I would apologize for the clickbait title but it clearly worked, didn’t it? You clicked after all and now you’re reading the article. Besides, is there any clickbait title that can rival the irresistability of the phrase “Written by Jason Alt”? I maintain that, no, there is not. The reason for the title and for the departure from my typical format is that I was pitched this idea from management and I liked it enough to write it. I don’t know if we’re going to uncover any hidden gems here, but I do feel like there is value in looking at an albeit subjective list of must-have EDH cards that are getting up there in price (or which are already there, in a few cases).

To determine what I feel are considered “must-have” cards, I’m using a combination of EDHREC analytics and personal experience. I’m trying to make this as objective as possible but there maybe choices you don’t agree with or which you feel have been omitted in error. Feel free to make the case for your picks in the comments.

Some interesting things happened when I tried two different approaches and tried to reconcile them. The first thing I did was search for all of the most expensive cards that see EDH play at all and look at the number of decks they were played in (per EDHREC). EDHREC isn’t a perfect model for adoption but I use it because it’s as good a model as we have, it’s comprehensive and it’s a collection of lists from people who are registering both decks they have and decks they’d like to have. It seems like there would be danger in using a model like that because anyone can just register a $4,000 deck they’ll never afford and never build on TappedOut like a lunatic and if enough people do that, it will throw off the model. However, it’s not like those cards are expensive because a lot of people are pretending they’re in decks they’re not in – the cards are expensive because they’re old, rare and/or people are buying them and playing with them. You might expect the “money is no object!” fake deck crowd to juice the stats on expensive Legends, Arabian Nights and Antiquities cards but the opposite is happening. Players who can’t afford to drop $150 on a Forcefield don’t even seem to be aware it exists, or at least they aren’t making a decklist that EDHREC scrapes that claims they run Forcefield – its $150 price tag might make it a good candidate for this article but it’s in fewer than 250 decks.

Going the other way and looking at cards that were in a ton of decks yielded equally disappointing but less surprising results. Obviously we’re not paying Mana Drain money for Sol Ring because it’s been printed more times than basic Mountain at this point. The trick is finding cards that tick both boxes – they’re expensive but they also get played in a decent number of decks.

First, a few notable cards excluded from the list.

At a whopping 17,563 inclusions, this was included in a ton of decks. However, it was excluded because while it was the most expensive card in more than 10,000 decks, it pales in comparison price-wise to the other cards in the list. It’s surely a must-play card but it’s hardly the most expensive and thus didn’t make the cut.

This is a card with a lot of potential and with no reprint last year when it would have done a lot of good, the card surged, gaining 50% of its value in a year. This isn’t in enough decks to crack the list, but it’s in quite a few and it’s going to be expensive enough to be a contender, soon. I really liked this as a pickup around $20 when it wasn’t reprinted in Commander 2015 but I think there is still money to be made here, given their apparent reluctance to give this a reprint. This didn’t make the list but bore mentioning.

Included in about 20,000 decks, this is the definition of “must-play” but with so many cards worth much more in the $100+ range, I had to cut cards worth less than $40. If I balanced the list to favor inclusion rather than price, this likely would have made the cut.

Without further equivocation, here is the list.

#10 – Mana Drain

At 2,873 inclusions, this is the lowest-played card on the list and basically established the cut-off for “must-play” cards. If you look at inclusion, you have cards like Sol Ring in 88,000 decks and see a big drop-off right after with cards like Demonic Tutor, Counterspell, Brainstorm, Rhystic Study, Sylvan Library, Swords to Plowshares and Solemn Simulacrum all hovering between 40,000 and 10,000 inclusions. After that there is an even bigger drop-off and if you insist the cards in this list be worth at least $20, you have to include some cards that aren’t in quite as many decks. I think the amount Mana Drain gets played is adequate for our purposes and the price justifies its inclusion, here.

#9 Wheel of Fortune

at 4,581 inclusions, and likely growing the more people build Nekusar and Yidris decks, this is an old card with a lot of printings but a lot of demand that has soaked up all of the copies under $50 in most places. Wheel effects are strong and this is the alpha wheel, the one that got us all started.  This is a Reserved List card with a lot of applications and it’s only going to get less and less affordable as more people play EDH and build decks.

#8 Survival of the Fittest

At 3,635 inclusions, this card is no slouch and has a lot of utility in a lot of decks. Legacy gave this price a lot of help and its Reserved List status helped keep the price high as well as its applicability in EDH. A Legacy unbanning would do ridiculous things to this price, but it’s pretty good right where it is, frankly. This card is going to hold its value quite well and is a mainstay in toolbox decks.

