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MTGFinance: What We’re Buying/Selling This Week (April 19/15)

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By James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)

One of the most common misconceptions about folks involved in MTGFinance is that we are constantly manipulating the market and feeding players misinformation to help fuel achievement of our personal goals.

It recently occurred to us here that though we dole out a good deal of advice, most of you ultimately have very little insight into when we actually put our money where our collective mouths are pointing. As such we’ve decided to run a weekly series simply breaking down what we’ve been buying and selling each week and why. These lists are meant to be both complete and transparent, leaving off only cards we bought without hope of profit, where appropriate. We’ll also try to provide some insight into our thinking behind the specs, and whether we are aiming for a short (<1 month), mid (1-12 month), or long (1 year+) term flip. Here’s what we were up to this week:

Buying Period: April 12 – April 19, 2015

Note: All cards NM unless otherwise noted. All sell prices are net of fees unless noted.

James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)

BOUGHT

  • 8 boxes of Modern Masters 2 @ $191
  • 1x Tasigur, The Golden Fang @ $4.50
  • 2x Abrupt Decay @ $11.25/per
  • 5x Collected Company (Foil) @ $11/per
  • 1x Goblin Rabblemaster (Russian Foil Promo) @ $16

SOLD

  • 5x Dragonlord Atarka @ $18/per ($6 cost)
  • 5x Dragonlord Silumgar @ $15/per ($4.25 cost)

SOLD (Pucatrade)

  • Boseiju, Who Shelters All @ $10.65
  • Chromatic Lantern @ $6.15
  • 3x Stirring Wildwood @ $3.52/per ($2 cost)
  • 3x Simian Spirit Guide @ $2.82/per (pack opened)
  • 1x Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas @ $16.00 (pack opened)
  • 1x Duress (IDW promo) @ $20.99 ($4)
  • 2x Watery Grave (Gatecrash) @ $10.73 ($6 cost)
  • 2x Steam Vents (Guildpact) @ $18.31 ($8 cost)
  • 1x Amulet of Vigor @ $8.23 ($3 cost)
  • 1x Ensnaring Bridge (Stronghold) @ $19.63 ($10 cost)
  • 1x Xenagos, the Reveler @ $6.91 (pack opened)
  • 1x Remand (Jace vs. Vraska) @ $14.91 (set opened)

Most of my purchase activity this week was dedicated to locking down a couple of cases of Modern Masters 2 on pre-order at a very solid price that helps ensure value regardless of the final set list. The Collected Company foil acquisitions are reflective of my belief that a strong Modern deck using the card is inevitable within the next couple of years. As a small set rare, the foils can easily hit $20-30 should the theorem prove out.

On the sell side, I was able to out some of my key specs from Dragons of Tarkir pre-order season for a true triple up on the Dragonlords. Over on PucaTrade I continue to dump cards I expect are either peaking or likely to decline due to imminent reprint, with an eye to trading up into a $500-1000 card within a month or two of frequent trading.

 Guo Heng (@guoheng)

BOUGHT (MTGO)

