Readers!

I don’t expect YOU to upgrade the Kaldheim precon decks, necessarily. I am not even going to tell you how I think you should do that – it’s not my job. It’s so not my job I just hired a father/son duo to write that article series on EDHREC and if you came here looking for that, that’s where it is, go nuts. I feel qualified as an EDH-understander to do that, like if you wanted to tweet at me and ask me a specific question, I’m all over it, but, again, not my job. I’m not above it, it’s just outside the scope of what I do here.

Besides, you want me to answer a different question because it’s relevant to your interests. You’re not here for “how do I upgrade these decks” but rather “how are other people upgrading these decks?” and “follow-up, why should I care?” and lucky you, I have the answers to both of those questions locked and loaded.

Do these decks matter? I think one matters more than the other, so I’m going to bury the lede a bit and talk about the less exciting one first.

Ragnar is sort of a weird precon. It plays a little better outside of the box against Lathril than vice versa but once you start adding the ridiculous Elves from Magic’s history to Lathril, Ranar gets outpaced in the arms race. There aren’t really any exciting Foretell cards to add and there likely won’t be more in the future, so it seems like this deck has made itself fairly obsolete by virtue of doubling down on a set-specific mechanic versus giving people another chance/excuse to build Golgari Elves. I rebuilt my Nath deck and it was super cool how everyone scoops to Tergrid. I mean, I hate it, but some people like that, and there are a lot more options for Golgari elves than for Azorius “cards from literally just this one set.”

That said, people are using this as a blink commander to get value when you return stuff. You only get one token when you Ghostway your board, so you’ll have to do it in smaller batches to get value, but value you shall have.

It used to be, a reprinting would tank non-mythic rares pretty hard, but Closet didn’t even really acknowledge that a bunch of supply was added with its Double Masters printing and just hovered around its pre-2018 value. This doesn’t go to $10 for longer than it will take to reprint it again, but with a $4 floor, I think getting in for $3ish on TCG Player and getting out for $6 CK store credit in a year is very achievable and super easy. This card is very good and won’t stop being good.

It’s subtle, but you can see the CK price beginning to diverge from the TCG Player price. One reason for that is that Panharmonicon is on “the list” and can be busted from Kaldheim Collector and Set boosters, giving individual and store-level sellers a few copies to list, driving a race toward the bottom, but not giving a big store like CK enough copies to keep in stock as fast as demand is rising, especially with events closed. If Ck wants copies, they have to throw buylist money at them, and hope people want to mail them in.

They’re paying TCG retail on their buylist, just about. The cheap copies on TCG Player will disappear because set boosters of Kaldheim are about kind of like a dog with two butts – fun and novel at first but the drawbacks quickly make themselves apparent. I am betting on CK’s assessment of the trajectory of this card being the right one. This has very little to do with Ranar except that Panharmonicon should go in every Ranar deck without exception, and this was as good a place to talk about this card as any.

There isn’t much else I love on this page other than maybe Cathars’ Crusade, but that’s never not a buy as soon as it’s reprinted.

Let’s look at the other deck, now, shall we?

Lathril may nor may not want to be at the helm of the deck, but if this card makes people rebuild their Nath deck and jam this in, more power to them because this still caused an Elf deck to be created and it does work in the 99.

There is no money to be made here unless you find these in a binder for its old price at a store that doesn’t look stuff up. Between the Golgari Elf commanders in Commander Legends and now Lathril, there was no reason not to expect this to be in play, but a crazy moonshot wasn’t quite what I expected or I might have mentioned something before. This was $2.50 on November 10th and now it’s 8 times that, which seems high, certainly. I would sell into this hype, but if you don’t have copies, don’t think about Ezuri as much as think about what is absolutely going to predictably go bat$@&% as a result of Strixhaven, buy those cards now and sell into the dumb, predictable hype there. Strixhaven probably gives us Wizard tribal stuff and probably doesn’t reprint the Ezuri equivalent in that precon deck, one of which is bound to be Wizards related. Or, hey, here’s a thought – Bitterblossom spiked because they said Throne of Eldraine would be a fairy tale set and everyone said “YOU HAD ME AT FAIRY” and bought Bitterblossoms. That’s dumb, but if spikes like that are predictable, why not buy the stuff for pennies now and wait for the inevitable?

Oh wow, Kaldheim! A snow set with Vikings and Barbarians and Berserkers. This is going to do so much work when that set drops!

*45 continuous seconds of a fart sound effect*

Someone(s) (including my podcast cohost DJ “stank” Johnson) made money buying this for like a quarter and waiting for the big-brain speculator crowd to pay him $4 each for them. There’s free money in Strixhaven and if a basically useless card like Lovisa is in play, imagine what happens if there is a Wizard that’s close to as playable as Ezuri. Yeah, we missed Ezuri, but we got into EDH so there was more than one opportunity every 6 months for a spec to hit. Dust yourself off, look at Wizards lists and make stacks so fat they end up guarded by super problematic goblins in the town where all the kids at Strixhaven buy their wands or whatever.