#7 Grim Monolith

In 3,719 decks and counting, this is an allstar in decks that are greedy and want artifact mana early and don’t care about the consequences later. This is a mana rock that doesn’t deal you any damage (not that we care that much about a point or two of pain in a 40 life format, making Mana Vault much better) and while older formats give the price a boost, EDH still loves to use this card and it shows.

#6 Cavern of Souls

7,984 people jam this tribal favorite in EDH and that has helped the price ascend. If we’re very lucky, we’ll see a Modern Masters 2017 reprinting of this card to get a few more copies into the sweaty mitts of a few more tribal players (Legacy players can fend for themselves). This card might even get jammed more if it were more affordable. I still remember being laughed at for buying these at retail when Avacyn Restored came out because I thought Legacy and EDH could push them to $50. In general, if you bet on tribal cards, you get the last laugh often.

#5 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

At 4,967 copies, this exceeded my expectations for how much play it would see in EDH. People love the idea of having a card like this in play and straight decking someone out of the game or just smoothing out every draw with the option of bouncing a troublesome creature. Even the Brainstorm function is useful, putting lots of counters on Lorescale Coatl or making Thought Reflection really good. Jace is this expensive with a Modern banning, so imagine what an unbanning could do to his price. The result is likely that it prices Jace out of a lot of EDH decks, which would be too bad.

#4 – Force of Will

There sure are a lot of blue cards on this list. 4,696 players agree with the assessment that blue is one of the best or the best color in EDH by jamming this clunky, 5 mana spell that is card disadvantage. At least the art is cool, I guess. In all seriousness, some decks can’t sit back and watch their opponent play a turn 3 Kozilek and they have to have something to say about it because that’s what blue players do. This card is one of the most iconic Magic cards ever and it’s not going to go away. Be prepared to be blown out by this card that, despite its high price, is still an EDH windmill auto-include for a lot of people.

#3 Mana Crypt

I can’t say I consider this card 100% necessary, but 8,896 deck builders disagree, opting to jam this in their list. And why not? This is better than Sol Ring on turn 1 and competitive players are all about good turn 1 plays and they’re also fine spending the money to win. You can’t say they aren’t real EDH players and if they’re voting with their wallets to play with this card, we should pay attention. Eternal Masters and Masterpieces  got more copies in more players’ hands and that is a good thing. If we see this printed some more, I think the price can withstand the extra supply because the demand is quite high. There’s a reason this was so close to the top spot.

#2 Doubling Season

This used to be a bulk rare, as hard as that is to believe. EDH is the bulk rare format and the only problem with that is that players don’t tend to let things stay a bulk rare if they really want them. This is perhaps the card that best encapsulates what EDH is all about. It’s expensive, powerful, a good build-around and it was a stupid green bulk rare before this format came along. Casual players took notice before EDH was even official and the price began to creep up. This shook off a Modern Masters reprinting and really got nutty when Atraxa came along and captured the imagination of every EDH player on earth, though I’d argue if you build Atraxa you probably didn’t have much of one to begin with. This is good in nearly every deck that runs green because it’s bound to help you do something you’re doing twice as well. This card IS EDH as far as I’m concerned.

#1 Gaea’s Cradle

I was hesitant to rank the cards but even when I didn’t want to, I knew I wanted this card to be #1. This is pure EDH – rewarding you for filling up the board. While this is useful in Legacy to the extent that its largest price increase was predicated on the Legend rule change (and justified cum eo by its Reserved List status) this is still an EDH staple and gets jammed in lots of decks that go wide. It creates a feedback loop with cards that let you pay mana to put out creature tokens and casual players and competitive players alike have sworn by this card for over a decade.

I’m looking forward to all the comments on reddit saying “This lst iz trash he didnt even enclude ne white cardz this site sucks anywayz” and some more constructive comments in the comments section below. I really wrestled with these rankings and even with the 10 cards I included. How do you really objectively decide something like that? Do you weight it in favor or how expensive they are or how much they’re played? Is it fair to leave off cards in 10 times as many decks as some on this list just because they’re under $20? It’s hard to know. I’m happy with how this turned out and I got a few surprises looking through all of the data. I hope you found this valuable and if not, I’ll be back to my old tricks next week. We might even have some Modern Masters spoilers to look at. Until next time!

