Awww yisss

I spent the last week covering the spoiler for Conspiracy 2: 2 Fast 2 Conspiratorious and it made me want to talk about some of the cards that those cards are going to impact. A lot of times I write financial reviews of entire sets hoping there will be some under-priced gem in there, and sometimes there are but there aren’t always and I don’t always find them. The good thing is, if you are buying to invest and not play, you never have to buy a card if you missed it at its cheapest price, so I just make money elsewhere and move on with my life. Still, if you find more $12 Pain Seers than $5 Thragtusks after a while it starts to feel like you can only lose money pre-ordering.

Is that the case? Of course not. Lots of people make money pre-ordering and lots of players who just go ahead and pull the trigger on those $8 Collected Company because they need them to play with make out like bandits. I’m not saying I don’t think that happens or even that I don’t know how to do it. What I will say is that everyone writes about that. It bores me. So let’s go next level and look at the cards that are going to move because of the cards in the set rather than the cards in the set because it takes people longer to do that analysis. In the case of the EDH community, it takes a long time to do that analysis which means our orders aren’t getting cancelled, we have time to clean out our LGS and all the stores in the area and we can grab every loose copy from binders. In one to six months the card will quadruple and everyone will say “Who could have seen it coming?”

I think there are a ton of exciting cards in the set, but I think there is one obvious commander that is going to make a lot of prices move quite a bit and we have some time to buy those  cards because while players who are all about EDH are aware of what cards interact with commanders, they don’t always buy in a timely manner. We had almost 6 weeks to buy Squandered Resources when they spoiled The Gitrog Monster. It’s probably not done going up, either. Why try to be the first to buy TCG Player out of some new Standard rare because it was on camera in a deck that is 4-1 because its pilot had 3 byes? Your order is getting cancelled. Let’s try MTG Finance on easy mode.

Let’s talk about one of the least fair commanders they’ve ever printed.

THE CARD IN QUESTION

I am so excited I can’t even not type in all caps.

Look at this elf.

Look at it.

LOOK AT IT

“Real talk, I’m about to ruin EDH forever lol” – This dude

Look at his Scott Bakula-looking stupid elf face. He’s about to make EDH a buncha bulls$%&t for like, ever. This Quantum Leap-looking long-ears. You got two choices right now, nerds. Beat them or join them. Or don’t play EDH. Three choices. Or buy the cards that are about to go up. Or start vaping. Five choices. You have five choices.

What’s about to go up?

Let’s start with this one. With Leovold’s first ability, this card now reads “During each player’s draw phase, that player discards his or her hand then draws one card. Forever. They are probably pretty salty about it since you Mind Twisted the whole table for 4 mana and this doesn’t let them hang onto anything they can’t afford to play the turn they draw it.” Puzzle Box is brutal with Leovold rendering them unable to draw additional cards and therefore climb back into the game. If you curve out, it’s reasonable to play Leovold turn 2 (Tricky but doable, especially with signets) and Puzzle Box turn 3 and get punched in your smug, stupid throat on turn 4.

So is Leovold going to be popular enough to drive this already highish price up? I think so. It isn’t like anyone’s taking apart their Nekusar decks to build Leovold, after all. You’re the same jerkoff playing the “Tier 1” EDH deck because you’re the kind of tryhard who insists there even are tiers in EDH. You won’t take your deck apart, you spent too much time getting Japanese foil Ponder because you play Ponder in Nekusar. Wow, that got specific. The point is, Leovold is going to appeal broadly, and people don’t really take apart EDH decks that often. Absent new supply we’re seeing a price increase predicated on new demand because that’s how economics work.

Remember what I always say about second spikes? That applies here, I think. Teferi’s Puzzle Box was a fringe card forever. EDH never really wanted it because it never really fit in with any sort of win condition and it inconvenienced you as much as them. There were copies in bulk boxes, binders, collections, store inventories, the works. Nekusar comes along and suddenly $0.25 seems cheap. People buy extras because they never know if they’ll want more. They start flying off the shelves. Suddenly a card that’s in boxes all over at LGSs marked for sale at $0.25 is buylisting for $1. All of the cheap copies are being snapped up and sold to buylists. People are trading them and the people they trade their copies to either put the card in a deck or they buylist it. Copies are going from being diffuse and hidden to being concentrated and accounted for. Loose copies dry up, the price equilibrates based on the new demand and it waits for an event. An event could be supply never really gets sustained and dealers start to race to the bottom to get out of their copies and recoup their investment. That or the price just makes sense and hangs out forever.

