Not the most popular, but still popular. The fourth most popular this week and fifth most popular this month per EDHREC. That would seem to indicate popularity is increasing as more and more people buy the Commander 2016 decks and start building with them. While it’s no Atraxa, the third most popular deck of all time per EDHREC, it’s still trending in the right direction. We’re of course talking about Saskia, the commander I left for last because, frankly, so much of what’s in the deck comes in the precon. As people start to build a bit more and add some unique cards and that tech catches on, we’ll see stuff emerge. We’re sort of stuck scouring decklists for clues rather than just checking the main EDHREC page because it’s currently lousy with cards from the precon. Rightfully so – we have discussed the precon effect in this series before and I’m sure we’ll have to do it again. Basically, if a card doesn’t look terrible enough to cut, people will favor leaving it in over taking it out because there is some small, intended amount of synergy there and they don’t have to buy a new card that way. It will take a minute for new old cards to shove old new cards out of those slots.

Saskia is a pretty brutal commander, though, and the stuff that he makes happen ends games quickly. Even though the decks being built are skewed toward precon contents much more than the other four decks which we’ve already covered and that’s why I handled this last and gave it another week for more data, there’s still stuff that’s going to move. How could it not with such a popular deck? It’s more popular this year than The Gitrog Monster and Leovold both. Could it be because the deck comes mostly built? Or are people that jazzed about four color commanders? Either way, let’s look at what we can look at.

Right off the bat we see a card that was reprinted in an FTV that didn’t do much of anything to its price and has been laying dormant for a while. Waiting. Biding its time. I think the time is now. This is mythic, it’s an angel, it’s at its historic low and it just happens to straight wreck the game coupled with Saskia and the other cards in the deck. Pair this with Eldrazi Displacer to ruin everyone’s day or just get one extra attack phase which can translate to quadruple damage if you hit the player you targeted with Saskia. Good luck not straight murdering someone. Tap their team down with Naya Charm and take them to pound town. They’ll think they live in whatever town the Pound Puppies was set in, they’ll be so pounded. Did they ever actually specify where the pound that the Pound Puppies lived was located? Or didn’t it ever matter because they’re puppies and they have no way of actually knowing where they live because they’re in a pound? And are also puppies? Did you know Frank Welker and Peter Cullen from Transformers did voices on that show? Nancy Cartwright from The Simpsons, too. Lotta voice talent on the Pound Puppies, even if it was a depressing as shit show about puppies essentially on death row. Did they ever get out of the pound? Like, get adopted or something? I never watched Pound Puppies, I was like 2 in 1986. What was I talking about? Oh, Aurelia. Yeah, buy this card. It’s time.

This isn’t quite at its historic low but it’s below its recent high. Could Modern help this card? Certainly. Is a reprint all that likely? At its price point, it’s doubtful…ish. I still think Commander 2017 will have ally-color, two-tone decks and GW tokens seems like it’s pretty likely. How much will this go up in a year? I don’t know, but Irelia and Iroas decks love to run this and Iroas just got reprinted meaning anyone who wants a cheap copy of their commander to build a deck in the worst color combination in all of EDH is welcome to it. I think Saskia decks should jam this more often than they are. If they start to, this is a good pickup under $7 but I don’t like paying much more than that.

Basically everything we said about Aurelia is true here, except Gisela managed to dodge the FTV printing. This is basically at a historic low not having fully recovered from the Commander 2015 printing, but with a Commander 2017 printing not all that likely, this is probably the time to buy in. This card is nuts in decks like Saskia and since it’s a mythic angel on top of being a card that is seeing a resurgence in its utility, this seems like a slam dunk. This flirted with $20 historically so I don’t think it’s out of order to suggest you could buy this at $4 and expect it to hit $10 before you cash out.

Next up in our “How the hell did this dodge a reprint?” series we have Savage Beating, a very aptly named card. This IS a savage beating and if you are attacking the person you targeted with Saskia, you probably just murder them. I wish I could run 4 Naya Charm in the deck and always be cilling people, but even if they have blockers, giving them double strike and coming back through for a second wave of the beatfaces is probably going to crumple even the most robust of defenses. Commander 2016 and this deck specifically would have been the perfect venue to reprint this card and since they didn’t, we’re forced to ask ourselves where they could reprint this at this point. There are a lot of variants on this card, which means it is shielded from reprint slightly because another variant could be reprinted instead. In fact, at $10, Aggravated Assault seems like a juicier reprint target than Savage Beating.