This JUST got reprinted and it stayed above $10, when it has gotten significantly lower in the past.

Card Kingdom isn’t doing a fire sale and I am not sure you should, either. A lot of people don’t love the new art. If the price is where it is after the card was added to The List AND it got a printing in a product like Commander Collection: Green, I like its chances of rebounding.

I didn’t expect this to be the “better luck next time!” article, but I think the Elves in Commander Legends shortened our window in a way I didn’t anticipate and I could have written this article the day they spoiled Lathril and we still would have been too late. All we can do is prepare better for next time. This going from $3 to $11 is pretty significant, especially for a card with a Duel deck (albeit like the first one ever with 0 supply) printing.

Let’s quickly post some pics of cards it’s NOT too late to buy and call it a day.

I got nothing. All the Elf stuff doubled from all of the Elf decks lately. I literally think next week I’m going to do something I tell you never to do and pick out a bunch of Wizards stuff that probably goes up. Let’s be early for once, shall we? Until next time!

Readers!

I love to talk about the most-built deck on EDHREC as a source of potential specs because what could be more ripe for investment than the most popular deck? Like sometimes happens, there has been some jockeying for position and this week, we’re seeing a non-Magda, non-Tergrid commander occupy to the top spot. Is there any money to be made here?

I don’t know how many more of these it makes sense to do because the clock is pretty much ticking on some of these. Orvar stuff I mentioned last week is moving and if all of the obvious stuff from Fynn, the Fangbearer hasn’t popped before next week, I’ll be really surprised. That said, I think there are a few hidden gems we can tease out, so let’s do that thing.

Magda has moved aside to let another 5-color commander through. I wonder how many people who put together these 5-color lists are actually building them. That said, I severely underestimated how powerful Golos was going to be and that was clearly a miscaculation given how popular Golos has become.

I didn’t make any bold proclamations calling it terrible or anything, but I would not have predicted that a deck that could be built so many ways, most of them pretty underwhelming, would eclipse Atraxa. That said, Atraxa is one of the more versatile decks as well, so who knows? What I do know is that 5 color commanders are fun, everyone should have at least one, their mana bases are expensive and Esika lends herself to two very popular builds – Gods and Superfriends. Esika could be the definitive Superfriends deck moving forward, so let’s delve into the deck, shall we?

The great part about a “Gods” deck is you get new Gods from Kaldheim, you get The World Tree and you get cards people forgot were Gods like Ilharg. Esika could just as easily be built with Planeswalkers, or both, so a lot of older, placeholder 5-color decks like Kenrith and Sisay could make the switch, but I expect Esika to generate a lot of new decks as well, given how the deck guides people toward Planeswalkers and Gods in a way that no 5-color commander has quite as much before.

Here is what I think could be in play.

I think cards that are high for inclusion rather than high for synergy are better picks because they’re not specific to this deck. Ordinarily, the high synergy cards are ones that aren’t used much in other decks and therefore are undiscovered cards about to go up super hard because the new deck got them noticed. We’re not going to see anything like that in this deck. Look at the high synergy cards – Kruphix, Iroas, Keranos – not exactly undiscovered gems. They’re not played as much outside of Esika, hence the high synergy score, but if we’re going high synergy, we’re hoping to get in on an early Whim of Volrath type card. If we’re picking a more tried and true card, I think high inclusion is the way to go. Athreos is the most-played creature in the deck and it’s rebounding from a significant price drop after the Mystery Booster printing. I think Athreos is a very good candidate.

If you found that argument persuasive about Athreos, good news, everything I said is also true of Purphoros, and Purphoros is played in a ton of other decks. I think it recovers without Esikia’s help, but Esika WILL help.

A card to watch, therefore, will be Nicol Bolas. The highest-inclusion Planeswalker, Nicol isn’t played a ton outside of these theoretical Esika builds the way an all-star like Purphoros is. If Purphoros goes up a ton and Bolas stays pretty flat, we must have overstated the new demand created by Esika decks. However, I think this could follow a similar trajectory, and with a lower buy-in, I think there is opportunity here.

Sk8r boi said see you l8r boi to $20, but with 2 printings in a year, they’re either going to leave this alone for a while or print it into absolute powder. I think they’re inclined to let it recover a bit, but I’d get in and our rather than hoping for $10 again.

This doesn’t have a TON to do with Esika, but the second this stops dropping (buylist, too) I like these longer term. This does a lot of work in a lot of different EDH decks, and it can replace a lot of cards that only do one of these things in a deck where you could use a card that did all of them. I like this, but I don’t need to buy too early.

