It’s a new year! New year, new me! Ish! Probably not that different! I don’t feel that different! And I took a few weeks off and got my head straight and finally offloaded some of my stress and now it’s back because we have Phyrexia: All Will Be One spoilers! It’s not a hard job but some days I feel like Lucille Ball watching those chocolates come down that conveyer belt and other days I feel like Lucille Ball watching those chocolates come down that conveyer belt but one of those chocolates is a card I want for a deck and I’m like “Oooo, a piece of candy” and that makes it all worth it! Let’s get up to some old tricks for a new year and look at the non-zero number of new decks we have to poke around at.
There isn’t a ton here, but these are all fairly interesting commanders. I don’t expect to see Elesh Norn remain the top commander in the set for lots and lots of reasons that you can skip reading if you know about but in case you’re not super familiar with EDH, Elesh Norn is White and that’s a bad choice. That said, I’m absolutely building a Seance deck with Elesh Norn and this sentence inspired this tweet.
Needless to say, I’m in a fantastic mood right now.
I’m building Norn as a Seance deck because I’m a nut, but how are other people building the deck? What cards should you buy? (The answer is Seance). I’m going to tell you because that’s sort of this column’s entire deal.
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2022 was a big year for me, both professionally and personally and looking back over everything that happened and that we put up with, it’s amazing we survived this year intact. It was full sensory overload for us 24/7 and it feels like everything I used to like is coming at me too fast, from superhero movies to Magic releases to family and personal milestones. We’re going to wrap up the year by reflecting on how we got better at picking out cards that were going to pop based on clues from EDHREC.
The first thing I acknowledged was something that I had hinted at privately but felt like I didn’t want to exacerbate by drawing too much attention to it was what is dubbed the “Command Zone Effect.” I wrote about the impact of that show on the price of a card like Fervent Charge and how it’s worth subscribing to their Patreon to see the episodes early. Cards that do something crazy, even in a contrived scenario, are bound to pop in the short term and being ahead of the curve.
It is always noteworthy whenever I show tips or tricks about using EDHREC, it might be worth refreshing your memory about it from time to time. I sometimes forget things I’ve learned about the site, and I am looking at ways to make more of our data presentable. 2023 will be a great year for analytics, even the ad hoc, self-taught analytics that you could do yourselves.
This is the first time this year I mentioned Setessan Champion, but I mentioned it a lot after. That card is still way too cheap and if you take nothing else away from this year, get that card. Sell it whenever. If it gets reprinted, buy a bunch of copies. It’s very, very good and it has a extended-art version that is less impacted by a reprint. It’s crazy good, even now.
Baldur’s Gate was one of the biggest sets for EDH of the year and it’s going to be the gift that keeps on giving for a while. I highlighted the cards that mattered then in this article, but I really think it would behoove you to take a look at the set’s page yourself. We got a TON of cards, a TON of cycles, a new kind of companion, Gates support and a ton of Legendary creatures. The set is so dense and we’ve only scratched the surface.
I am not sure how to categorize “Buy The Bottom” but I think it’s the best thing I wrote this year, or at least the article I’m proudest of. Give it a read if it’s been awhile.
This was the first year I really made a habit of going back and checking high-impact sets a few months later to se where the prices ended up when the dust settled, and doing the same for decks was a revelation. This was the first but not last time I made a point to write about my process.
It pays to go back through the EDHREC Top 100 cards, because any cards that got added to that list in the last year are very pertinent. Some of them haven’t quite moved in price despite being very high on the list, so if you want 5 examples of cards to watch, here you go.
In this 2-part miniseries dubbed Brother Vs Brother and Brother Vs Brother 2: the ReBrothering we widened our scope a bit to look at the cards that in general will go up as a result of lots of new artifact decks being built. It doesn’t matter what the individual decks do if you know what the next 6 months of releases will do, so stock up now.
2022 was a year full of slight improvements to my methods and I’m glad I took the time to document them. Signs of growth in my skills at picking specs are encouraging and despite doing this over a decade, I’m pot committed to this life and ready to charge into 2023 with all 3 guns blazing. Until next year!
Today I am going to show you the most played EDH cards of 2022. There are some who insist on calling the format “Commander” and I get basically nothing out of being a curmudgeon and insisting on continuing to call it “EDH” except not having to change, which at my age is all the selling point something needs. It was a bad year for people who fear change as collector boosters made foil rares feel worthless, product getting dumped on Amazon made sealed product feel worthless and having to cover 70 new Legendary creatures every 3 weeks made me feel worthless. I know it’s not your problem, but I want to be up-front about my mental health and make it clear that I am not joking that the release schedule had a deleterious effect on mine. Am I a weird outlier because I work 4 jobs in the Magic community and they all want me to write about every set (and every Discord community wants me to hang there, something I can’t physically do)? Or am I canary in a coal mine, signaling that even highly enfranchised and entrenched people like a guy with 2 kids who have Planeswalker names are feeling burnt out?
What will 2023 bring? They’re hyping the next set as their Avengers: Endgame moment where all of the planar portals jump out and we’re supposed to believe Huatli and Lukka are going to turn the tide. If the set is good, lots of people could start playing Magic. If the set is bad, it will sell a lot, people will complain and 3 weeks later they’ll shell out for the next product. There aren’t any sideways ships in the Suez right now, so I am hoping there will be fewer shipping issues which will cause a bunch of products to stack up at the end of the year like this time. If sets are more spread out, then the format will have “time to work” on the cards that it didn’t get this year. It feels like there are so many EDH decks now that no one card goes up because not enough people build the physical decks they register online because products come out too fast.