Another event that’s possible is there is new, novel demand for the card. Leovold isn’t replacing Nekusar, it’s supplementing it. That means even people with Puzzle Boxes in their Nekusar deck are jamming them in Leovold. That means people need copies. They’re not going to get them at the LGS for $0.25, those sold. They won’t find them in some random’s binder, he traded it for a card back in 2013. They’re forced to pay $5 on SCG. (I mean, no one is forced to buy from SCG but lots of people do) and when the cards sell out on the relatively small number of websites (or on just TCG Player which means 20 copies selling in a week will trigger all of the “market watch” people to buy out every other site). The card is good, it’s good in a deck already and it will be good in this new deck, too. People will pay the new price. That will make the price go up. Foils are already selling out. Puzzle Box is due for a second spike on the back of Leovold and you could make some money on this card, again. I love gifts that keep giving. All of my Puzzle Boxes were free since I sold enough that I broke even on the ones I bought before the first spike so I have the luxury of seeing how high they get, but I think there’s money to be made even buying at retail now if you can out for retail later. This card is real.

This card is good in Leovold. Very good. People are brewing with it, and more importantly, people who are widely read are brewing with it. Even if a deck isn’t necessarily great, you have to look at what the EDH writers are suggesting to large swaths of people. There aren’t that many EDH articles so it’s pretty easy to pay attention to 2 or 3 articles a week based on new generals. Bruce wrote about Anvil this week, so did I and I imagine a few other writers will, too. If people pay attention or discover the card on their own and put it on TapedOut, EDHREC readers will notice and start buying it for their decks. It was always a good idea to read articles and see what people who have a lot of readers (like Bruce does) are suggesting to people but Anvil was the card that made me think to talk about it. Anvil’s supply and demand are both flat. The card is primed for an event to make it move and I think that event is Leovold.

If they put Archivist in every Commander precon set from here until eternity that will only make me feel better about the $3 foil. EDH demand has made this attractive before and a card with 3 printings but only one in foil that does this much work is worth looking at. If they have a full grip and you have Leovold, you’re wrecking the entire table with this, especially if your hand is empty. Dealers have been enthusiastic about this foil before and will again. The non-foil is trash, but I don’t hate the foil at $3. It’s got nowhere to go but up.

This card is pretty brutal. Nath of the Gilt Leaf and other decks like it (Hey, Nath would be pretty good in Leovold) use this card already and I expect Leovold to like effects like this. Playing a simple Megrim seems boring but getting value out of them discarding to your Anvil appeals to me. I have this card in a few decks and I’m never sad to draw it. It’s climbing already, so this can only help it climb faster.

I like when cards that are climbing on their own already get a second look based on a card that just came out. This is bound to make stuff happen.

There are a few more cards that go in the deck. Temple Bell, Howling Mine, Kami of the Crescent Moon. With the exception of the Kami, the rest of the article would be basically

Highlight paragraphs about Teferi’s Puzzle Box

Ctrl + C

Ctrl + V

Ctrl + F – replace “Teferi’s Puzzle Box” with “Temple Bell”

Pat self on back.

By now you’re equipped to hit EDHREC in the next few weeks as people start to populate tappedout with their own lists. Look at what’s trending. Look at how popular Levold actually is (I literally can’t fathom him not being the next The Gitrog Monster) on there, you know how to do some of this legwork yourself by now.

I’m not sure what I’ll be writing about next week, but with Marchesa a tempting card, a new Recruiter poised to make some decks better, others playable for the first time and giving us another lesson about how cross-format overlap only helps all of us who buy early and with a new Daretti Planeswalker making me want to brew, there is a lot to talk about. Keep paying attention to the rising tides and keep doing finance the easy way.

While it’s not the immediate, standout build-around card that The Gitrog Monster was, another Golgari monstrosity is piquing some interest.

An obvious EDH bomb, I identified this as a card to buy at its floor. It seemed too slow for Standard but its power was obvious in EDH. On the Brainstorm Brewery podcast, Ryan said that he was going to go pretty deep on $2 copies of the itsy bitsy Grafwidow and I opted not to join him. It’s not that speccing on golgari cards in the past hasn’t paid dividends – I’m writing this article on the computer I bought with profit that was in part to Deadbridge Chant spiking to $10 after all. But this didn’t seem like it could impact Standard all that much. Wish I’d bought in, frankly. I have stayed away from speculating on Standard cards for so long I can’t tell if a card is good or just good in EDH.

Then it spiked to $10.

Unless you listened to our set review episode and agreed with Ryan and dropped a few hundo on $2 copies of the Grafwidowmaker you aren’t in a position to make much money from her directly. However, you may remember that one of the things I do in this series is scour decklists to try and find financial opportunities. Older cards that suddenly are getting more play due to people building a new deck can suddenly become worth money, especially if they go from trash to staple the way a new deck can make cards do. I think there is money to be made on a few Ishkanah staples and there is still time to get in.

I am not going to load this article up with a ton of preamble this week because I basically am not feeling my typical, jovial self.

