Readers!

I know I love to do a data-driven series. and you love to read such a series, but 2020 is almost over, and I think it’s time to take a look back at stuff that came out in 2020, will be expensive later, and which you can get for less now. Let’s have the “wait, when did that get expensive?” conversation now that the stuff is gettable for a reasonable price, shall we?

I’m serious, I usually do a few paragraphs of preamble to have something “above the fold” so to speak because we like to tease non-Pro Traders for a few days to incentivize people to buy the membership but I am too eager to get into it, let’s talk about cards I love from 2020.

There was never a “great” time to get this card. It’s going to go up, especially the extended-border versions. The ship has largely sailed on the $40 foil (I didn’t really expect its initial price of $30 to be a bargain, but it never dropped below $30). Beyond Death is a weird, topheavy set that was the first set to have collector boosters, was hit hard by distribution issues related to the pandemic and rares in the set are somewhat overshadowed by the marquee mythics in the set. Theros Beyond Death actually has quite a few cards that I like bordlerless long-term.

I haven’t looked at how the most-played cards from that set have shaken out, and if I was surprised, it’s possible you will be, also.

What is this, a picture for ants?

You can check the page yourself and peruse through the entire set – it’s worth it. The surprises here are Underworld Breach played a lot in EDH, Heliod’s Intervention in the Top 5, Calix in the Top 10 and Nyx Lotus, Athreos and Woe Strider not in the Top 10. I didn’t like Nyx Lotus much, but I thought I was alone.

Focus on Theros – it’s a year old already and prices are flat but demand could catch up to supply soon. EDH is basically the only plague-proof paper format, thanks largely in part to spelltable. You can find some cards I missed, but I’m going to move on.

These are all too cheap. They look great, they’re not curly-ass stupid foils (I like the showcase foils, too, though) and they’re played a lot.

Cards 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the set are the Triomes. The fact that the showcase versions aren’t just full art but their stylized, sexy, unique art tells me that they are going to be the go-to in the future. I hate foils but I don’t hate making a deck look nice and now I don’t even have to use foils to make my deck look nice if I don’t want to (I don’t).

The extended art triomes are too cheap. They look to me like $1 Rishkar’s Expertise and Aetherflux Reservoir used to. Buying in above $5 is a little loose but it’s reality and is likely a bargain. I don’t know how reprintable these are, but I suspect “not very.” I think there is a lot to like from this set, but a lot of it is “very good” and not “slam dunk” but I think the full-art triomes are and always have been a slam dunk. I don’t see anything in the data to suggest otherwise. All of the top 20 cards in the set are worth looking at extended art, but the triomes are far and away my favorite. I am considering ending the article here so you don’t get distracted by other picks.

Core set 2021 was a real mixed bag. I expected… some of these things. #1 card is Sanctum of All? Granted, it’s sorted by percent inclusion, meaning a significant portion of the 5-color decks made in the last 2 years include Sanctum because a significant portion of them are sanctum decks. It’s generating its own headlines, essentially. Check out this Top 20 – it’s nuts.

At $11 on TCG Player, I think this is a fine pick-up. It might not have the most upside at this price, but it’s been flat for too long and this stupid card draws too many stupid other cards. It’s too good. You know what card I hated and James said on Fast Finance he liked and I said “No, that card sucks” and now everyone is playing it but it doesn’t matter because the price hasn’t changed much?

Could this go to $5? Maybe. It’s a non-mythic rare from a core set, but no one even drafted the set and the extended border gives it so chops. I hate foils, but the foil isn’t unattractive.

As this approaches the price of the non-foil, I more and more relax my anti-foil stance. The card is played a ton in EDH and it reminds me of cards that end up in a ton of casual decks and become $5 overnight, surprising everyone. I don’t want to be surprised, I want to have a lot of copies when this goes up. Let’s all look at the price graph and marvel at how James said it was a great card, I said I hated it, everyone is playing it, and he would have been wrong to buy them in July and I was right not to. MTG Finance is easy when you’re never punished for being wrong.

I’ll do another article like this in 6 months for the stuff printed more recently. We have time for long-term specs to materialize but, until then, stock up and prepare to look smart later. That does it for me this… year, I guess. Thanks for being great readers and we’ll see you all in 2021 where Boston Dynamics robots will become self-aware or a meteor will hit or something will make us all tweet “Man, I thought 2020 was bad.” Until then!

Readers!