 

Tap abilities are pretty common on cards. A gatherer search for cards with tap abilities annoys the actual bejesus out of gatherer and it sends you a bunch of viruses instead of your search results because go $^%& yourself trying to search for every card with a tap ability, you nerd. There are 16,505 unique Magic cards and probably a third of them are permanents with tap abilities. That seems high. Even if it’s a fifth, that’s still 3,300 cards with tap abilities and searching through all of them would be super annoying. Why are we even bothering to think about doing that, anyway?

Well, Wizards went and printed a card that makes you take a second look at cards that tap because it untaps them. It untaps them well, and it untaps them often. What’s that? Do I mean Prophet of Kruphix? No, suckers. I mean a card that untaps all of your non-land cards way more often. Try every time you play a spell.  You all know the card I mean. A few weeks I said I didn’t think it was bannable but now I’m not so sure. Have you played with this card? You know the one I mean.

This sucker.

I didn’t think Standard would be as keen on this card as they were Panharmonicon and I think I may have underestimated how much Standard seems to love jamming seemingly EDH cards. You may have to wait longer than we’d anticipated for these to get cheaper (they almost assuredly will and they will almost assuredly go back up, also) but that’s OK because speculating on the price of Paradox Engine isn’t really what we do here. I’m way more interested in what it’s going to do to the price of other cards and I think I have a few excellent candidates.

While Prophet of Kruphix annoyed people by letting us take every turn by virtue of untapping our mana and letting us play spells as though they had flash, Engine doesn’t aim to stick around, necessarily. Prophet was a card you played, fought over and hoped to stick so you could get a small advantage on their turns. Engine plays a lot differently. You almost never play it until you’re ready to go off and when you do, you win on the spot, usually. If you don’t, you aim to cripple their resources so badly that they never recover. There are a lot of ways to win with Paradox Engine, and they’re all going to get a boost if Engine isn’t banned.

I don’t see this as super reprintable for whatever reason. I feel like we discussed this before Commander 2016 and it didn’t get reprinted in C16 so we have AT LEAST another year on this. I am bullish on this going without reprint for quite a while and if it does, it’s going to continue going up a few bucks a year, possibly at an accelerating rate. This card wins the game with infinite mana, something that we can easily achieve with Kydele. Did we discuss this when Kydele was spoiled? Well, I still like it at its current price. Let’s move on to some less obvious cards in the same vein, possibly ones that don’t require infinite mana.

Do you remember why this hit $30? I consider myself a pretty decent MTG Finance historian but for the life of me I can’t remember what happened here. That goofy spike makes it pretty tough to see what’s up lately.

That is clearer, but it’s also a little disappointing. Whatever made the card spike, it’s clearly done happening. The card is going lower and lower as dealers left holding the bag try to sell out. The good news is that Paradox Engine lets you steal everyone at the table’s lands which is hilarious. Druid decks aren’t that bad considering a lot of good elves are both elves and druids, meaning you can basically be an elf deck that randomly takes all of their lands. You’re mana ramping a ton with all of your elf druid mana dorks and you can generate a lot of mana, meaning you will be able to play spell after spell. With all of their lands under your control, you can either sac them or use them for mana – it’s up to you. The important thing is that supply of this card is beginning to wiggle and after the wiggle comes the waggle and after that comes the “When did this become $7?” which is where this could easily go.

Remember, this is a second spike on a card that people convinced themselves they could buy at $15 and still profit. When a card spikes this profoundly, lots of people notice and lots of people noticing means lots of people root the loose copies out of their hiding places. They cruise by a ton of LGSs and find them in binders and boxes and flip them to a buylist for $8 or whatever which is fine since they paid $2 each. Dealers who paid $8 each gradually lower the price when they can’t even out them at retail for a profit. If this card does get renewed interest off of Paradox Engine toomfoolery, a second spike will be harder and faster and you’ll have less time to react. I recommend being proactive, here. I think this could end up being a real mover based on Engine decks and elves being nutty in general. There is another factor to the rise of mono green, if you ask me.

This is giving a lot of decks that were a little inconsistent a second look because this smooths a lot of draws out and gets you a lot of extra cards. If you’re dumping your hand and untapping all of your mana dorks, this keeps the party going. This pairs very nicely with Paradox Engine and I think this is one of the best ways to spend $1 right now. I want roughly 1,000 of these so I can throw them at buylists when this is suddenly $6 in a year or two because of how stupid it is. I don’t know how likely a reprint is, so this seems like a great card to trade for. I’m not inclined to pay cash, yet, but I feel like if you can out a Standard card  that’s like $4 and bound to go down for a set of these, these can retain value better and if they really go up quickly, you quadruple your gains because you have four times the exposure to upside.  I’m sure I recommend this course of action a lot. There’s a reason for it. It makes money. Bestiary is a good card in its own right, but with green having the most mana dorks, I feel like it also has the best Paradox Engine synergy. Other colors surely do, also, but this has the best if you ask me. It’s good since other colors get buyback spells and all green has is Wurmcalling.