What I like best about Savage Beating is that it’s a second spike. Really, all of the Relentless Assault variants are. When Narset was printed, everyone wanted to rip these effects off of the top and get infinite attack phases and hella value. They are starting to return to “normal” now that demand has cooled a bit, but I don’t think many people who built a Narset deck are going to take it apart so this new demand needs new supply. Since there are fewer loose copies of Savage Beating to come in and plug the holes in supply at the low end (meaning they are introduced into the market for their buylist price by people who had them in a binder rather than sold to the end user at retail) the price is bound to go up as the cheapest copies start to disappear and are replaced by slightly more expensive copies. I think this card has a lot going for it but Saskia’s price spikes are lagging behind Atraxa and Breya, meaning there is time to get copies but also time to second guess yourself. Do the former but not the latter – Saskia is increasing in popularity as more and more people open these decks.

This card has so much going for it, it’s not even funny. Everything about the shape of this graph should be making you salivate right now. Actually, that part’s pretty funny; imagining you salivating over a Magic card like a cartoon wolf staring at a prey animal/cartoon woman’s jugs. It’s just cardboard, settle down. Should we go into everything this card has going for it? Okey dokey.

This was first and only printed in the original Commander set. That means supply is pretty low and is a lot lower than anyone really thinks. This is going to see a few more copies printed in the Commander Anthology set, but that’s not going to really introduce that many copies into the market because no one is paying $160 or whatever for Commander Anthology just to bust all the decks apart and sell them off piecemeal. People who buy that product are buying it to play with or collect. Supply is and will likely remain low for the foreseeable future.

The shape of the graph is incredibly encouraging. Not only is the retail price starting to finally take off, the buylist price is moving along with it. Dealers are selling out at the current price and they are expressing their confidence in it selling out at a higher price. Dealer confidence is good because it’s endorsement of your pick by someone who does this for a living.

This is just about the EDH-iest card ever printed and it’s pretty nutty in Saskia decks, though currently it’s more likely to be run in Kynaios and Tiro decks. Casual players love that it’s a big, dumb avatar, competitive players love that it doesn’t let your opponent have blockers and dealers seem to be loving that they’re selling out. It’s in a great place and I think you’re pretty safe buying this.

If there is a theme to this article, it’s “Cards that dodged a reprint somehow” and the next installment is a card that managed to not get printed alongside Elesh Norn. This recently spiked and with new demand from a deck like Saskia that absolutely loves your opponent not being able to play creatures to block with and wants your creatures to have haste. Urabrask is kind of tricky to reprint but at its price point, it might be a good inclusion in Commander 2017 since it’s not too expensive but is a fun, splashy mythic. I think this can at least get up to its recent peak of $15ish before that happens, though. Urabrask is a shoo-in for a deck like this and will continue to impact a lot of EDH decks until it’s reprinted or prohibitively-expensive, whichever comes first. Modern has a non-zero chance of coming along and randomly spiking this, also.

Saskia is taking a bit longer than Atraxa or Breya to spike cards but that’s OK because it just means we have more time to pick up the stuff we want to pick up. Pay attention to what people are building with on EDHREC and don’t be afraid to go into a few decklists by clicking on the links at the top and seeing if there is any original tech in there. Cards from Mirage block don’t need much of a push to go off, for example. You make money by being ahead of price increases, so stay sharp and be ready to sell when others want to buy. I just jammed all of these decks on an Amazon wishlist so I expect to get them for Christmas and I imagine there are a lot of people out there just like me. Cards aren’t even close to being done spiking, so keep an eye out for the next card to go up instead of worrying about what spiked already. Until next week!