  • 4 See the Unwritten for 2.04 tickets/per
  • 1 See the Unwritten for 2.09 tickets
SOLD
  • 1 Den Protector for $3.30.
SOLD (MTGO)
4 Dragonlord Silumgar for 13.26 tickets each
1 Icefall Regent for 4.81 tickets each
4 Atarka’s Command for 3.01 tickets each
“I cashed the MTGO cards out right after the Pro Tour, riding on the Pro Tour hype. I made an insignificant sum on the four Atarka’s Command, which I bought for 2.69 tickets each. The Icefall Regent was a draft pick from a release draft I did. Rares on Magic Online rarely hold a price higher than 4 tickets. Even multi-format star Tasigur, the Golden Fang could not hold a price tag of 4 tickets, what more Icefall Regent who is also in a large set. Dragonlord Silumgar is a card I was bullish on in my Pro Tour prediction article. I bought a playset for my own use on Magic Online the morning before the Pro Tour when he was a mere 4.39 tickets  (you know, in case he spikes). After three UB Control made the top 8 of the Pro Tour, and some spectacular Dragonlord Silumgar action on the day two and top 8 feature match, he spiked to 13 tickets on Magic Online. I decided to sell. I was sure Dragonlord Silumgar will drop back to under 10 tickets.  He is now 16 tickets and is the second most expensive Dragons of Tarkir card on Magic Online. Oh well. I didn’t see that coming. 
Re: See the Unwritten on MTGO, there was some great discussion in the Pro Trader private forums about the potential of See the Unwritten. I bought a couple more to bolster my long-term hold on Magic Online. I now have a paltry 9 copies of See the Unwritten. 
I sold the paper Den Protector that I had opened in one of my pre-release packs to a player as I don’t think Den Protector has more room to grow. “
Douglas Johnson (@rose0fthorns)
BOUGHT
  • 23x Aggressive Mining @ $.25 each ($5.75)
  • 9x Bladewing the Risen (FTV Dragons) @ $5.99 each ($53.91)
  • 6x Bladewing the Risen (FTV Dragons, SP) @ $4.99 each ($29.94)
  • 1x Dictate of Erebos @ $.40
  • 100x Heartless Summoning @ $.25 each
  • 5x Ob Nixilis, Unshackled @ $4.99 each
  • 19x SP Plunge into Darkness @ $.33 each
  • 18x Skill Borrower @ $.25 each
  • 40x SP Swan Song @ $.40 each
  • 17x Trade Routes (8th Edition) @ $.25 each
  • 1x Trade Routes (9th Edition foil) @ $2.99
Douglas says:
“For those of you who didn’t know, starcitygames.com is holding their annual Spring sale. While the prices of most staples aren’t cut by anything meaningful, there are still some deals to be had on bulk rares, which are my favorite speculation targets. I’ll preface this by saying that I usually don’t even pay $.25 for bulk rares (I only pay $.10-$.12 each when buying collections and bulk lots), but I’m putting this money down for fun and am perfectly aware that I might not make much of it back for several years. This type of speculation is a long-shot, and I don’t recommend throwing down cash unless it’s play money that you’re willing to throw away.
It shouldn’t take much explaining by me to see that a lot of these are just “Maybe this will eventually be in a Modern deck” bulk rares that I’m happy to sit on forever. Even if the theoretical decks don’t end up being good, I’ll be glad to have copies on hand to sell into the hype. Some other targets that I wanted but were sold out were Realms Uncharted, Gather Specimens, and foil copies of Deathbringer Thoctar. Meanwhile, Bladewing the Risen has been one of the only older Dragon cards to not see a ridiculous spike in the wake of Dragons of Tarkir. The only nonfoil printings are from Scourge and the original Commander set, the latter of which was the first supplemental product of its’ kind. Meanwhile, FTV: Dragons was also the first From the Vault set, sharing a ridiculously low print run. I believe a $6 price tag on the FTV foil will soon rise above $10. If you can still get in on non-foil copies at $1-2, I don’t think that’s a bad play either. Just remember that this is primarily an EDH and casual card, and you have to be able to unload all of the copies you get. I’m still sitting on 40+ copies of Ghave, Guru of Spores, so I didn’t want to go too deep on this because my only other out would be buylisting. “

So there you have it. Now what were you guys buying and selling this week and why?

James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.

ADVERTISEMENT: Get the Cube Starter Bundle with the 3rd Edition Grimoire Deck Box, the brand new Grimoire Deck Box designed specifically for the red mage in you. 

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Hits and Misses

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Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir has come and gone, and it has uncovered a lot of key information in the tapestry that is DTK Standard. I am assuming, of course, that this format (and all smaller, and therefore solvable, formats) is a game of Tipsy Tourney from Mario Party.

TipsyTourneyMP1

Some of the obvious winners were Dragonlord Atarka and Den Protector, while the two prospects I personally had the most vested interest in (Pitiless Horde and Dragonlord’s Prerogative) largely failed to deliver1.

Den Protector already appears to be sliding ever so slowly back down, and I suspect that its price coming out of the tournament last weekend is its ceiling for the remainder of its life in Standard. Den Protector is the type of card that is very good in terms of potential in-game value, it’s pretty good on rate, and it develops your board (which is why it may be “better” than Restock2). On the other hand, Den Protector is not likely a four-of in more aggressive environments, it is not likely to trade up at three mana (and even less so at five), and in a pinch can always be replaced with something else (nobody’s deck needs Den Protectors, in the sense that they need Nykthos to gain buku mana, or they need Mastery of the Unseen to gain insurmountable amounts of life). Those factors (as well as rarity) are what I expect to keep Den Protector largely grounded for the time being.

Dragonlord Atarka, however, is about to get paid. You know that a card is good when three-color decks are splashing to be able to play it at a Pro Tour. We talked about him (her?) last week, and apparently my read on the card barely scratched the surface.