Speaking of which, here’s another potential second spike.  Buyback spells are very good with Engine and this is probably the best of them. It’s something non-green. If I am recommending other colors, blue has a $12 DCI foil Capsize and a $6 foil Timeshifted Whispers of the Muse to pair with Paradox Engine. White has… Evangelize? Also, like no mana dorks, so good luck going off with Evangelize and, like, Marble Diamond. I built a Kydele and Thraisos deck with Paradox Engine and Capsize is the dirtiest way to go off, ever. If they can’t stop you, you bounce them back to the stone age. Whispers lets you draw your whole deck and win with Laboratory Maniac. It’s kind of boring in how consistent it is.

With Paradox Engine, it basically doesn’t matter what you put on this, you can go off with 2 colorless from non-land sources and Engine. Lightning Bolt, Brainstorm; even Healing Salve is a winner when you combo like that. I prefer to kill them, but even if you’re just playing a spell for the untap trigger you can go off with Aetherflux Reservoir. Scepter is a must-have in Engine decks. I even run Dramatic Reversal (a steal at $1 for foils considering how much competitive EDH players love this combo) in case I need to go off without Paradox Engine.

Scepter was in the Izzet v. Golgari decks that were popped aggressively for a minute to get out the sweet, sweet Golgari Grave-Troll. With its banning, the EV of the decks either drops a lot or the value gets shifted to other cards. There is a Scetper, a Life from the Loam, a few signets, a Brainstorm, a Putrefy – even a Sadistic Hypnotist which as enjoyed a resurgence after people realized it was nuts with Nath. With Grave-Troll’s banning, Scepter could see a bit of a price raise as there is less impetus to pop the decks and free up loose copies and with Modern shenanigans conspiring with The Gitrog Monster to make Life From the Loam expensive again, Scepter could see some upshot despite its many printings. I like Scepter paired with Engine a lot.

OK, so two things here. First of all, wow, a common (meaning in multiple decks) from Commander 2015 got up to $3. Secondly, wow, this is so reprintable it makes my teeth itch. This just seems like a teetering house of cards of a price, but it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. I don’t think Commander Anthology is going to free up that many copies of anything (who’s paying that much money to bust it for singles and sell them off?) so this probably has a while to grow. This isn’t THAT good with Engine since it only taps for 1 mana, but it does untap every iteration (unlike lands) and it lets you draw very aggressively and keep a fat mitt full of goods. I like this card a lot but even I didn’t anticipate this doubling in a year. Good for it. Dealers finally seem on-board with the price – it spiked to $3 before and came back down and the buy price didn’t even move. Well, it’s moving now. This card is the real deal. I hate how badly a reprinting would blow it out and I’m loathe to pay $3 for something that will get super cheap if it’s in Commander 2017, but this is a card, that’s for sure.

This is what a Commander 2014 followed by a Commander 2016 printing looks like, graphically. I anticipate a similar shape of a Commander 2015 and subsequent Commander 2017 printing on Vessel.

Look at this tank. This keeps shrugging reprints off. I love this card and it taps for SO MUCH mana. It’s just as good as Gilded Lotus in my limited experience going off with Paradox Engine in a 2-color deck (which you wouldn’t think, but it’s true. You need very little colored mana to keep going and ultimately win) and with it being cheaper to buy and cheaper to play, I think this could have some real upside. I wish Gilded Lotus would get a reprint because I don’t like buying it at its current price. A reprinting would knock it down to a buyable level and since we all know the price would recover, make us all a lot of money. Or would it? Dynamo isn’t very impressed with reprints, is it? It dipped about $2, though, and if you bought at the cheaper price, you had some room to make money in the recovery (which isn’t over, and with Breya running around, isn’t all that likely to end soon).

This is what happens when people basically don’t really open boosters. I anticipated the price of this card would go down as more packs were opened, but basically day 1 was peak supply. People drafted this for like 2 weeks and then boxes began to rot. People bought some around $70ish which is pretty good considering the high EV and the high price of some foils – a foil Leovold pays for like half a case, for example. Foil Selvala pays for a whole $70 box. There are a lot of $20 boxes of Conspiracy, 2, I am sure, but I could see a lot of $100+ as well considering the Legacy reprints mixed with Commander goodies. What makes the price of this card go down? How likely is a reprint? Where would it happen? I think this is powerful, expensive and safe. My kind of card.