This really is too easy sometimes. Commander 2016 is available in stores and people have started to buy it in earnest. Now that players have the physical cards that come in the precons, now and only now they are starting to buy the cards that aren’t in the precons that they want for their decks. They didn’t buy them when spoilers began to trickle in and they knew Deepglow Skate was broken. They didn’t buy them when Atraxa was spoiled and they knew they were going to build some durdly planeswalker deck. They didn’t buy them when the list of the Atraxa deck was fully spoiled and they knew which cards weren’t going to be included in any of the Commander 2016 precons. They didn’t buy the cards during the two week period where everything was fully spoiled when they and everyone else was making their theoretical builds and submitting them to Tappedout so EDHREC could build their databases with everyone’s builds and tip off financiers to which cards were important. No, they waited until they had the Atraxa deck in hand, tore it open, spread the cards out – only then did they look online and exclaim “Oh my stars, look how much Doubling Season costs!” You had like a month to get The Chain Veil and only now is it spiking. The same goes for Krark-Clan Ironworks, Time Sieve and a dozen other cards we identified in this series before they went up.

I don’t think cards are done going up, either. While Atraxa and Breya are making stuff spike, I think Yidris and Kynaois/Tiro aren’t done. In fact, in the case of the latter two decks, I don’t think the cards have really started despite there being a relatively similar amount of decks registered on EDHREC. There aren’t the sexy targets like we had in Breya and Atraxa, but I still think there are cards worth talking about. So let’s talk about what Kynaois and Tiro are going to do for us.

Group Hug is an odd approach to the game. Gaining other people life, drawing them cards and developing their mana in the hopes that they will leave you alone can usually work pretty well but when it comes time to close the game out, you may find yourself  in some trouble. You may use the approach to try and help the second-strongest player kill the strongest one and then try and mop up, or you may try and play for second place. You may also just play a deck where you have a lot of symmetrical effects like Mana Flare but you take advantage of them more than the other players because you are set up to win before they do. Maybe you make everyone think you’re helping them with the extra cards they’re drawing until you deck them. What I do know is that you need to protect yourself and cards that do that are always going to be winners.

There is decent reprint risk here, I think, but I don’t really know when and where. What I do know is that this has quietly doubled over the last few years and while flashier cards that are played outside of EDH like Ghostly Prison are getting all of the attention, this card makes them pay 4 mana to attack with their creatures in the Kynaios deck and that’s two Ghostly Prisons by my count. Even at $5 I like the buy-in on this card. It’s from Invasion, a set where there are plenty of $5 uncommons. A playable rare seems pretty reasonable at $5 by comparison. Aura Shards is $8 after a commander set reprint and is uncommon from the same set. Aura Shards is also in 5 times as many EDH decks as Restraint, but I think with commander sets giving us commanders that encourage us to build enchantment cocoons, I think the gap could close. At 3 times as rare you also mitigate that demand gap a bit. I think $8 is reasonable for Restraint and if you find these under $5, I think it’s a good buy. This pairs very nicely with this deck and its strategy and also with 5 color decks. It’s almost always going to be better than Propaganda, but even if it were just a functional reprint of that card, scarcity could give it upside – look at the P3K cards that get played in EDH because they’re spare copies of staples.

This has been flat for a minute, but perhaps there has never been a commander that let you take advantage of this card better. Since you’re drawing all sorts of extra cards, it’s negligible to skip your draw step and you never have to worry about coming up with cards to pitch to the cost to keep this shield up. There is very low supply online and the price has been flat for so long it’s unlikely to get a reprint for price reasons and it’s a bit pernicious to include in a precon. With limited reprint prospects, dwindling supply and a potential spike in demand, this seems primed to make some moves. Since it has hovered in the $4 to $5 range, the odds of this being hidden in dollar boxes seems low so it’s unlikely that a wave of discovered supply will mitigate a price increase predicated on copies disappearing from retail outlets. This protects you very well and with the extra cards you draw at your end step helping you keep this around indefinitely, especially if you’re further drawing with cards like Consecrated Sphinx. This may be a nonbo if you’re trying to deck yourself and win with this next card, but it’s certainly good at making sure you stay alive.

I like this about as much as I can for someone who liked this more at $2. My enthusiasm hasn’t been dampened but I won’t pretend we weren’t better off getting these at $2. Then again, I used to pull these out of bulk, so it feels good to think about this card going to $10. This card is a great way to win the game and we have already called this cheaper than it is now so we were able to make some money off of it. Can we continue to make money even if we have no copies and are buying in now for the first time? I think so. Innistrad boxes are hella expensive and this seems tricky to reprint outside of supplementary product. I think the odds are good that we have ally-color decks for Commander 2017 so if this isn’t in the Dimir deck, I expect this to spike hard then. I also think this will grow a bit before the start of C17 spoilers. I am betting money this doesn’t get reprinted, are you? The buy-in price isn’t bad right now if you are.