Want to hear that bad part? I didn’t pick up any extras going into the weekend. I know, I’m bummed. I really want to play that Atarka Abzan deck. So why didn’t I buy in? Because I’m an idiot. Let me give you a long-winded response why:

My Magic finance philosophy is largely defined by something that I first spelled out in January of this year.

MyPhilosophy

The highlighted part is the most important, but I included the rest for a little context (it was B&R update time) and also because I liked The Office.

I try to approach Magic finance from the perspective of someone who is not a store owner (with the powerful ability to buylist), and has a fixed amount of Magic-dedicated capital to spend at any given time. While my two big buys prior to the tournament (Pitiless Horde and Dragonlord’s Prerogative) haven’t moved since the weekend, the buy-in for them was negligible. Had I bought Dragonlord Atarka in the days leading up to the tournament, they would have individually cost me anywhere from seven to ten dollars (my order of 26 Pitiless Hordes and 20 Dragonlord’s Prerogatives cost me about $17, shipped). Let’s say, just for fun, that I did buy 20 Dragonlord Atarka for $10 each (most places would upgrade you to free shipping at that point) the day before the event—the current best buylist price (as of Wednesday, April 15) is $11.75 to Troll and Toad. This means that if I want to make $1.75 (before shipping costs and ignoring any PayPal fees), I have to send these cards to Kentucky and hope they make it. The other choices are to try and sell them piecemeal on the internet or to PucaTrade them away for “value” (even though this means I won’t get any of that $200 seed money back in my bank account).

But let’s now say that the card didn’t break out over the weekend, either because of some unforeseen metagame wrinkle, or because the people with the best Atarka technology bombed out in Draft. In this case, I have spent $200 (a lot of money for me, and presumably most people) on something that I am about to have a very hard time recouping on. Even if that was all “Magic money,” suddenly my future buying power is hamstrung by the fact that I have a lot of money tied up in a card that I need to move at or above its current retail price.

Insurance and risk management professionals typically assess need by something called “MPL” or “Maximum Possible Loss.” If your $2,000,000 building burns down, blows up, or gets attacked by some kind of Cloverfield monster tomorrow, you have suffered the MPL ($2,000,000). While the technicalities are different, you should always approach an investment knowing what the MPL is. If I bought the dragons on Thursday, the best possible buylist price on Friday was $6.50, a loss of $3.50 on my initial cost of $10. In our worst-case scenario, Atarka bombs out at the Pro Tour as bad as that StarCraft guy they invited that one time, and the buylist price hovers around $5.50 (Thursday’s best price) to $6.50 until Magic Origins. If I want access to any of that $200 I just spent, I have to eat a loss of at least $70. Heck, I could have just bought a Wasteland at that point! Compare this to the maximum possible loss of the purchase I did make:

  • 14 Pitiless Horde at 30 cents, total of $4.20
  • 20 Dragonlord’s Prerogative at 38 cents, total of $7.60
  • 12 Pitiless Horde at 43 cents, total of $5.16
  • Grand total of $16.96. Shipping was free on all of these.

Let’s assume that none of these cards ever get outside of a bulk box, and the best I am ever able to recoup on these is a dime each—the best case then is that I’m getting $5 in trade somewhere or a free value menu lunch at Taco Bell. Comparing this to the Atarka scenario, I’m getting back 27 percent of my initial investment, versus 65 percent for the Dragonlord, but the buy I made is diversified (two cards instead of one), it had much less investment of capital, and I got significantly more cards. Even if I get literally nothing out of either purchase, it’s much easier to justify losing (and subsequently make back) $17 than $200.

That’s why I’m fine losing out on things like Atarka: I’d rather kick myself for missing a winner than for picking a loser.

I want to touch quickly on a unique topic that has been pretty popular in the ProTrader forums the last week.

Brief Marketing Aside: By the way, if you aren’t on the ProTrader forums, you really should be. I know this is going to read as me towing the company line, but I really think it’s the best value in terms of subscription for Magic content (especially with all the cool stuff coming soon!). I was using MTGPrice before it was cool to use MTGPrice. Alright, alright, alright.

