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This week I didn’t want to flog the dead horse that is the latest commander/modern mishmash reprint set because the cards that are going to rebound are obvious to you if you’re reading this article. I think one of the best-kept secret of mtg financiers is that you will immediately look amazing at it after about 4 weeks of effort compared to someone who doesn’t pay attention at all. Most of making good mtg finance calls is just paying attention, and if you’re paying attention to my articles, that’s probably paying attention enough. This article isn’t me teaching you to pay attention, this article is me being paid to pay attention for you, something you’re capable of. I’m absolutely fine with that arrangement, it is my preferred method of laboring under capitalism. If you’re fine with me being fine with it, let’s talk about what you already know a bit more.

Since all parties involved accept the basic premise of the first paragraph, we can all agree that we can basically dispense of another article where I tell you more cards from Double Double Toil and Trouble Masters. I talked about the ones I strongly believe in last week and we can always revisit the topic next week when prices are sure to have stabilized a bit more and the picture of what’s a nice pickup at its bottom is a bit clearer. I’ll pay attention to that for you. I was going to belabor the point a little for the sake of the content but I owe you better than that. I needed a backup article idea and James Chilcott told me “Keep it simple. Tell me 5 cards you think are underplayed” which, I don’t feels like a cheat…somehow? Thematically? It just seems like such a dry topic to drop in your laps, I thought I’d type a few paragraphs to lull you into a false sense of security and then spring a really basic topic on you with no pizzazz and then

5 Cards I Think Are Underplayed

It’s not the same as the title of the article because I didn’t want people to see the number 5 in the title of the article because then this really looks like I farmed this job out to someone at buzzfeed. You know what? This is a good article topic, I’m going to have fun researching this and presenting my findings to you. I’m going to stop apologizing for this being the article, but I kind of blew a lot of the word count space I would have needed to introduce these topics a little better so we’re really going to have to get into it very quickly

OK, can we move on? No, you’re probably right, and the very least I should address what is the obvious implication of my bias regarding this card. I think this card should be in every EDH deck. Without exception. That’s probably a little hyperbolic-sounding, so I will tone it down and say that every deck should play this card with exceptions. I can’t think of any, but maybe you like not having the best way ever to take care of a problematic commander. The price started going up in 2021 and it will probably sound ridiculous if I take any credit for that, right? I’m not that much of an egomaniac but, like, the dates line up, that’s all I’m saying. I think this is a buy under $10 forever. It’s not on the Reserved List but the last time they really talked about it for a reprint that is going to come out anytime soon would have been like 2 years ago when this was like $3.60 on TCG Player. I think we’re good to cash in buying these under $10. I really don’t see a reprint coming anytime soon and if they’re not really nimble enough to respond to an increase caused by us buying. This feels like a slam dunk and I would honestly bring this card up every week in this article if I didn’t think you’d all get sick of that.

Acquire absolutely RIPS as a Magic card but something very important happened in 2020 and it caused people to not really play cards that searched other peoples’ decks because everyone was playing on webcam and being germaphobic in person. I think there is pent up demand for Acquire that will actualize when play in person returns in full. Barring another reprint or media insert, these are a buy under $5.

This version is exceedingly rare for some reason, I guess because people stopped picking up the comic book when it was like Arrest, Feat of Blood and like, Castigate back to back months. I was in it for the early Faithless Looting and High Tide but a lot of people dropped the book making these concentrate in the hands of dealers. When those copies sell out, the card will basically disappear and command a premium. I like this version under $10, $10 may be pushing it a bit. It’s around $6 or $7 on TCG Player right now, I like that number quite a bit.

MANNNN I wish I had calling this sooner. It basically bottomed out at $1 for the superior Urza’s Saga printing but not you’ll be lucky to get these under $5 on TCG Player. It’s a shame because I really believed this card would rebound but I was too busy watching Tiger King and playing Animal Crossing to go back for it. I like this under $5 for the record. It shrugged off its reprinting, and by the way, reprints like that have a way of creating demand that will put pressure on existing stock, also, because some people literally didn’t know the card existed because it’s been that long since this set came out. Imagine you started playing a year ago! You wouldn’t be able to keep up with current releases, let alone go back to Urza’s Block. EDHREC ranking on this keeps slipping year to year but it will come back, and when it shows up in the high synergy cards of a sacrifice commander, you’ll be glad you HODL’d.