We talk about reprint risk a lot but today, I want to talk about the opposite of reprint risk and how a category of cards that keeps making itself obsolete is not only sheltered from reprints, but also benefits from the need to redundancy. Today, we study cards that beg for new and improved copies of themselves that are also cards that are new and improved copies of something else. That sentence will make sense later, I hope.

What?

OK, so you know how one of the earliest things Blue knew how to do was pretend to be something else?

It was a good effect, and a very blue one. Being able to copy their best creature and thus neutralize it, copy your own best creature and thus double it and generally get a ton of value from a card that had a lot of utility in a color that wasn’t exactly known for having efficient creatures was popular early. Doppelganger and Clone both became popular cards and for years, Clone was reprinted into absolute oblivion. Doppelganger was left alone, mostly, but Clone lived on as the de facto, well, Clone effect. Eventually, WotC realized it was a fun design space and started sexying up the clones a bit with new effects, broader ranges of targets and better names than “Clone”.

The question is, if Clone had 0 reprints after, say, Unlimited, would its price be higher because of scarcity or lower due to being obsolete? I realize it’s an unfair question, but the question itself isn’t that important, it’s how I’m framing the rest of the article. We should be thinking about how a format like EDH with 100 cards that are 1-of effects is so profoundly different from a format with 60 cards that are 4-of effects that being “the best” Clone effect doesn’t matter, and being “the worst” doesn’t even matter some of the time. Sometimes you want to do your best Ash Ketchum impression and leave home 10 at to go engage in a bunch of what is basically legal dogfighting with no parental supervision catch ’em all.

Sakahsima is very popular right now and while there are a lot of decks pairing Sakashima with other creatures to amplify those effects (Krarkashima is blowing a lot of other decks completely out of the water, which has been a nice surprise and is why I didn’t try to guess which combinations would be the most played because I would have guessed wrong) people are also going mono-Blue Sakashima. Why? To load up on Clones, baby! And why not?

If you have enough clone effects, you can copy the same creature with a powerful (or hell, even a weak) ETB effect every turn and make opponents feel a sense of deja vu that ends with their death. It’s a silly deck but people like it and if people like it, they’re going to buy the cards.

If the deck needs basically all of the good clone effects, it doesn’t matter which is the best or worst, but merely how many the deck has room for. Since Clone effects, for whatever reason, are cards they’d rather redesign than reprint, the reprint risk on them is very low, making them appealing targets, and the fact that a deck can come along and make swaths of them relevant again all at once and could do so again in the future, makes them also appealing targets. Let’s look at the Sakashima page on the ‘Rec and try to find some good ‘uns.

The harder-to-get and less-printed ones have already begun to tip. The thing about Commander 2015 is that after everyone grabbed the one obvious card out of the deck, they sort of stopped caring about everything else and a lot of those cards started to pick up steam in EDH. Everyone was so focused on Containment Priest and Teferi that they didn’t realize that a lot of the decks have $3 cards in them. A lot of $3 cards. A lot of the Black deck has these 7 mana spells that most players didn’t even read that are pretty powerful effects in EDH. Gigantoplasm is still gettable for $2 on sites that didn’t get the memo and it’s unlikely the card ever gets printed again. It’s not flashy like Clever Impersonator, but there is something to be said for not being Clever Impersonator and therefore not getting reprinted. I like these at $2 and I don’t even hate them at $4.

So what will it take to push a card like Cryptoplasm out of bulk rare territory?

It seems like, with a similar amount of play for both cards, we’re waiting on supply to dry up. There are simply more copies of a bulk rare from a regular set than a card from a Commander deck. The demand for the Blue deck didn’t really materialize until it was far too late to print more – Teferi decks became a cEDH staple, Cyclonic Rift hit $20 and climbed more and we don’t need a third thing, two things is enough when those two things are the two things, but you were expecting a third thing.

So if Cryptoplasm doesn’t get there, are there cards that can?

Are we better off waiting for a card we know will recover to do that, buying when we know we’re at the absolute floor because the price has rebounded ever so slightly and the set it’s in was 10 products and 2 months ago?

Do we buy on the basis of a huge price disparity between two sites because we know that Card Kingdom slings a lot of EDH product, we’re not likely to get a reprint soon, the card sees play in a lot of formats because it’s not just a big, durdly, 4-mana clone?

Do we buy somewhere between the floor and ceiling because we know there are additional factors that make a card difficult (but not impossible) to reprint and we know once it goes out of print the price will go up?