RossLincolnAd2

Anyway, the first hot topic has been the new prerelease foil treatment. Ultimately, the debate has come down to actual scarcity versus perceived demand. Prerelease Tasigurs are much rarer than set foil Tasigurs, but how much extra is that gold lettering worth? Currently, it’s actually a detriment to the card, with set foils being worth roughly $30 and the promos going for about $25. Siege Rhino promos are worth about two bucks more than the set foils, though, and both versions of Anafenza are about the same. The similarity in all of these cases is that there is more demand for set foils than promos (according to the “Wants” tracker on PucaTrade, at least). Part of this is going to have to do with uniformity for playsets—it’s a hedge against narrow corner cases, but competitive players typically want their cards to all match to avoid giving away information unnecessarily. If someone absolutely has to own the rarest version of something from this (and presumably future) block(s), then they need to own the prerelease foil. Ultimately, however, I expect the prices to largely resemble the set foil prices, since it will be easier to find complete sets of set foil Rhinos than prerelease ones, but the prerelease copies won’t be too undervalued since they will still have appeal in singleton formats like Cube and EDH. It’s going to be a learning lesson moving forward, but any prerelease foil that is ever significantly cheaper than the set foil is probably a good buy.

Well, that’s going to be all for today. As always, feel free to reach out in the comments if you have any thoughts about this week’s article, and I’ll see you next week! Oh, and don’t forget to submit your questions for the mailbag article! I’ve gotten some good ones already, and it’s been tempting not to answer them right away!

Best,

Ross

1 Prerogative did make a few appearances, though, and my genuine expectation is that it will get more attention after Khans (and with it Dig Through Time) gets rotated out of standard. Remember that DTK will be in the format longer than KTK.

2 It still amazes me that this card sees zero Constructed play. It was kinda popular last time!

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Prediction Review

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By: Cliff Daigle

From time to time, I like to go back into my archives and look at predictions I made, and see if I was right or wrong. Self-reflection is an important part of the process, and anything that improves my ability to gain value is good.

The Curious Case of Time Travel (Jan. 16, 2015)

At the end, I made these statements:

  1. If you open the foil alternate-art Ugin, hold on to it. This weekend will represent the largest supply of these cards and the lowest price. If Ugin ends up as an awesome card in Modern Tron decks, then the pimp foil has yet another outlet to fetch a high price. Commander players all want the card anyway! (Including me)
  2. Trade away almost everything else. Supply on Fate Reforged this week is at its lowest, and you should sell into the hype. Everything is hyped, so move it all.
  3. The exception to this rule is Whisperwood Elemental. This is an amazing casual card but it’s also pretty great in Standard, as a free source of card advantage. I think it has room to grow, and multiple sites are increasing their preorder price on it.

I was right by about 50% on #1, mostly right on #2, and spot on for point #3. I’m actually a fan of picking up Whisperwood right now, because it’s just good. It’s six power and toughness for five mana, and is likely to be important for the coming year. Getting it now around $12 is okay, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it hit $15 or $20 around the time of Battle for Zendikar.

The Fate of Dragons (Jan. 9, 2015)

I told you to pick up foil Dragonspeaker Shaman at $8, and it’s gone up to $12. We might not be done watching it rise. I also called Utvara Hellkite, which has doubled.

I did not make good predictions about Dragon Roost, Dragonstorm, and perhaps worst of all, Scion of the Ur-Dragon. That one really stings. I seriously thought we would get a new 5-color dragon to play with, and that would preclude a run on Scion. The nonfoil has gone from $2 to $16, and the foils have gone from $50 to about $80. That’s a lot of value that I missed, because I wanted a new dragon.

The lesson here is that I need to make sure I don’t lose focus on what is, in my quest for what could be. Perhaps I was too bullish on a new 5-color legend, and lost sight of the fact that the old one would still be very good.

Commander 2014 Previews (Oct. 31, 2014)

So the moral of the story is this: Wizards is going to make sure that the True-Name Nemesis problem doesn’t reoccur. Each Commander printing going forward is going to produce enough stock to keep everything very reasonable to very cheap in price. I was way off for almost every card, but my advice to stick with singles could not have been better. The singles prices for this entire set are rather low, and two of my favorites (Dualcaster Mage and Feldon of the Third Path) just got revealed as judge foils.

Looking at the prices for Commander’s 2013 release is even worse. You might expect otherwise, but no, this has three cards over $5. Next year, get out of the reprints and fast.

Overall, one of my worst sets of predictions. The lesson is learned, and I’m +1 to Humility.

My Long–Term Targets (Sept. 26, 2014)

In this piece, I looked at several cards for long-term growth. It’s been seven months, worth peeking in for progress:

Unchanged: Garruk, Caller of Beasts, Scavenging Ooze, shock lands, Master Biomancer, Aurelia, the Warleader, Enter the Infinite, Thespian’s Stage, Sphinx’s Revelation, Rest in Peace, Ash Zealot

Gone up slightly: Kalonian Hydra, Rise of the Dark Realms, Progenitor Mimic, Chromatic Lantern

One of the worst feelings as a writer for MTGPrice is when I advocate for a card and then that card tanks in value. I still like the cards that haven’t changed in price, and at the least, I haven’t lost any value on any of these.

