’t sure what to make of a card like this, so I decided to see where it ranked amongst other non-mythics in MH1.

This is already on the high end of non-mythics between $5 and $10, but this set has been out of print a while. Will Satoru make this more popular than Giver of Runes? I think we needed to see they were showing us Ninja in advance and pay attention then, unfortunately.

Basically all other Ninja are even worse. There is another kind of card for this deck, though, that will benefit more from data and is less kittycat in nature.

There are a few quick hits that don’t deserve their own heading but do deserve a mention.

“Hinata, Crown of Dawn”
{1}{U}{R}{W}
Legendary Creature — Spirit Kirin
Flying, trample
Spells you cast cost {1} less to cast for each target they have.
Spells your opponents cast cost {1} more to cast for each target they have.

This seems like all of the cards with Strive that target are in play, at minimum.

Here is a scryfall search for “Any number of targets” to get you started. This dropped literally seconds ago so I haven’t had time to fully explore this, but it’s interesting.

This has a strive cost of 1 which makes it a very exciting target.

It seems pretty likely that if we look at Twinflame for the ceiling on these spikes, we’re looking at $2 minimum. I think the deck looks fun and I bet these bulk rares make some people some money.

Hinata makes Magma Opus cost 1RU but I doubt it makes it cost more money given how recent it is. Still, if you did build Hinata, Opus would be a shoo-in.

You have to weigh how you feel about low risk versus high supply. I’m in for a couple of playsets.

Final Fortune and friends already went bonkers in price because of Obeka, but Sigarda’s Aid and other equip aids could get there. If CK can charge $14 for a Sigarda’s Aid, I can pay $8 on TCG Player.

There will be plenty more hits as cards continue being spoiled, so check out my Twitter account for my thoughts. Until next time!