It’s hard to know exactly what to do when we see data like this. Personally, I think if we were going to target a card like Gigantoplasm, the time to do so would have been before it started to get bought up a bit, buying in at the floor. A card that is a bad version of a good card and therefore obsolete can lay dormant for years, waiting for the deck to need enough redundant copies of the effect to spike it up and when that happens, the price spikes hard. You want to be the one selling into that first wave because a second spike isn’t guaranteed for a card with medium demand and 0 supply the way it is for a card with high, sustained demand and medium supply in two waves.

I don’t know if I like any of these Clones other than Gigantoplasm which appears to have some room to grow and some supply at the old price, Phantasmal Image which has grown a lot but isn’t done and Spark Double which has additional utility but less reprint risk. You don’t HAVE to target any of these, really. But what we can do is use this case as a lesson because while tribal cards are obvious when a new tribe is announced, you’re not always the one holding Louvisa Coldeyes, sometimes you’re the one trying to buy Bitterblossom because WotC announced a fairy tale set and you stopped listening when you heard the word “fairy.” “Clone tribal” turned out to be a thing, if you apply a very loose definition of what tribal decks are. But hear me out – the people applying the same loose definition of what cards should be grouped together in a deck the way players are going to are the ones who will be prepared for the next thing that is a little less obvious than “they spoiled a Minotaur, you know what to didgeridoo about it.” Until next time.

We have done some baseless, semi-baseless and mostly baseless speculation on this column. Not everyone knows this, but in my day, I’ve even done some quiet speculation. I have largely gotten away from the uncertain where I can, preferring to look at solid data from EDHREC and base my picks on what people are actually playing rather than what I think they’ll play. Today, I am going to do a bit of a hybrid approach because I think what people are going to play soon will be very similar to something played already and I’m going to see if I can figure it out weeks before anyone brews a single deck.

My Thoughts On Leaks

Leaks suck. If you leak cards, I hope you get a splinter under your fingernail every day. I hope WotC sues you and turns your house into a camp where arsonists learn to paint minifigs and one of them burns it down with all of your stuff inside. Leaks are like telling a child Santa isn’t real, except in this scenario, Wizards of the Coast contacted me ahead of time and told me it was cool if I told everyone Santa wasn’t real and I worked for like 10 hours on a video about it and then you just blurted it out a week before I was allowed to post my video… ish. Like, in this scenario, I’d be a monster because I was about to tell everyone Santa wasn’t real… OK, this metaphor is off the rails. The point is, leakers are a combination of people who tell children Santa isn’t real but also someone who shouts out the punchline to a joke before a comic delivers it. Yeah, great, you’ve heard this one before, but the reason I’m telling the joke and not you is that I have something called

My Thoughts On Leaks Continued

timing.

That said, if the leaks are out, they’re out. I make lots of different kinds of content for a lot of different websites and they all have different philosophies about how to handle leaks. From a finance perspective, other people are acting on this information and we should, too. We’d be doing our readers a disservice if we didn’t provide the same analysis the competitors are providing. We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, so let’s look at the cards that leaked, namely the two face cards from the Commander decks.

Lathril, Blade of the Elves 2BG

Legendary Creature – Elf Noble

Menace

Whenever Lathril, Blade of the Elves deals combat damage to a player, create that many 1/1 green Elf Warrior creature tokens

T, tap 10 untapped Elves you control: Each opponent loses 10 life and you gain 10 life

2/3

Lathril is kind of spicy – having a win con in the command zone is useful. I played a different GB elf deck and it was tough to kill them without Craterhoof – I often found myself resorting to using Jarad (I went with Jarad) or Shaman of the Pack to kill them. I miss my Nath of the Gilt Leaf deck, but it gets to live on this week as the inspiration for basically the exact deck everyone is going to build around Lathril. It may have fewer discard effects, but it doesn’t have to considering Nath goes in the 99 and Discard effects are good.

This will be a bit of a Voltron deck as well, and I can tell you the kinds of cards people will likely include in a deck that wants to hit hard and will have lots of tokens.

This goes in the deck, but is it good? I don’t know. It’s crept up a bit from its floor of about $0.50 on CK but it’s not quite at the $3 it was flirting with, either. It might take more than Lathril to make this the $5 you’d want it to be if you’re buying in around $1.50, but you can make money here, albeit not easy money.

There is a heavy Discard component to Nath, so if we want to play this safe, we should ignore than stuff since it’s not guaranteed to be in Lathril. Instead, we can focus on on the common cards between the two likely decks.