The purpose of mentioning cards I have already mentioned is severalfold. First, I want to remind you that we liked these cards in the past and they have gone up. Secondly, I want to call attention to the fact that we had a reason before to think these cards would go up and now we have another reason. That makes me think they will go up even more. Annex is in the same class as Collective Restraint. Tricky to reprint, this is also specifically references planeswalkers and is more likely to force them to pay life the more aggressive their deck is (and therefore less likely to have access to white mana). We talked about this card earlier, but for a different reason and now we’re talking about it again. Seems like a winner to me.

Between Leovold and Kynaios, demand for this card isn’t going down anytime soon. It’s a tad on the expensive side, but as a conflux rare, there is room for growth. It’s been enough time that copies are starting to dry up and with nothing to replace them, this card is going to grow sharply if it shakes off its current inertia. Lots of mine effects went up due to Nekusar and new demand means they could continue to grow. I am pretty enthusiastic about this one in particular, especially with how many times Temple Bell and Howling Mine have been printed.

This oddly benefits from being worse than Rites of Flourishing. While Rites is on its third printing, Heartbeat has been mostly left alone to grow quietly. You’re likely to play both, especially in a redless deck with no access to cards like Mana Flare and Zhur-Taa Ancient. However, of all the new decks in the last few years, Kynaios is the most likely to want this card. Casual, 60-card players use this card a non-zero amount. I worry about this going up so quietly that copies may be squirreled away, but I feel like casuals are demanding this and ferreting out secret copies and a demand increase will likely directly correlate to an increase in price.

Whereas high-demand commanders are already spiking prices, I think there is still opportunity for the cards here. Lower-demand commanders will still nonetheless get built. People haven’t even opened the decks they’re getting as Christmas presents. There is time to get in on a lot of these cards.

One thing I caution is to not be impatient. Don’t invest money in EDH cards unless you can afford to wait a while. I recommend buying stuff to play your other formats and trying to trade it into EDH cards before they drop in price due to rotation or whatever. EDH cards hold their value longer because they are non-cyclical. Trading a Smuggler’s Copter that will be a bulk rare when it rotates into a whole big stack of Panharmonicons and Ghitapur Orrererys is going to make you feel like a genius in a year or two, and your trade partner will be happy to do it, too. If this stuff doesn’t go up immediately, DON’T PANIC. How long have people been holding onto The Chain Veil? We knew it would spike eventually and this week it finally did. It took a while, and if you bought them back when I first said it would be a $5 card soon and got impatient when they weren’t $5 within 6 months and sold out, you’re kicking yourself this week. If you took the last year to accumulate copies through trading, cheap eBay lots, SCG sales and Puca Trade, you’re happy this week. Font of Mythos may take a year or two to go up. It may take another card like Leovold getting printed to finally break its stalemate and head upward in price. The point is that we all know it can do it. If you don’t want real money tied up, find other ways to accumulate copies of EDH cards you want as specs. The whole reason we’re buying EDH cards is they go up slowly, predictably and inevitably, they’re easy to identify, easy to move and we can play with them while we wait them to go up. Patience was rewarded this week as cards like The Chain Veil finally moved and patience will be rewarded again. We called Anvil of Bogardan when Nekusar came out and it took Leovold to make it go up. Concepts are used and reused and commanders will come out in the next year or two that will create additional demand for cards that aren’t growing right now. Just remember that cards that let us cheat are always good and we’ll all make some money. If you’ll excuse me, I have to buylist a pile of Time Sieves. Until next week.

The word “Maelstrom” should make your ears perk up. Err, you know what I mean. Like, when you hear it, it should make your ears perk up. If you’re just reading it in the article, you’re just reading it. Maybe you hear, like, your own voice in your head so technically you’re hearing it, but you’re not, like, “hearing” hearing it so your ears won’t perk up. Let me start over.