This card only gets better in a world with Paradox Engine. I realize I have a lot of mono-green in this article but that’s because green is very good at having stuff to untap with Paradox Engine.

I hope I didn’t talk about too many cards I’ve talked about before. Paradox Engine has so many implications that even cards I consider a bad buy-in at their current price (Bloom Tender, anyone?) will likely experience some upside.

Is Engine bannable? I am changing my answer from “no” to “maybe” but I still think the card can be dealt with. You have to be very careful not to play it until you go off because it will get killed on sight otherwise, meaning it won’t help make every turn good like Prophet of Kruphix did. It’s a combo piece – a powerful one, but still a combo piece. We’ll see what the committee thinks. Until then, brew with this, buy double orders on anything you want to use with it so your cards are free if they go up and watch EDHREC to see what’s popping up. If you can’t win fairly, remember to play elves and steal all of their lands. Until next week!

There were no new rat cards in Aether Revolt or Commander 2016 and yet I feel like a few decks are going to get a look because of something that wasn’t printed. It’s itself a bulk rare and while maybe the foils have upside, I’m not excited about either the foil or non-foil or the card itself. However, this series was predicated on, and subsequently got away from when I felt like it, the idea that a new card, whether or not the card itself has financial upside, can re-invigorate older archetypes and get people talking about those archetypes and make some people some money when the cards sell more briskly. Prices of older cards balance on a knife’s edge and it sometimes takes a very small nudge to send the price teetering. It also takes a pretty long time for the prices to go back to normal, if they ever do.

Sometimes the push is very, very slight.

“Wait, couldn’t we beat Legacy Tron decks with this?”

“Anyone else sick of losing to Storm?”

I remember people flipping out in the QS forums over both of these cards and trampling each other to buy copies. It’s sometimes hard to tell what’s going to be a Sylex (also very, very good in Vintage) and what’s going to be a Druid. These pushes were from tournament tech that caused copies to disappear from the floor of a GP and sent people scrambling for copies around the event hall that weren’t there. We’ve seen it dozens of times and it’s always hilarious. Sometimes you had to be there – Aegis of Honor’s price graph has erased all traces of its “$20 on the floor of an SCG Legacy open in Columbus” from 4 years ago. Sometimes you have copies or get them right away while everyone else is flat-footed, sometimes you don’t. Little nudges are all it takes sometimes, and I feel like a nudge happened and it’s going to register pretty soon.

Low supply can have the same effect as high demand, and that’s why I pointed to cards that are very old like Sylex and Druid. I think a new card is going to make people more interested in a card with low supply and the rest of the cards in the deck, as well. Could we see one little rock thrown in a pond lead to big ripples? I think so. It’s funny that I mention ripples, by the way.

So this is a sub $7 card some places and that’s non-correct. Casual ripple players buy these four at a time, but obviously no one has in a while. The real upside can come from people building a new deck with Relentless Rats or Shadowborn Apostle in EDH. Is there some reason that would happen now of all times? I think so.

This plucky $1 foil is a pretty damn good card in a deck with a ton of Rats or Apostles in it. You can grab a bunch of copies of the card of choice and still have some left in your deck. It may not be a huge impetus behind a ton of new demand for rat and apostle cards in and of itself, but it’s one more reminder those decks exist, one more chance for some EDH deck brewer to write an article about those decks and a new group of people remembering those cards exist. Secret Salvage is not in low supply and probably never will be, even the foils, but that’s not our focus and shouldn’t be. I think Thrumming Stone is the best target in the decks, both of which have many other juicy targets with low supply.

Did you know this is a $12 foil? It’s nearly sold out which means we’re very near a tipping point, but this is, again, a $12 foil. That doesn’t seem correct to me and once this is gone at this price, it likely gets put back in stock at $20 and everyone looks at it and says “Yeah, duh, EDH” or whatever they say when they wish they’d thought of it. There is very low supply on Coldsnap in general because the boxes were miserable back in the day and now they’re prohibitively expensive. There was basically never a good time to buy boxes of Coldsnap unless you could see the future. That being the case, small runs on these cards aren’t mitigated by new supply and have long-reaching effects. We saw Arcum Daggson go nuts earlier and that price has stuck. Ripple rats decks aren’t Arcum decks (Arcum being a Commander that is nuts now that we have Paradox Engine. He’s stupid now. For those of you who read my Scrap Trawler piece and wondered where Trawler was needed, this is a good place to start looking) but they are still popular and with the combined effect of rats and apostles on the cards they share, we could see a similar amount of upside. $12 for a foil is wrong if anyone additional builds a new deck.