I don’t expect any of you to know this, but I write an EDH column on Coolstuff Inc. and I will, no joke, add Snow-Covered Lands to my decks literally just to play this and then at that point, why not Sunstone? And Glacial Crevasses? Might as well jam an Extraplanar Lens in there. I run Extraplanar Lens in 2 color decks, it doesn’t even got that well whenever I draw it, I don’t care, snow lands, BABY! Look how pretty and how cheap this pathologically playable card is. Fill your shopping card and this is going to be $3 again.

This whole entire article is positively RIFE with my bias, so why stop now? I am biased because I run a lot of of landfall. However, this is a Rhystic Study that banks the cards for a few turns then turns into a beater, or you literally go troll mode and hit them with The Omenkeel and steal their lands. It is so funny to steal people’s lands in EDH, they get so upset. Especially on webcam. I write the name of the person I stole the land from on the infinitoken to mock their pain. This is 2 kinds of card in one and I saw literally 2 articles today (fine, I wrote one of them, but I still SAW it, I had to see it to write it) talking about what a boring card Rhystic Study is. This is a more fun Rhystic Study, and it doesn’t cost $30 for a common masquerading as a rare.

I am glad we decided to do the article this way this week. I have some more opinions and I’d like to discuss them with the Pro Traders in the Pro Trader Discord, so if you’re not signed up for Pro Trader yet, it might be a good idea. My article was late this week and our loyal Pro Traders deserve some compensatory picks from me and I really hope they’re non-obvious since I feel like I accidentally hyped them up a bit. Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next time!

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Dominaria United is coming eventually, and on the tenuous basis of one thing I heard, that there will be a Legendary creature in every pack of Dominaria United, I am going to do that whole speculative thing I do when I say “it’s a D&D set so buy Orcs” or whatever. It’s great because you don’t have to be right, you just have to have people who are also wrong buy the cards from you rather than from someone else.  If we are getting new Legendary stuff, and not just reprints of older Legendary creatures in new, premium borders (which is what I actually want) we could see some bold new additions to a kind of deck we haven’t seen much lately until it reappeared with Shrines – the 5 color, Legendary goodstuff deck. We have seen some even more instructive variants, so I will be looking for inspiration in 2 places – Kethis, the Hidden Hand decks and Reki, the History of Kamigawa. If people are going to use the Historic keyword again, it pays to know what a deck built around something Historic plays, and if those decks are to be bolstered by new printings, it pays to know what’s in them. I am imagining we can see quite a bit in the high synergy cards from those decks and go from there. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Kethis has a lot of goodies for us, and while they’re not all worth a look, one class of cards is – the cycle with all 3 copies represented in this Top 10.

Of those 5 spells, only Urza’s Ruinous Blast and Karn’s Temporal Sundering are worth even a dollar, which means there is financial opportunity because they’re cheap or no financial opportunity because they’re so cheap and have been the whole time. Short of printing a new Legendary creature that interacts with those spells better than with any other spells, the slight trickle of copies into a few niche decks hasn’t really excited the price of cards in a set where there are only 19 cards worth more than $2 and 7 of them are reprints. I like Temporal Sundering, though, actually.

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I am willing to entertain the idea that we might have missed some value jumping around from Kamigawa to Street Fighter to Stranger Things to New Capenna to Baldur’s gate, so why don’t we check back in on Kamigawa now that prices are at the lowest point they’re going to go to?

As you can see, the commanders didn’t exactly end up where we might have expected. More people are playing a commander that interacts with 2 of the 5 colors of Saga more than they’re playing Hidetsugu, the face card of the set or Kodama of the West Tree. I got the top 5 correct but the order was VERY wrong. I would have picked Umezawa, then Hinata, then Isshin, then Tatsunari then Light Paws. I did OK but some of the ones I underrated deserve a second look. In fact, there is a spec in each of the top 5 decks that I missed before.