The word “Maelstrom” should make you take notice. “Maesltrom” is a word they put on magic cards to let you know they are going to be worth money. Cascading is a form of cheating in Magic that is somehow legal. When you cascade, you get hecka card advantage and it’s also random so it’s fun, more fun than just tutoring for something. Maelstrom Wanderer is a popular commander so it stands to reason that another cascade commander will also be popular. Did I mention this one lets us play black spells? Because this one totally lets us play black spells. Behold.

This guy does it all, I mean, mostly. You still have to make contact with him, so cards that enable that are worth a look as well as spells that have a higher printed CMC than you end up paying. If you can cast an expensive spell you can both dome them with Vial Smasher and also cascade into good stuff. Yidris has been the number 3 most popular commander searched for on EDHREC every day for the last month and Vial Smasher is not far behind. With a new focus on spells that enable these two strategies, we could see some movement on a few key cards. I have some ideas.

This card is underrated and I feel like I bear some responsibility for that because I slept on this in my set review. I feel like I filed this under “I like this card OK but I don’t like it financially” which may have been because it was $2 or $3 pre-sale (I don’t remember) but I’m warming to this. If you think about it, you’re most likely playing in a pod with 4 players which means 3 opponents which means a 3 mana reduction. You look at EDHREC and notice that like 3,500 people are jamming Go for the Throat in their decks. With Curtain’s Call, you’re paying Dark Banishing mana and getting a double Go For the Throat with no color or type restrictions. Not only that, but you’re paying Dark Banishing mana for a spell that’s going to dome them for 6 with Vial Smasher and cascade into any CMC 5 or less spell when you cast this after hitting them with Yidris. All of the undaunted stuff is good in this deck (ish) but this is by far the best and I feel like it’s not relegated to decks where you’re trying to cast high CMC spells.

Granted, there is inherent weakness with this spell given you need two legal targets to cast it, but this isn’t Hex in Limited we’re talking about. We’re not trying to cast Decimate. We’re looking for two legal targets in a game with multiple opponents – it’s hardly a drawback. Speaking of Hex and Decimate, both of those spells are better in EDH and scale well into larger playgroups. This is the same and I feel like this is too cheap at $0.50. I doubt undaunted stuff gets reprinted soon and I feel like any black deck can jam this if it wants to. If you’re playing with 5 people this is like 5 times better than Go For the Throat. At its current price, I feel like the risk is pretty low, the upside is pretty high and people are going to start noticing this card. I feel very strongly about this. There is a lot of supply to soak up, but we’re up to the challenge. A lot of the copies that get opened will end up in the deck that gets built as a result.

This card is good enough to be banned in Modern and Legacy. A card good enough to be banned in both of those formats is worth looking at, don’t you think? We’re about to see one of two scenarios pan out – either being banned in Modern and Legacy is too strong and EDH won’t be able to muster enough demand to soak up all of these copies and the card will go nowhere or the fact that it’s banned in Modern and Legacy means the card is stupid powerful and EDH will make a stupid powerful card end up worth money. Treasure Cruise was reprinted in the Yidris deck which was a great opportunity to reprint Dig that they missed (or just didn’t decide to take). When else can they reprint Dig? It’s not going in Eternal or Modern Masters, not in Standard. It basically has to go in Commander 2017 to hurt the price. Commander 2018 will bring it back down, but by then it will have gone up if it was going to. I think this is as cheap as it will ever get, it’s bannably good, it’s stupid in Yidris, it’s tough to reprint and I don’t feel like I need a fifth thing. This card seems like a pretty good target and I will be a little surprised if this isn’t $2 or $3 in a year or two. There are a lot of copies to soak up, but the card is powerful.

This is the best red wrath ever printed. We have seen this card basically shrug off one reprint already. Do I expect it to shrug this one off? Not exactly, and therein lies opportunity. I think this printing in Commander 2016 will make it pretty cheap and cheap means there is a chance to scoop these. You know how I love those backward-J-shaped graphs because they’re an indication that we’re at the part of a U-shaped graph where we can still make some money. Blasphemous Act is unlikely to be reprinted in Commander 2017 because they seem to be skipping years which means you can get these for bulk and wait two years to see if this gets up to $3 again. You can make money on this card, so make money on this card.