Speaking of small multipliers, this is a $3.50ish foil. The fact that a foil common is $4 when a non-foil common is $2 points to the fact that casual players are inclined to build around this card and therefore buy the cheapest version. Still, EDH players do foil decks sometimes and if it’s only twice as much for foils and they’ll get bought 20 or so at a time, only one new deck is going to permanently impact the price.

There’s perhaps no better visualization of what’s going on than the price graph of Shadowborn Demon’s foil price over the last couple of years. It’s like you can watch people not care about the deck in real time. I don’t think it’s necessarily people freeing up copies by selling the deck because the deck was cheap to make and costs nothing to keep together, and if you’re going to sell a card, why buylist it for $2 when you could just keep the deck built? Do you want to free up 100 sleeves that badly? I think this is mostly from hype around the deck when it was first built that while it materialized, didn’t quite sustain the amount of copies it would need to sell.

Do I want to buy $3 demons with the expectation that they will hit $20 again? Not really, but the supply is mostly accounted for since it spiked early which means renewed interest will make the price increase more sharply, if it does. I think the cards basically can’t get any cheaper at this point, just on principle. Still, let’s look at the cards shared between the two potential ripple decks besides Thrumming Stone and Secret Salvage to see if there is anything that has two chances to go up.

It’s not entirely certain if there will be a Commander 2017 given the announcement of Commander Anthology, but given the release of Commander 2016 in a year when they released Planechase Anthology earlier in the year, I wouldn’t sweat it. Still, the odds of getting White-Black reprints until 2018 at the earliest seem low. Iroas hinted they are willing to do it, but the exclusion of Kruphix or other Gods that would have vastly improved the decks they were in signals that a reprint of a God is theoretically possible. Still, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Clearly capable of selling for more than it is now and also the best general in Apostle decks (Though maybe not rat decks) I am breaking my promise to talk about cards in both kinds of decks to point out that this seems to be climbing a bit and the spread is narrowing. This is probably not worth speculating on, but I would get them if you want to play with them because the cheapest days are behind it.

This is hard, guys. This is always going to go up even if it’s reprinted, but other than obvious tribal stuff, what do Ripple Rats and Ripplepostles have in common? One’s rats and the other one is demons. They have EDH staples in common. Black Market. Dictate of Erebos. One’s better with Shirei, the other with Marrow-Gnawer.

This is also poised to go back up. If you take nothing else away from this week’s article, let’s remember to go back and look at stuff we think we know the price of. That’s sort of what Secret Salvage did. Even if we don’t find anything juicy, we found a bunch of prices we haven’t checked in a minute. Stuff is creepin’ so creep on the creepers and peep their creepin’ for the price of the creeps is too steep.

Hey there, creeper. This is probably the most expensive card in the deck if you’re trying to build either one. I think Secret Salvage is a good way to fill your hand so you can pitch the cards to something and Bidding or Living End them back or win with Mortal Combat or something. This is, again, a pretty general tribal card that could go up based on renewed ripple rat rapture but will also creep on its own.

You would think all of this would discourage me, but it actually doesn’t. While the Shadowborn deck seems like a bit of a bust in terms of targets and there is way less non-staple overlap than we had wanted, I still think the rats builds are solid moving forward and Thrumming Stone is a card I want to be about. It’s old, unlikely to be reprinted, has the same supply as cards like Arcum Daggson which have been good movers lately (albeit with more of an impetus, I know that, I’m just saying Arcum establishes what renewed interest in a Coldsnap rare does) and I think it’s too cheap right now. Rats has a chance to shove it over a tipping point as does Shadowborn stuff. With every new demon printed, people will get a reminder. With every new rat, same. Thrumming Stone will likely continue to creep up and 60 card, 4-of casual could really get the ball rolling for us faster than we expect.

Next week I’m going to delve into the lists from Commander Anthology and talk about which cards I expect to recover, which I don’t and whether the Anthology is even going to impact prices all that much. Until next time!

