Readers!

We have seen enough of the new cards to speculate baselessly which, thought I said differently last week, is the best way to speculate. I am going to semi-baselessly speculate because I’m too good at this not to have a basis even when there is no basis. Or something. Look, there are new commanders, I’m going to look at them and think about cards that go in the decks, OK? This is like my 12th year doing this, and writing what I am going to do right before I do it is kind of boring to me but I also know I really need to do it.

Let’s look at some cards and I’ll talk about some other cards and we’ll call it a day. Sound good? OK, here we go.

This is a strong one. Right away, landfall stuff, the way I would typically build an Omnath deck (I have 5, soon to be 6. Yes, I have 2 Locus of Creation decks. Sue me) but this one doesn’t care if the mana is from lands. In fact, is way more unfair if it isn’t. Here are 2 sources I think are superlative.

If they ever stop printing this card, it could go way up. Also, if they just stop printing foils, the foils can go up, so either way, we’re likely in bad shape here. I don’t trust them not to reprint this, and riding the wave back up from $3 to $6 isn’t my bag these days. It is free money for you, though, until it isn’t.

The foil thing was a joke, there’s 1 and it’s bonkers. Could this be $200 on CK again? Maybe! I don’t want to buy at $150 and try and find out, but that 99 Euro NM English copy on Card Market might find its way into my basket. If you want less risk, I have an idea.

This card once flirted with $30 and now it is worth less than half of that. Could this be $30 again? It’s going to be more than $12 again, that’s for sure. This has already demonstrated how high it can go and I plan to buy a lot of copies of this for personal use before I even start to speculate. This feels very, very strong to me in the deck, and with mana burn gone, there is no downside at all to this mana machine.

I don’t want to wade into which 3 color creatures are good, but you know what’s very good in a deck that plays Conflux like this deck probably will?

That’s right, Dream Halls. This is basically half of its historic peak as well. Was that buying driven by speculators trying to dump crypto gains into something stable? Maybe, but it’s on the Reserved List and it’s dirty in a deck like this where you have a good shot of pitching any given 3 color card for another one. This deck is going to be so much fun.

Black Market seems super good in this deck, too, honestly.

Looking at the Black Market price graph reminds me of the article where I talked about how I expected Blind Obedience to recover. Whelp! Extort is a sick ability in Commander but not enough cards have it. While Blind Obedience is too expensive right now, consider this monster.

As is the trend this week, this card also used to be worth more and is better now than it previously has been. Pontiff is very good but very slow. Play it in a slow deck, like this one.

I think this set is going to be huge and that’s a shame because I still haven’t really processed Brother’s War. Next week we’ll have some data to dig into so, until then, check my twitter feed, the Pro Trader’s Discord and your bulk. Until next time!

Readers!

I have been trying to identify new ways to target specs in a world with less and less time between sets to build, more and more hype, more expense and, in general, no rest. I used to sometimes get a little bored waiting for the next set, and I foolishly wished for that situation to be better on this old monkey paw I got from a dude named Rod and here we are. It’s not the end of the world, just my old method. Luckily, some of the calls I made are starting to pay dividends. Remember when we talked Blink, specifically White stuff twice in the last 2 months?

A few of these sold for $9.99 on TCG Player Direct today, so the doubling we predicted should be upon us within a matter of a week or so. It feels good that my new method of “Building around keywords” rather than commanders gives us a whole set worth of Legendary Creatures to give the card a chance to pop. It’s not just Elesh Norn that wants this card, either, if the data is to be believed (it is).

Teleportation Circle has had itself quite a year. Checking the card’s raw stats might not point to this kind of dominance across many different commanders, but it’s clear that a lot of people want to be blinking creatures in White decks. Then there is this.

The card is in 1,000 Norn decks already and is in 69 Malcator decks (nice). There is no reason we won’t see more in the future. I think Teleporation Circle may be a bit trickier to reprint, but targeting cards like Portal rather than very specific cards like Dream Chisel is the way to speculate these days. I could write lots of paragraphs about how there isn’t time to wait for people to upload their decks to Archidekt and give us a week or two to pick up copies of cards. The movers are moving immediately, just like they began to do in Standard about 8 years ago which made me shift to EDH. I told too many people how to do this and now they’re doing it, and I can’t be mad at it. I didn’t really invent anything all that revolutionary, I mostly just camped one data site hard until they hired me to improve its reach and here we are.