I want to talk about every set that came out in 2022, what the most played card was and whether EDH having so many products could even impact the price of those cards. Let’s get started.
Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
No surprises here – Boseiju is number 1 with a bullet but the entire cycle is in the top 20. It’s sad to see highly-played utility rares like Lion Sash and Mirror Box end up bulk rares. The Hidetsugu hunt put so many busted remnants of collector boosters that there is basically no chance. No rare played in fewer than 40k decks is worth more than $2 and that’s pretty scary, frankly. This is why I like finding Scourge Rares that are going to go up because they print a new Cephalid Commander, new sets scare me.
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We talk in this series a lot about what is new and impacting things, as we should, but sorting by set can obscure the picture a bit and sometimes it pays to zoom out a bit and get a view of the format as it’s shaping up by the week or month or last 2 years. EDHREC has modes for all of those and some of the results may surprise you the way they did me. We have paid a lot of attention to the commanders that are the most popular within their respective sets, but once a month when they’re previewing a new set and therefore we don’t have any new cards in hand to write about, we can take a break from the constant assault of new products and take a look at the ones that came out a month ago and are already forgotten about.
Or are they? As much as new product is coming out way too fast and it’s hard to keep up, we can tell with data whether people are blowing by the new stuff or going back for it. Not only that, when we expand out to look at all decks rather than by set, we see which sets are making an impact. I think there are a few clear winners.
This is this month, where we see Jodah, Urza from the precons and Mishra all newly in the mix, as well as Ghyrson Starn from the 40K decks. When you look at weekly, you’ll see some jump up you may not have expected.
Urza and Mishra continue to be huge players, and Kibo, a deck we went into in depth because I had a good feeling it would make an impaft, is 14th this week, beating out Propser and Kenrith which are always Top 20 decks. Surprised? I am a bit about Urza and Mishra because I didn’t really expect them to be popular for more than a week or two but so far they’re hanging on on in there. The shine is off of the 40k commanders a bit, probably because everyone stopped theorycrafting and went to their LGS who was charging $100 for the Black precon and they came home and built Kibo like I did. Still, Urza, Jodah and Mishra are nuclear hot and they all get a look today.
Before I get too deep, I noticed a LOT of the cards in the Urza deck are out of the “Buckle Up” Kamigawa precon with Shorikai and I want to point out a few images.
I expected Kappa Cannoneers to be $10 on its own by now, and if it ever takes off in Eternal formats (read “if those formats come back”) despite being reprintable, there will be a period in time where you’ll benefit from being stocked with these guys. The deck has a LOT of $5 cards in it – I realize that a lot of that “$60” is bulk rares being assessed at a buck, but there are quite a few $5 cards despite it being a precon they sell bricks of on Amazon and with those cards including Parhelion II and Swift Reconfiguration, you have a lot of chances to make money buying at $30 (there are more for this price on eBay, I don’t know why I assume you’re reading this and thinking I’m an idiot but I should also point that stuff out in case you’re new).
This JUST got a reprint, which it’s not taking well as it heads to $5 and maybe below. I love this below $5 given its past capability of hitting $20 and flirting with $23 on CK. Will it get that high again? Doubtful, but while we’re getting an influx of supply, we were getting an influx of players, too, at least we were before Chris Cox took over Hasbro. We’ll see if this recovers, but it’s going to be very useful in a year of Artifact sets.
I just like this card at $5 even given the overall shape of the graph. This was on its way to $10 before we had a ton of Artifact sets right in a row.
I feel like people skipped over this card because there are too many new cards, but this is one of the strongest EDH cards I’ve ever seen and I can’t figure out why I’m the only one who thinks so. It’s slow and clunky but it’s also, at worst, a 4 colorless mana graveyard wipe that comes with a really big body. This is exactly what I want to be doing in EDH, and if people want under $5 for it, I’ll oblige them. I am willing to concede I could be wrong here, but I know these cards take some time – it took 18 months of sweating for my Aetherflux Reservoir spec to pay off and when it did, I got to feel like I understand EDH for the first time in 18 months. I would like to think I understand EDH better now than I did then.
I think there is only one question we need answer here. Can an erstwhile $20 card on its third printing, the second of which it shrugged off effortlessly (Can you even tell where on the graph it got reprinted?) make you money if you buy in absurdly cheap?
This seems like a nice price…
The new frame looks great, too. I realize Brother’s War is a smorgasbord of reprints and not all of them are going to rebound, but, come on. If this doesn’t rebound in a year or two then I don’t know anything about anything.
Last but not least, it’s a card whose text box I haven’t been able to make myself read it its entirety. You Legend cascade? This is a lot of fun to a lot of people and they’re building it, STILL, so let’s sell them some singles.
This has to be the worst card people like. Still, it’s a big, dumb Timmy card and those are a buy under $5 if you can get it for that, still. I like this as a pick-up very much though I’d never put this in a sleeve ever. It’s like the opposite of Nautiloid Ship – one card I think is too good to be this cheap and one that’s too bad to be this expensive. For reference, they’re both like $5.
That does it for me. I think we’re going to see Artifact stuff as a whole go up, so if you can buy some preconstructed decks with a lot of those cards, you’re basically investing in an index fund and that’s way safer than playing the market, especially when the market seems unable to stave off Hasbro wringing us all out until we stop excreting money. Will the game collapse under its own weight or is having 9 different versions of a pushed Elesh Norn that is going to be absolutely MISERABLE to play against in Commander good, actually? Find out when I do. Until next time!
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