That does it for me this week. Esika could be the best 5-color Gods and ‘Walkers deck we’ve seen and while I don’t expect them not to make Esika obsolete in the next year with another pushed 5-color commander, for now, let’s make some money. Until next time!

Readers!

I would have liked to have talked about Orvar before stupid junk like this happened, but there was a lot going on over at EDHREC.

Don’t let the prices fool you – Whim is sold out everywhere, even when relisted at $8 or $9. It was a bulk rare last week, but Orvar, the All-Form made it pop off. Did we miss the opportunity to pick these up cheap? Sure, but we shouldn’t look at it as if we lost money. We missed an opportunity to get some money, but as always, the less obvious stuff in a deck like this takes longer to get scooped up and gives us ample time to plan our moves. So why didn’t I write about Orvar beforevar? Simply put, there were some doings happening at EDHREC.

Pardon Our Dust

EDHREC got a UI facelift and I think it will work even better as an analytical tool. Nothing we used before is gone but there are some new features that I’m sure I’ll go into at length in future articles. Focusing on launching a lot of new features sapped a lot of the site’s mental bandwidth and the scrapers weren’t working optimally for about a week. That’s normally not a huge deal, but during that week, we weren’t getting updates about how much Orvar was being played. Now that it’s fixed, we know.

It’s played a lot.

Sometimes people tell me that I make these pictures too wide so that the individual cards are too hard to read. You don’t need to read the individual cards, readers. I’ll zoom in if that needs to happen. What I want you to see is where Orvar is.

It’s the 5th-most-built deck in the set, right after Toski and right before Fynn (the poison guy). Orvar is popular and since that’s the case, the Whim of Volrath spike matters even less because if the deck has legs, there are other cards people missed. I found ’em.

Check out the Orvar page. A video should automatically play that tells you about the new features, and it’s worth learning about what they are. Once it’s done, you’ll see that Orvar is sort of boring. A lot of the cards are going in every single build, which bores me as an EDH player but makes me feel better about my investments as a financier. Usually when one part of my job makes me unhappy, the other half makes me happy to compensate. The money I made finding Necrogen Mists at an LGS for $2 makes me feel better about how stupid a deck Tergrid is and how much I hate that they made it. Let’s look at the obvious cards in a linear deck and marvel at how they’re still cheap.

Literally 24 hours ago, Card Kingdom had a bunch of copies, and they were cheaper than TCG Player. When a price is “wrong” like that, as we discussed last week, it’s worth noting. The “cheap” CK copies are gone, but TCG Player is still reasonable, and other sites haven’t quite figured out that this is in as many decks as Whim of Volrath and is just as reusable give its retrace ability. I don’t expect this to stay under $5 for long, and it probably goes higher.

Scepter bottoms out from reprintings, but always manages to rebound strong. This deck, in particular, makes use of a lot of cheap cantrips that have a lot of impact with Orvar out. Anything you imprint on Scepter is good in this deck, meaning there’s no reason not to run it because you don’t have to build around it. It’s always good, and with its price at a 7-year-low, it’s time to get serious about the scepter.

Can someone who knows about foils tell me if this is a good buy at $30? It seems like it is to me. I don’t love foils, as we all know, but this is a rare promo with unique art and the card is going to be played more than usual soon. With Scepter getting a lot of reprints in sets that have foils with its classic art, this is the better foil – I don’t care for the FTV one bit. If you like FTV foils, though, here’s that graph.

$13 for a foil that has flirted with $30 in the recent past. If you buy the premise that Scepter can see more play on the back of decks like Orvar, this seems like it has a lot of potential. It likely never gets cheaper than it is now.

This was on a rocket to the moon already, but in case you weren’t sure if the literal Sakashima deck was enough to help this recover from its Mystery Booster crater, here’s another deck that can’t get enough copies.

Tidespout stock is incredibly low everywhere. This is about to hit a tipping point and you’ll want to have some copies in hand when it does.

The copies from Battlebond are good, too. If I had one card I could buy this week, and I couldn’t find cheap copies of Glamerdye (my Pick of the Week last night) I really like Tidespout Tyrant. There are a lot of cards you can copy with Orvar, and a lot of them are either bulk rares like Scourge of Fleets or already the correct price like Torrential Gearhulk (unless you think it’s on its way up, in which case call it a bonus pick) but Tidespout is about to sell out and it’s nutterbutters in this deck.

When everyone decides there is exactly one way to build a deck, and it’s a popular deck, I have to push past the revulsion I feel as a self-proclaimed steward of the format and make myself feel better by stacking cabbage. Join me in buying obvious cards before they’re obvious to everyone else. Glamerdye is the exact same spec as Whim of Volrath, but one was obvious and easy to buy out and one wasn’t, so let’s do what we always do and make some money. That does it for me, until next time!