It’s only bad news for me if I want to be lazy and not learn anything, so I guess it’s good that we can talk about my new ideas by talking about a hit. I think there are more hits coming, though, and it’s all cards I have talked about in the past. Instead of showing you that I like Prince Charming and Panharmonicon and their current price (they can’t possibly print Panharmonicon again for like 6 more months… right?) I want to talk about another concept – getting rid of counters.

There has never been a better time to be trying to take counters off of permanents. With Infect creatures shrinking blockers, Planeswalkers everywhere and Sagas that are fun to keep on their first mode keep getting printed, it’s very useful. Unfortunately it’s mostly in Black and Green, and Leeches popped already (I have so many copies of that card that I can’t wait to out). Fortunately, the concept will stick around and I have some spicy picks.

Glissa has all of the cards I want to talk about within one deck so let’s see what they all are.

It’s going to sound insane to say this, but we can safely ignore the High Synergy cards, at least this time. More decks might come along that remove counters but not necessarily synergizing with Sagas. If the next card printed IS good with Sagas, they begin to make more sense. Why don’t we avoid the very, very niche cards because we have learned that method doesn’t work as well as it used to. I need to sift through to find gems. Luckily, I did that.

I had no interest in using Puca Trade to trade, but one of the reasons it failed was they gave every new account like $15 to spend and a person (me) could make an account, order cards, get them, never do anything, and win. You could use the platform, and maybe it was a mistake not to (Cardsphere is better and still going) but regardless, I put one card on my want list – a $1 rare called Torpor Orb. I received 12 of them with the $15 and bought a few more, but it was mostly just a way I got 15 copies of a card over a month.

I’m not bragging about my hits – if you have read my series for long, you know all about my misses, after all. The point is that once it hits a certain threshold of usefulness, it’s not at all unprecedented for a rare from New Phyrexia to be $10, or even $15. I think Hex Parasite could get there, and its overall price trend is upward anyway. If they were going to reprint a creature with Phyrexian mana in it, I feel like they would have in ONE or the ONE Commander decks, but they didn’t. I think Hex Parasite is a $12 card.

If the non-foil goes up, the foil which is showing no sign of an increase right now, could have some upside.

Lots of it.

Speaking of foils, I know I don’t love foils, but I love one foil.

These are DORT CHEAP in Europe, also. I am always talking about how good Blind Obedience is and how everyone is always shocked I deal 1 to everyone and gain 3 with it almost every turn. Everyone remembered the player who Extorted gaining 1 life, gaining 3 is a surprise. If people are surprised how good a card is, and it has another unique ability that’s in vogue right now, I don’t see a downside to picking these up at half of their historic peak price, do you?

This is why I never sell my foils, I just keep them in 500 count boxes STUFFED AS FULL AS POSSIBLE with basic lands at both ends to keep them as compressed as possible so maybe, just maybe, they’ll flatten out. I am not saying we can expect $25 for Thrull Parasite, I’m just saying if you have foil Power Conduits in a box, like maybe from before 2021, go open that box. I’m about to! I bet I sold a bunch of these for $5 in July of 2021, though. “U SHAPED GRAPH, BABY!” I likely screamed, already mentally spending all of those Lincolns on Skee Ball and Nikl-Nips.

Is that a good corollary for this card? No, but it does show the ceiling is basically boundless compared to its current price, and even if it “merely” hits a historical high, you’re doubling up, just for starters. I always dig through an LGS’ loose foil box if they have one and cards like this that were $0.50 when they put them in there and slowly creep up to $5 over time for no reason other than that they’re old and have some utility. Those card can go up a lot when that utility happens for a whole year worth of new commanders. Some people might have to buy 2. You don’t HAVE to buy ANY foil copies of Ferropede, but I’m gonna.

I was feeling a little gloomy over the holidays and the accumulated stress made it hard to see a future for this column. I have had to adapt or die a lot of the tenure of this series and if you keep working with me, bouncing ideas off of me in the Pro Trader Discord and just keep reading, I’ll keep trying to make us all some money. Thanks for reading, I really mean that. Until next time!

Readers!