This card is going to do something someday. Basically, whenever a card is unique in its effect, you need but ask whether you think casual players might one day be interested in the effect. If the answer is yes, you have a delicate balancing act to think about. Is the card good enough that lots of casual players playing lots of decks will want it but not good enough that they need to reprint, functionally or otherwise, the card for future sets? I don’t know that they’ll feel the need to give us another Assault Formation any time soon, but making everything Doran opponents in the face is a cool effect. Spiders and other big-butted creatures get a massive upgrade from this. Legacy and Modern players can even use Assault Formation to kill opponents Tarmogoyfs with their Tarmogoyfs and break up ground stalls. I mean, they won’t, but they can and that matters. You know, to me.

Modern is also giving this deck a bit of a bump in noticeability because MTG Price’s own Corbin Hosler is streaming some doofy Doran deck in Modern where you use Zur the Enchanter to snag Assault Formation so he can attack for 4. There is removal and stuff he can also grab. The deck is a pile, but if piles didn’t move prices, Travis Woo would be out of a job. You know, more. This could put some pressure on the price, also. Those two factors may not be enough to drive the price right now but all that means is that you have more time than you would if Corbin’s stupid deck got played on camera (I know he streams, but I meant a camera that has people watching.  I don’t even watch him stream and I’m friends with him. I bet even his wife doesn’t watch his stream. Still, he writes for TCG Player, now and that has to count for something. At least the card is getting put in people’s minds.

I think you have a while to move on these, but I think you’re safe going pretty deep.

This seems like a no-brainer. I don’t know that this gets printed again easily and it’s narrow enough that there won’t be much pressure to do it even in the few avenues where they could do it. This is in a precon that theoretically has $60 worth of cards in it, but a lot of that is presuming you can get $0.50 for a lot of the uncommons. It basically has an $8 Commander Beacon, a $5 Eternal Witness and a $4 Solemn Simulacrum. These decks aren’t super worth picking up at MSRP to flip so basically the decks are going to players. This card is above its historic low but it didn’t stay there long. It’s trending up-ish thought not enough to make a pronouncement. I think there are enough $3-$5 cards in Eldritch Moon that will be $0.50 next month that you should start sheltering your value by trading for a $3 card that has upside like this. This doesn’t just go in Ishkanah decks, but 90% of the Ishkanah decks uploaded to EDHREC run it so if that deck is popular at all, this card will be, too.  If this goes down at all, I like it. If this goes up at all, I like it even more.

The rest of the deck is pretty cheap, and that’s appealing, too. When a deck can be built as cheaply as this deck can, it becomes appealing to foil the deck out. That can present challenges but people will still try. One challenge is the disparity in foil multipliers for other-format staples and also for cards that are reprinted in non-foil in Commander sets but are only foil in the original set.  $30 foil Urza’s Incubator doesn’t care that the non-foil is $4, now.

Still, it’s a deck where, once the artifacts like Door of Destinies, Ashnod’s Altar (ouch) and Sol Ring (I may skip this one) are foiled, you can finish it cheaply means people might try it. A lot of the spiders are affordable but there aren’t a ton of them and there could be opportunity here, if only just to trade the foils off.

These come as a set, and 75% (heh) of the Ishkanah decks are running this combo. Cheap spiders are easy to buy a few playsets of affordably and watch the price go up over time.

This was reprinted in a Commander precon which means as the non-foil price goes down, we’ll see greater and greater divergence of the foil price, which is already trending upward at points. We’re not getting more copies and even though dealer confidence went down with the reprint of non-foils, demand is going to eat copies eventually and when supply can’t catch up, the price will.

This card, near its historic low, has a mere 10x multiplier. Standard used this and maybe Modern will, so the additional potential exposure from some crazy Modern dredge thing could give this some traction on top of a crazy foil spiders deck. Dealers are staying pat on this, but a second spike will be harder and they’ll be flat-footed so maybe take a look at this.

Early Standard adoption messed this price up for life, basically. The non-foil is tanking but the foil doesn’t know what to do. Dealers aren’t in a hurry to race to the bottom so I feel like it’s in a weird spot. I’m not enthusiastic about its current price and I feel like it will be $3 before it’s $7. This is gross, but people may want to buy it now, and you never know if Standard somehow spikes this if people adopt Ishkanah in Standard. Strangers things have happened.

Also, buy basically every single spider that goes in the deck in foil, if you can. People who build this deck run a lot of crap spiders from the pre-foil era and a foil deck would have to leave them out (We hardly knew ye, Root Spider) but the deck is doable in foil. I don’t think a ton of people will build it, but it will be tempting once people see how cheap most of the cards are. Any cards, like Cryptolith Rite and Spider Spawning, that see play in other decks will have additional upside exposure and are better buys.

That’s about all for Grafwidow. Join me next week where the topic of discussion will be something else.