Some cards went up because of Standard. One of them was a card I said I didn’t like. Did EDH make it go up? No. Could Standard have not made it go up? Yep. Was it easy to see coming if you had a grasp of the Standard metagame a few weeks before the pros solidified it? Yep. The point is, I feel like betting on Standard to make a card like Walking Ballista go up over the weekend seems risky. The longer I do this, the longer I like safer bets. Speculating is fun and sexy. I used to like making calls like Craterhoof Behemoth when it was a few bucks or Sphinx’s Revleation at $4, but even though those paid off, they were still risky. Risky bets are more fun when they pay off, but ever since I got into EDH finance, I’ve seen so many safe bets pay off that it’s hard to go back. But sometimes safe bets take a while to pay off. Today I want to talk about cards that didn’t spike in an afternoon but which creeped (I know that’s not a word) up without us noticing and what we can learn about cards currently at their floor.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll talk about cards that were printed in Commander 2013, 2014 and 2015, but we can certainly revisit this topic in the future. There are plenty of cards to talk about. Hopefully by looking at cards that were either new or reprinted in these sets, we can identify analogous cards just printed or reprinted in Commander 2016. Let’s take a look at what’s getting there.

In general, it’s hard to be surprised when a good wrath that draws a ton of cards goes up in price, but these were DIRT for a minute, and they got dirt cheap again about a year after they were printed. MTGPRICE graphs don’t go back far enough to get a good picture of what happened with Commander 2013 cards, but this one is worth looking at. This is a great card for EDH and it has managed to shrug off the reprinting, but it’s climbing so slowly no one has noticed that it tripled in price in an 18 month period. I got a ton of these for like nothing from people who cracked Mind Seize for Strix and True-Name Nemesis and threw the rest away. Sol Ring and Nekusar were obvious cards to glean from that pile, but I identified this card as a potential grower and forgot about it until I checked the price recently. Yowza. I am glad I have a lot of copies in a lot of decks and a lot more in a box.

The Commander 2016 analog for Decree of Pain is probably Blasphemous Act. I don’t know if it will recover as strongly from the Commander 2016 printing as it did from the Commander 2014 one since they’re basically signalling a willingness to print the card every few years, but I still think if you buy at the floor, there’s money to be made later on. I’m not as bullish about this as I am about some cards that made it a few years without a reprint, but this is the closest to Decree I could find. Not all of the analogs will bear fruit, but I am still mentioning them. I think this is a bad buy but if you trade for these, they’ll regain a lot of trade value, and if they cap out at $4, you still traded for them at $1 and you can either get out for $1.50 to $2 cash or quadruple up in trade value and either of those outcomes is dandy.

This seemed somewhat conspicuously absent from Commander 2016 given decks like Kydele and Breya. This was in the Derevi deck where it was great and it sort of crept up and crashed a few times despite never getting a reprint. This is a card I’m very confident in and while there is danger of a Commander 2017 reprint, you have a while for this to keep growing. I don’t know why it crashed in 2015, but this is a solid card and it has a good future. It can probably tells us bit about something from Commander 2016, also.

Cauldron of Souls seems like the best Commander 2016 analog for Elixir. While potentially not as useful in as many decks, this is very, very useful in the decks where it’s good. Juniper Order Ranger and other cards that can erase the -1/-1 counters are always climbing after reprints and persist cards are good with popular commanders like Marchesa. Cauldron isn’t done crashing and I don’t hate these at under $1 cash since they demonstrated that they can cap at $8 in a favorable climate. We’re going to get a ton of copies from Commander 2016 but the price is bound to recover. Isn’t it fun to talk about cards before they go up instead of after? It’s like the opposite of reddit.

I’ve been bullish on this card since before I even liked EDH. This card was under $1 when it first came out and people only cared or talked about Standard. I bought a lot of these for cash and sold probably too early, but that’s OK. What I didn’t do was buy a ton of these for $2 and I really wish I would have. The reprint pulled the rug out from under this card but it’s recovered nicely. I don’t know if we’ll find a Commander 2016 card as likely to recover this strongly, but we can try. It’s going to be a minute before they do another mono-colored EDH set so it may be tougher than you’d think to reprint this.

This isn’t a great analog for Caged Sun on Caged Sun’s merits, but I think this has the same growth potential. The only wrinkle is that this card has already established it’s much easier to reprint than is Caged Sun. While Sun lends itself to mono-colored decks, this has been in dual decks and the like. I still think this is going to recover from Commander 2016 and clearly the market does, too, because the price hasn’t gone down as low as I’d like. It’s gone down by an amount that rivals almost all of the other reprints from Commander 2016 (something almost no one seems to think is significant enough to mention) but I don’t think it’s gone down to a low enough amount to be jazzed about buying in. It could still go lower and I’m going to wait for that to happen, but I am seeing indications that its current price for Commander 2016 versions, $3 on Strike Zone, could be the floor. $3 for a card that has flirted with $20 after multiple reprintings is worth at least watching, right? HAS to be.  I don’t know if this can get cheaper than $3 but we all know it’s going to get more expensive than that. The question is how long are you willing to wait and how often will you keep checking the price?