That’s all I want to talk about in terms of cards that are expensive and get cast for less expensive because there is another trend I am noticing in Yidris decks. That’s that people are tending to play wheel effects in Yidris. A lot. Nekusar is using a lot of these wheels and since Nekusar isn’t going anywhere, we’re going to see more competition for these cards, even from people who already have copies of them that they’re using. When Leovold was printed, we saw an increase in Teferi’s Puzzle Box and Anvil of Bogardan because those can go in Leovold decks. Red wheels, however, cannot and this gives us a chance to grab red wheels before they go up. Will they? You tell me.

This graph is for Wheel of Fate. There is quite a drop-off to the next-most used but you will notice that Yidris uses it as much as Nekusar, maybe more as time goes on. The demand for this card just doubled. Its price might not double, but its demand doubled and that’s pretty significant. Is there money to be made on Wheel of Fate? Dunno, let’s look.

It would appear Nekusar demand has made it creep up. Now we’re looking at a potential second spike happening, which is even more promising. I think there is money to be made here, and out of all of the wheels, this is the one I’m most enthusiastic about. It’s really tough to reprint suspend cards often and this just had its demand double with more sure to come later. We have seen what could happen based on other wheel effects that Leovold spiked. Speaking of which, I imagine Puzzle Box isn’t done going up. You’re late to the party but sometimes even people who show up late can grab the last few cold beers at the bottom of the cooler if they’re willing to get their sleeves a little wet.

Finally, there’s one more thing that makes me want Wheel of Fate right now.

If this is a cycle, casting Suspend cards for free off of decent spells is a game-changer. I think you buy all of the suspend stuff.

The rest of the wheels don’t seem as juicy because they either got reprinted or are too expensive. Puzzle Box may be worth a look, though. Leovold hype is still powering it, but it’s not good in the Yidris deck.

Finally, we want to be hitting them. There isn’t a ton of money to be made on Whispersilk Cloak unless you’re picking it out of bulk, so let’s look at cards that let you get through again if you did once.

Second spike HYPE. Nekusar made this and other Relentless Assault effects go up and this is on its way back down. We’ve seen where one card making it spike and bringing all of the loose copies out of the woodwork made it go, Yidris is sure to at least hit the benchmark set by Nekusar and very likely exceed it. This is silly with Yidris, so, you know, play it in that deck. And buy it. A lot of copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers which means buying will signal the market and the cheap copies in binders and boxes that filled in the bottom of the price pyramid last time around are exhausted. Expect this to go up.

I feel like I talk about this every 6 months and whenever I do, it’s more expensive than it was the last time I talked about it. This card is on the uptick, anyway, they missed a chance to reprint it in the Kaseto/Ezuri deck and it pairs very nicely with hitting them in the face with your commander. Saskia could honestly use this, also. This card seems solid and it was growing already. I like this a lot and you should pick it up. I would be remiss if I mentioned this without also mentioning my favorite aura.

Bear Umbra is nuts. It’s an infinite combo with Hellkite Charger and that has been a staple of durdly EDH decks for years. This is Nature’s Will but only for your lands and you have to attack them with a specific creature. The upside is that you’re only really relying on hitting them with your commander anyway, and this also keeps him alive. This is going to go up until they reprint it. Luckily this isn’t in Planechase or Archenemy already so we’re not getting more copies of it dumped on us with some Anthology reprinting – this is in ROE and that’s it. ROE boxes are expensive and not getting popped so the umbras we got is the umbras we got. I like this long-term and Yidris being popular certainly won’t hurt this price.

I feel pretty good about most of these. I am interested in particular to see what happens with Curtain’s Call because I like that card and think it can go up and also Dig Through Time because that case can help us evaluate cards like it in the future. No matter what happens, wheels and Relentless Assault effects have some upside. Look into that stuff to see if there is anything I didn’t like the margins on if you’re feeling ballsy. Don’t forget to bookmark EDHREC – it’s the best resource for this sort of stuff and just glancing at the page for a commander is enough to give you a sense of what to pick up. That’s all for me this week – join me next week where we’re sure to have more accidental Aether Revolt spoilers and updated EDHREC metrics for other popular commanders. Ciao, nerds!