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A new product means new cards. Am I talking about Kamigawa 2049 specifically? You’d think so, but no. Even though I don’t have any of my boxes yet, it still isn’t the newest product – the precons are.

Preliminarily, (I use that word a lot, I hope it’s a word and I don’t sound like an idiot) a lot of the data is tainted by cards that came in the precons. I won’t take up TOO much of your time up top, but I do have to write a little above the fold and this is something I should talk about because I work at EDHREC and know a little about how the site works. For example, I know that later this week, we’ll be adding the precon upgrade guides to the site and showing data regarding what people leave in and take out. Before we look at the new Commanders, let’s look at what a precon upgrade page looks like.

The “sets” dropdown at the top of every page brings up this menu, at the bottom of which is a link to the precon upgrades section.

It is sorted by deck, not by commander so it shows you the cards that synergize with the deck as a whole, which sometimes is impactful. A card in 250 Strefan decks and 250 Kamber and Laurine decks is in more decks than a card in 400 Leinore decks only, and it pays to have that information.

Clicking on one of these commanders takes you to the deck’s page.

What I wanted to point out was this menu on the left.

The “cards to add” and “cards to cut” section are a wealth of very specific information about how people are modifying the precons. It cuts a LOT of noise if you can see that 63% of players are adding one particular card to a precon and removing the other cards people are running in the deck can help you focus on the most impactful cards. I like showing people how to use the site for finance purposes, especially if I can contribute to how a new feature works since you’ll want to use that the same way I do.

We don’t have the full Kamigawa precon data now so we don’t have the section up, but make sure you check it out when it’s finished. Until then, though, I’ll do it manually. If you think it’s a typo when I say that the most popular precon commander isn’t in the precons, you don’t understand WotC. The most popular commander is only available in… I want to say set boosters? I don’t actually know, I didn’t order any set boosters. All I know is that a very narrow card that doesn’t do anything surprising is in the set.

Remember everyone built a Shrine deck when Sanctum of All was spoiled? Well those same cards that were in play then are in play now because we finally have a Sanctum of All commander.

I don’t think there is much here but I’m still going to delve into it.

Well, yeah.

Well, also yeah. Still. Paradox Haze gave me an idea.

This is at its historic low. If it goes any lower, buy in harder, but don’t not buy in now just because it could dip more. If Paradox Haze is a top card, Sphinx can fill a similar role, especially at half the price and double the utility. It’s clunky and people forget the turn ends because your post-combat main has to end before the additional turns start, but this is a solid way to give you a ton of Honden triggers. This and Paradox Haze gives you triple trouble, which is also the name of one of the worst Beastie Boys singles. And that music video with Bigfoot? Yikes.

I’m afraid to look, but I sure hope I said to buy these when CK had them for literally $7. I still like them at $18 since they seem poised to flirt with $30 on CK. Go Shintai is nominally a shrines deck, but you can play Enchantment reanimator with Omniscience and get a lot of work done. With more and more ways to cheat stuff into play or reduce costs as WotC rapidly runs out of design space because they print 40 Legendary creatures every 3 months, Omniscience will go up until it’s reprinted. If this does get reprinted, let’s remember the shape of this graph. Let’s buy the dumb things for $7.

This card doesn’t belong under $10.

CK doesn’t think so, either. That’s why they are paying an astounding $13.65 in credit. Figure it out. This isn’t as good as Estrid’s Invocation but there are probably a tenth as many copies of it out there.

Since the deck was Sissay Shrines before and now doesn’t have to be, a lot of people are throwing Sissay in the 99 but retaining the whole “Legendary matters” angle.

This isn’t the Sissay I was talking about above but it did make me think of what Maro said about “batching.” The context for this was that a lot of people liked batching Enchanted, Equipped and “has a counter on it” as “modified” the way they did with “Historic” in Dominaria. Legendary could be back as part of the “Historic” bath or Legendary could get batched with something else. Either way, if a large swath of cards become especially relevant, cards very specific to that type are in play and this is a $30 card in waiting. Don’t sell these.

I don’t know if Go-Shintai is the real deal or if the fact that they printed Farewell, a $0.25 card that makes this deck just automatically completely scoop, in the same set(ish) will be relevant. Only time will tell. Until then!