You know how I feel about foils, but there are so many non-foil copies of this bulk card that the foils may be targeted. Again, I don’t personally like the foils of EDH cards but some people do, and you may just out these to greater fools if you sell online. I think this card and Pennon Blade deserve a look.

Unfortunately for Pennon Blade, it was just in Commander Legends and foils of this are everywhere due to the Collector Boosters. I think this cad is cooked, which is too bad because foils were flirting with $2 but most people had these in their foil bulk, which is almost always unsorted, meaning the market would be slow to replace the copies bought quickly. There’s no money here; thanks Commander Legends.

On the other hand, here’s a card with 2 foil printings (Legions and Eternal Masters) and whose foil flirted with $9 already. I like this for $4 if CK was getting $9 for these earlier, irrespective of if Lathril can replicate the demand that led to that earlier spike (it can’t).

Card Kingdom selling out of a card only played in EDH makes my speculator sense tingle. This won’t be $4 when CK restocks, which means it’s pretty likely their new buy price will be above what you can get these for on other sites right now. It won’t be enough to bother arbitraging, but it will be enough that the TCG Player price likely goes up to approach the new CK price, which means you profit.

One thing I will say for foils is that it insulates them from potentially being reprinted in the same deck that’s giving us Lathril, something I can’t say for non-foils. If they’re obvious enough for us to know to speculate on them, they’re obvious enough to go in the deck.

Let’s look at the other one.

Ranar the Ever-Watchful – 2WU

Legendary Creature – Spirit Warrior

Flying, vigilance The first card you foretell each turn costs Snow to foretell. Whenever you exile one or more cards from your hand, and/or permanents from the battlefield, create a 1/1 white Spirit creature token with flying.

I don’t know what the foretell ability is all about, but we can look at the rest of the deck and assume foretell is going to be fairly easy to pull off, otherwise there wouldn’t be much point putting it in a commander deck that’s likely to have some reprints.

That said, this is a blink deck that gives us value when we blink, and just like looking at Nath helped us with Latrhil, Brago can help us here. Also, don’t forget that it triggers when you exile their stuff. This could be fun.

This hit $4 once, it can do it again. If you can get these for half of that on TCG Player, I don’t hate it. Interlude and Ghostway are both in play, but I worry about them going in the deck, especially Interlude.

As much as the non-foil price is tanking a bit, CK has been sold out of the foil for a minute. I think paying $4 for the foil elsewhere for a card with (I think) high reprint risk when the non-foil was $4 on CK a while back is a good plan.

Wave and Tide are pretty old tech, but the more time that passes between today and the date Nemesis was released (February 2000), the more the trend in the price is upward. I think these will grow unbidden and a helping hand from people taking a second look at Brago tech next January will give these even more of a boost. I wouldn’t be surprised if this hits $10 for a bit.

Remember, Ranar says when you exile a permanent from the battlefield, not when you exile a creature of your own from your side of the battlefield, so this is even nastier than it was in Brago because you get value. You’ll want to blink this before the counters all fall off. They’ll get their lands back but you can rebuy a bunch of token creation. You can opt for the $15 foil, too, if you want.

That does it for me this week. I think that when we get a bit more info about the rest of the deck and what foretell is (I have to assume it involves exiling a card from your hand) w’ell know more. Until then, stay safe and if you must buy foils, remind yourself that we’re all making do in pandemic times. Until next time!

Readers!

As Obeka begins to wane (though not out of the top spot), naturally something else must wax for the balance to be maintained (I don’t know what the balance is, forget I even said that, stupid STUPID, focus Jason) and today what the waxer is became clear. It’s someone who clearly knows a lot about waxing.

Look at this smooth-chested, Glenn Danzig-looking rejected Manowar album cover. If you’re not impressed by the time he spends every morning, shaving the part of his body not covered by his leather karate gi, you’ll be impressed by how he’s climbing the leader board.

Shoving decks aside like he’s actually Glenn Danzig and the other decks are a fan who wants an autograph, Jared is making a big splash in the format, and a few (viking, on fire) ships have sailed already on the basis of this cartoonish 80s throwback of a Magic card. I’m sorry, I know you want me to get to the specs part of the article, but read his flavor text. “I’m here for what’s mine” like he’s Glenn Danzig in the promoter’s office asking for his check before the last note from “Long Way Back From Hell” has finished reverberating in the speakers onstage. Man, I do NOT like Danzig, apparently.

Unlike Danzig who coasted on the success of the Misfits (last one, promise), Jared Carthalion is out here doing real work.