I was wondering there might be some overlap when I decided to steer this column into EDH territory since I’m already writing an EDH article. How would I differentiate the two? What I’m interested is not going to change day-to-day, is it? If I write about what I’m interested in, I’m obviously going to write about the same stuff and the two columns will bleed together. That’s what I thought, at least. The truth is, Commander 2016 has taught me that what I’m interested in when it comes to finance couldn’t be more different from what interests me as a deck-builder. When I build, I am super bored by the boring ways people are choosing to build Commander 2016 decks. The collective mass of all those stupid, boring, basic builds feels like a weight on my chest, crushing any creative impulses I have for fear of straying too far from the charted course and losing credibility somehow. When I buy cards, I like that weight. Heavy is good.

Boring means predictable. If everyone is going to build their stupid Atraxa deck the same way, we can predict what they’re going to do and get ahead of them and snag those cards for ourselves and a few extra copies to sell after they spike so our cards were free. If that is how you use M:tG Finance, you’re doing it just fine, in my view. You don’t need to be a hardcore financier to play EDH for free, you just need to think like one or listen to someone who is. Let everyone else build so basic that you could fetch their whole build with an Evolving Wilds. That just means it’s easier for us to figure out what they’re going to do before they do it and be ready for the cards they buy to go up. So what’s a build everyone seems to be doing the easy way?

How about the #2 most popular deck on EDHREC? Atraxa is #1 and we had a look there already, so let’s see if, unlike with Atraxa, people are being basic by adding cards that aren’t already in the precon. I think they will do some fairly predictable stuff and there’s money to be made.

This is like $9 everywhere and Modern isn’t really picking up the slack we had anticipated it would when it was unbanned. Spiking to $30, this returned to reality quickly and might not be done sinking. So why are we interested in a card that may be overpriced at its current $9 and isn’t getting the play people expected in Modern? That’s fairly simple – Thopter Foundry comes in the same precon Breya does and Sword does not. Anyone who has been playing Magic long enough or who checks EDHREC to see that 43% of the decks that run Breya as a general are running Sword of the Meek (compared to 70% for Foundry so far. Even people who haven’t been playing long enough to know the Thopter Sword combo are smart enough not to take Foundry out of the precon when they tune it up) will want a copy to go with the deck; and why not? Breya can do a lot of work with a pile of thopter tokens and you can make as many as you have mana for and then use them to win the game. Make 12 thopters with your mana, sac 6 to Krark-Clan Ironworks and use the other 6 to blast someone for 9 damage to the face. Since you can get two mana for each token you sac to KCI, you can go off with these cards in play and gain infi life and hit infi faces infi times. Sure, it’s a 4 card combo, but one of those cards is your general and the KCI isn’t totally necessary since you can do the thopter sword combo with Breya and go non-infinite to generate a ton of life, damage or murder a ton of creatures. Speaking of which,

this is $4ish. I feel like this card is super reprintable, but it always seems to dodge reprinting. It’s unlikely a set that will be legal in Standard will print this because it’s so abusable and curtails the cards they can print alongside it. That leaves supplemental product and they’ve decided not to print this so far despite having lots of chances. I don’t hate this as a pickup at its current price but I feel a little hesitant. It just feels like it could get reprinted any minute. I realize that’s not a very anaytical approach to this, but I don’t like to buy in when I have a bad feeling even if data doesn’t bear it out. There are enough good opportunities I do feel good about, after all. If you don’t have some weird sense about this, I suggest buying a combo piece that goes in decks with artifacts. We’re getting Aether Revolt soon which means more artifact shenanigans which means every artifact EDH deck gets better and new ones will pop up. I don’t see a KCI reprint in Aether Revolt so I think this is safe-ish. This has seen $10 in the past and could again, so I feel good about this around $4 or $5.

Remember how much we like second spikes? Well here’s a card that’s due for one.

Some shenanigans in Modern made this spike a bit a while back to around $4 and I think it’s super reasonable for it to get there again. This is a very good card and does a ton of work in a lot of different decks. Artifact decks need sac outlets and tutors and this is both. A 4x multiplier indicates there is either EDH or Vintage interest (or both?) and while this is reprintable, it wouldn’t likely happen for at least another year. Breya plus Aether Revolt is pretty good for artifacts and this has spiked recently which means a second bout of interest in the card will increase the price more sharply. You want to get these now if you need them, and maybe buy extras. This seems like a fine target.