The black deck is pretty bad. Ob Nixilis is a pretty garbage planeswalker commander and it’s worth some money just because the value has to come from somewhere. Seriously, that deck is lousy with bulk rares. Big, stupid demons, too-expensive spells. Crypt Ghast is one of the only bright spots there, but we have already discussed how that already recovered. The Blue Commander 2014 deck has a lot of cards creeping up and that inspired me to write this article. Not much is creeping up in the black deck. Bojuka Bog is higher than a lot of the rares. Growth on the better cards like Abyssal Persecutor is anemic at best. Perhaps in looking for an analog we need to look for cards in bad decks. Unfortunately, none of the Commander 2016 decks are bad. There is one that is less popular than the rest, though.

There’s a problem, there.

Stalwart Unity (Kynaois and Tiro) is JAMMED with good cards. It’s not the most popular to build around and it’s the only one left on shelves of Walmart and Target when I poke around looking for Breed Lethality decks (Don’t laugh, I found a copy at a Walmart in Pennsylvania when I was there for a funeral this weekend) so it’s going to be the least-bought deck. This puts less downward pressure on prices because no one is willing to pop the decks and get some singles into the market. Any benefit from this is spread out over a ton of cards that are reprints – Swords to Plowshares, Propaganda, Ghostly Prison, Best Within, Progenitor Mimic, Minds Aglow, Homeward Path – the pre-reprint value of the deck was like $70. It’s going to be tough to find anything that’s going to go down enough that we’ll like it as a buy.  I will sure try, though.

I sure like the growth of this card. The Commander 2016 copies being available for like $1.25 in a deck where there are plenty of cards to spread value increases over means that this card doesn’t have to bear the entire financial brunt of the deck and it can grow on its own merit. There is an issue with cards going up too fast and MSRP artificially capping how much everything can grow. Say Ghostly Prison went to $30 overnight. It won’t, but say it did. That means every other card combined can’t be more than $8 or the price of the deck has to go up and MSRP in most places (and the loose copies everywhere) means that the price of the other cards have to stay cheap because the market can’t correct that quickly. What I think is more likely to happen is that the rest of the cards take a few years to go back to where they were but also some cards people expect to go up won’t. I don’t think the lack of Legacy events bodes well for Commander 2016 copies of Swords to Plowshares, for example. I don’t think the banning of Splinter Twin is good for Ghostly Prison’s price. I don’t think Oath of Druids is going to go back up considering it was basically played in Cube and Vintage and no Cube or Vintage player wants a C16 copy of a card they could get in Korean or judge foil. What I think is that the financial growth could be soaked up by cards EDH players want to play. I think Lurking Predators won’t be held back by there being a ton of good cards in its deck because it’s not 2014 anymore and some things that were obvious then aren’t true anymore. Lurking Predators is so good that I liked Aid From the Cowl when I first saw it. Lurking Predators is so good that I didn’t get to buy Mind’s Dilation for as cheaply as I would have liked. Lurking Predators is so good that also a third thing. I feel like I don’t want to live in a world where you get blown out paying $1 for Lurking Predators.

My suspicion is that the price crashes are a result of the card selling out and dealers having the oversized copy named the same thing, tripping our price scraping algorithm. “Meren of Clan Nel Toth” from the set “Oversized” is obvious to a person but not a computer. This means Meren is selling out a lot at $8. I think it has a chance to go for even more over the next year. There is certainly a very low spread in a lot of places.

It’s hard to know what’s going to pop in Commander 2016. Vial Smasher already hit $5 and that limits how much Kydele and Thraisos can go up in the short term. Commander 2015 commander prices haven’t stabilized yet so it’s going to be a while on Commander 2016 stuff for sure. I will say Atraxa likely can’t maintain $20. I will say that the good partners are going to go up based on EDH (Vial Smasher has gone up because of dual commander and the fact that spikey players don’t wait around to buy cards the way others do. I think if I had to pick a commander that could go up, I’d say Kydele. Have you read it? If Vial Smasher can be $5 (and the rest of that Yidris deck isn’t great, which is great for Curtain’s Call, a card that has already quadrupled since I started harping on it incessantly. I think Kydele and Thraisos can soak up some value that the rest of the deck can’t help with and those are potentially good buys.

That’s it for this week. I am not sure what to talk about next week, but this seems like a well worth plumbing for now. Hit me up in the comments, nerds. Until next time!