Jared doubled the price on this card just like Glenn Danzig doubles as a poor man’s Henry Rollins. Don’t expect to get these for under a 10-spot on CFB, either, folks.

So with the “Carthalion effect” (that would be a sweet name for a band) moving prices, why are we even bothering to dig through at this point? Hasn’t every ship sailed? Hasn’t ever boat been launched? Hasn’t every mother told her children not to hear Danzig’s words by now?

I don’t think so, I think there’s still plenty of meat on the bone. I think Jared is the Nikya to Obeka’s Vannifar and since it’s a non-obvious commander, I think there are some non-obvious specs. Pariah’s Shield was some low-hanging fruit but I think there is more fruit, higher up, but I’m mixing my metaphors now. Let’s do the spec part of the article now.

The Fruit Still On The Bone

I like this for a lot of reasons. I spiked hard because of a deck in Modern with Hardened Scales and while that wasn’t sustainable, we have a second spike incoming. When a second spike happens, there is no more opportunity for people to pull loose copies out of the binders at the LGS because those all evaporated the first time the card spiked. Copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers, meaning players have to pay whatever those dealers want for the copies. When that supply sells out, there is no way to get more supply in the hands of dealers without them raising the buylist price, so they do that. That’s how we get back out of them, usually. It’s a fun cycle of people paying each other to hold onto copies of cards.

Are we close to the card selling out?

With Card Kingdom out of NM copies and about to sell out of damaged and Coolstuff (where we have about 8 people who write about EDH every week) and CFB being sold out means that the card is about to pop. It’s not just Jared, by the way.

Neyith was printed this year and Marath was just reprinted in etched foil in Commander Legends. That’s quite a bit of interest just this year and the finite copies that were in the hands of dealers who probably paid like $2 to get these when they were selling for $5 are running out. With lots of people vying for the copies at once, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jared finish what Neyith started. If people could actually get Jumpstart to build decks with it, Neyith might have been even more popular. Oh well, still plenty of fruit on the bone. Let’s move on.

This keeps flirting with $14 on Card Kingdom and when it goes back down, it never stays there for long. This is tough to reprint and does a lot of work. It also just wins the game, which is cool. I am looking forward to CFB figuring out whatever is wrong with their Crystal Commerce page – this is not $6 on CFB.

This is about to sell out at $11. If you find these for… you know, not $11, that’s a deal. Card Kingdom has 8 of these at $11, and the other number we care about doesn’t suck, either.

The non-foil caught up to the foil. I don’t think that makes the foil more attractive, but I do think it shows that this is a card that casual players like and which may have underpriced foils in the future. I don’t like EDH foils, you all know that, but once they become the same price, the foil looks better and those have a higher ceiling.

I don’t think Jared has enough juice to move the needle on a card like Pariah with 4 printings (it was also in a Saga precon that I bought a bunch of because there wasn’t a better way to get copies of Worship when you don’t have a credit card). That said, there is a tiiiny bit of movement in the price that is outside the typical noise, so it’s trending up, for what it’s worth. 4 printings means less when those sets are Saga, 7th, 10th and Conspiracy. It was basically printed in Conspiracy. I don’t love this, but they exist. It’s also a 7th Edition foil, which probably will see a bump just because it’s due one.

I like Bear Umbra a lot. We saw a nice dip and we’re starting to see the very beginning of that reverse-J shape that is the start of a nice U shape. I think this goes above $10 pretty easily and I could see CK going from selling for $7 to buying at $7 within a year.

Whenever a card costs more on TCG Player than it does on Card Kingdom, I investigate.

Well, THAT is good to know. I wouldn’t have thought to check every card to see if they’re all in-stock, but I was alerted by the TCG Player price being higher. That’s a big red flag to me. Sometimes it’s legit, but with Card Kingdom being an established Seattle store that charges more but has a super generous buylist and which, to my mind, is the flagship EDH price site, CK can usually get away with charging more than a marketplace like TCG Player. When CK is cheaper, I take 2 seconds and check. Card Kingdom sells a lot of EDH cards, if they’re sold out of all conditions, TCG Player could be the next domino to fall. We’re about to see some movement. It won’t go to $10, but it could go to $5.

That does it for me this week. Next week we may be out of commanders to talk about and with there being a lull between now and Kaldheim, I might write a treatise on why I trust Card Kingdom so much. Until then, stay safe and don’t build anything I wouldn’t build. Until next time!