Thopter Assembly is a shoo-in for this deck, but with a million $0.40 copies of the stamped prerelease foil floating around, there isn’t much money to be made on that card. Still, its inclusion in the deck is natrually going to lend itself to people playing Time Sieve, another combo card. Time Sieve and Thopter Assembly go together like shocks and fetches and while there isn’t much money to be made on Assembly, it’s showing up increasingly in Breya decks (enough to make the EDHRCEC page at a 35% rate of inclusion – not bad for a card not in the precon) and that means cards that combo with it have upside. Again, Aether Revolt could give us some cards that combo very nicely with Time Sieve, also and by the time those cards are revealed, it will be too late to buy in because everyone else will notice, too. Accordingly, we’re not going to rely on Aether Revolt to give us stuff to make these cards go up, but we can allow for the possibility that prices will go up more quickly than anticipated and it makes me want to act on my artifact-based specs a little quicker than my general specs.

Out of everything we talked about today, this feels the “heaviest.” It has the most inevitability and the least sex appeal. No one is going to laud you as a genius for identifying this as a spec but you’re literally just going to make money if you buy this. This is your M:tG Finance 401k. It’s not very exciting but you can retire off of this. This is a card from Coldsnap. Coldsnap is a set they didn’t sell a lot of and which didn’t have any exciting cards at the time. Now Coldsnap is a $300 booster box (some on eBay are $400 and even $500 Buy it now) and has a lot of $5-$10 cards years later, including foil snow-covered lands. I’m not saying buy a box, I’m saying buying a box probably isn’t worth it. If Arcum isn’t reprinted and no one is going to pop those boxes of Coldsnap, $7ish starts to look like a great buy-in point for a card like Arcum. After all, he’s not just a great inclusion in artifact decks who can serve as a way to murder pesky artifact creatures like Steel Hellkite before they wreck you, he is also a decent commander in his own right, although EDHREC only has about 150 entries for him. He’s got combo potential, pairs well with cards like Umbral Mantle and Intruder Alarm and he’s only going to get more popular as we get deeper into another artifact block. His growth has been steady and consistent and I actually got a few of these in bulk rares sold to me a while back which goes to show that people underestimate this card. Demand isn’t the highest compared to other cards and the price still got to where it is now so any boost in demand should change the slope of the graph pretty precipitously. I like this as a pickup.

This is another card that’s obvious. I hope this gets cheap and someone doesn’t decide to go 3-1 on MODO with a deck that has this in it so we can scoop these affordably. This is Parallel Lives levels of obvious. It’s Hardened Scales reprintable, also, so watch that, but I feel like if you can trade any $2 Kaladesh card for this at $2 you’re almost certain to win in two years when the card you traded away is a dime and this is $5. Should I mention this card every week? It’s worth watching periodically because as soon as we deem the price to be cheap enough that it makes sense to buy in, there is real money to be made on a card this good. It does everything you need a card to do in EDH and it is even colorless so decks that don’t typically get effects like this can use it.

Obvious is good for us because obvious means a lot of people will all think of it independantly of each other. If you want an obscure card to catch on, someone has to point it out for that to effect the price and that person has to have enough reach and influence to make a big enough group all follow along to do anything to the price. Who needs that? Give me obvious any day. Let hundreds of people come to the same conclusion and fight each other for a limited amount of stock in obvious cards. Obvious means we’re less likely to miss it, also, and we don’t have to go to a bunch of obscure sources all the time to catch weird, obscure tech. Keep an eye on what people are doing and always remember, obvious doesn’t always mean there is no opportunity. WotC bundled a bunch of obvious cards with the Atraxa deck, which was frustrating, but one look at Breya shows us there are still a lot of avenues to profit. If they reprint half of a ridiculous combo, there is upside in the other piece. Half of a lot of combos are showing up in the Breya deck and it’s only a matter of time before people put two and two together. When they do, be ready.

That’s all for this week. Next week I’m sure there will be some more to look at from Commander 2016, so stay tuned, nerds. Until next time!