Using EDHREC or, if you want to do it the hard way, I guess, other sources, it’s easy to see which cards are getting played in Commander and which aren’t. Look at a set and see what’s getting played with. That used to be enough information for us. Barring reprints, cards were printed the same amount, roughly, foils were flat and still special and older cards went up when new cards made them matter again. The problem is, the more they wanted us to buy, the more the cards had to be good. They need to keep pushing the gas, which means more good cards per set, more sets, which means more cards you need to play. Do you build a new deck or take cards out of the 3 week old deck you’ve played twice to make room for the new cards that made your old ones obsolete? And if a card is too good to be made obsolete, do you take comfort in that and invest or do you worry about what the card that makes people stop playing Dockside Extortionist is going to look like? I personally worry about how just getting played a lot doesn’t matter, and also doesn’t seem to be useful for figuring out where prices will go. Let’s look at a few cards, shall we?

Forgive my hasty alignment using paint of all programs, I don’t want to take the time to fix it because I wanted to make a point. Both of these cards are played a lot in new Elesh Norn decks, and in the format in general. One costs more than the other despite being newer. Does that mean Terramancer is played more across the format?

No, in fact. There are lots of versions of Welcoming Vampire, and Deep Gnome Terramancer was in a set that has a lot of really good cards. Do I expect Terramancer to hit $10 when Welcoming Vampire is played more and hasn’t come close? How many reprints and variants and promos does it take to drag a card down to being a buck less than a card played half as much? As there other factors at play here?

The real question here is that whether Deep Gnome Terramancer is a good pickup at under $5. We’d love for it to hit at least $10 if we’re outing at retail prices, much more if we want to clear our shipping costs buylisting them. Is this sort of spec dead? Moreover, is being a format staple even good enough anymore?

We used to be impressed by a card being in 10,000 decks as far back as EDHREC measured, and one of the reasons I cautioned against arbitrary levels like that was that the number would have to constantly change and no one would know where it should be. At this point, is 22k enough? Why can’t 41k and a year of time offset multiple promo versions? What trajectory is Terramancer even on?

If 4 is the floor on this card and it’s already rebounding, will it pull farther away from Vampire despite being played less? What are we to make of these contradictions? Worse, is being in 40 or even 50k decks enough anymore? With all of the new keywords comes enablers and that means cards get more and more specialized until the decks build themselves. We used to be at a sweet spot where staples were an index and individual cards being buoyed by new releases meant some narrow cards would get a new look and that scrutiny would lead to buying and price increases. Now, the cards are so specialized that people are basically leaving the precons as-is a card being in a 40K deck matters more than being in 40k decks, you know?

The neon Hidetsugu and the promise of extended art foil Boseiju and foils of the EDH precon cards continued the unsustainable trend of collector boosters being opened until the prices were all meaningless. Is The Reality Chip a buy at $3? More than that, are we OK with a game where the 9th most played card in the most popular format is $2.50? Let me rephrase that, of course I want a game like that, but is it worth doing Mtg Finance the way I have done Mtg Finance the last decade if the demand can’t ever catch supply?

The days of snagging like 100 cheap copies of something you think is going up on TCG Player seem over. Mtg Finance has always been “adapt or die” and after taking a month off to grapple with how I felt about my current approach to Mtg Finance, I think I am ready to adapt. To that end, I’ll be spending the next few months developing and reporting on new techniques and pointing out times where my old approach pays off.

It wasn’t that Kibo, Uktabi Prince couldn’t move prices, it’s that Ravenous Baboons were the only card the really went anywhere. The price immediately went back down as there wasn’t much real demand since the card doesn’t especially synergize with Kibo and it was more likely just an old Monkey people remembered because they’ve been playing as long as me.

My current method, which we’re updating, is still useful for paying attention to movement, usage, relative ubiquity. Staring at the Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines page on EDHREC doesn’t feel like it used to where specs would leap off of the page at me. I just see the same mono-White Blink deck stuff that I said would go up based on another White Blink commander but didn’t. Cards used to be cards, but now the product matters a lot. Limited releases like Baldur’s Gate give us stronger signals, faster. Look what is in 40k decks and has been out exactly as long as Deep Gnome.

Moving forward, I’ll be targeting older cards for specs and only straying into newer card territory when it makes sense to do so, or if it’s in a dynamite set like Baldur’s Gate. I think Baldur’s Gate has more to give us, so I’ll be diving directly into that set next week. Until then, I usually include specs and this week I mostly told you what not to buy, so here are some presented without explanation.

Until next time!