I think Ash Zealot is still a great card in Modern. If Snapcaster is good and prevalent, isn’t this a fine answer for Burn decks? I’d rather be deep on this than Zurgo Bellstriker, right?

Magic 2015’s Casual Appeal (July 11, 2014)

These are always good to look at in hindsight. Did I make accurate calls? Was my reasoning good?

I underestimated the appeal of Ajani, Mentor of Heroes in Standard. Plus, he’s relatively scarce, two factors that have kept him far above my target of $10, and also why I was so off on Nissa, Worldwaker. Garruk, Apex Predator, though, he did make it down to $10 but has bounced back up to $13. I was rather wrong about Jace, the Living Guilpact, though.

Perilous Vault went even lower than I thought it would, and I can’t wait to get foils around $15 when it rotates in the fall. I was spot-on with the Hivelord going to $7, though I was a few dollars off on the foil. The foil version of the Chain Veil is also a high split, at $1.50/$8.

Going Mad, Uncategorized

Going Mad – Hold Your Horses There, Kids

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We had an exciting weekend of Pro Tour coverage, with many of us following the coverage live, or at least tuning into the expanded chatter that social media brings to our fingertips.

Many of us acted on what we saw in coverage and what we heard through our preferred social media channels. Some of us probably even received multiple emails telling us all the hottest cards of Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir.

Every time a card that hadn’t already spiked appeared on screen, a flurry of activity ensued. I know that I immediately rounded out a playset of Den Protectors on Friday when I tuned into multiple rounds highlighting the card.

WE HAVE TO BUY SPECS OR WE’LL DIE
–Average financiers

And now plenty of people are the proud owners of way too many Den Protectors—congrats, guys, you won! After all, nothing could possibly go wrong at this point, right?

The card more than doubled in value, so all these buyers essentially doubled their money in three days. You’ve gotten all those copies you bought in the mail already, right?

Top 8

Zero Den Protectors… but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good card, right? I bet we’ll see a lot of them in good Standard decks that people who didn’t make the top eight played, right?

8-2 to 9-1

Seven Den Protectors, but I mean, come on, right? Winning eight rounds of Standard at the Pro Tour is hard. It has the best players in the world, after all.

7-3 to 7-0-2

Two. Yes, the word “two” is a complete sentence, so get over it, grammar boy [Editor’s note: I think he means me…]. A total of two Den Protectors showed up in one list that performed 7-3 in the Standard portion of the Pro Tour.

53 Problems

So taking a look at the 56 best-performing decks in the Standard portion of the Pro Tour, only three of them included Den Protector, a fact that can’t be ignored unless CTRL+F is somehow malfunctioning in my browser… in which case, we’ll just carry on as though everything I’m saying is still factual.

When you’re looking for a rare to speculate heavily on, picking the card that appeared in less than six percent of the successful decks at a tournament is probably not where you want to be.

But the good news is that all of the folks that bought these up should get most of them in the mail around the same time the price crashes back down to the price they paid. Sorry, guys!

Thunderbreak Regent Promo

re·gent

1. One who rules during the minority, absence, or disability of a monarch.

2. One acting as a ruler or governor.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Thunderbreak Regent was never meant to be the king of the format, but in the absence of a true ruler, Thunderbreak does the job. Also, did you see how F***ING SWEET that promo looks? For the first time in years, I’m going to take a real deck to Magic Game Day. Here’s some MTG finance advice for you:

1. Learn to play Magic.
2. Top eight Magic Game Day.
3. Profit!

Notice how step two is filled in here?
If you take a look at how Thunderbreak fared at the Pro Tour, you’re going to see some significantly different results. A total of forty copies showed up in the top-performing Standard lists across ten decks, a little over 17 percent of the field.
While Thunderbreak didn’t show up as much as Siege Rhino (14 decks), it’s probably a safe bet that there are significantly fewer Thunderbreak Regents in the world than there are Rhinos… and it also turns out that dragons have waaaaaaay more casual appeal than rhinos, unless you happen to be  in the ivory trade (or whatever rhino horns are actually made out of).
So what does this mean? Thunderbreak is going to continue to be popular, thanks largely in part to its amazing little sidekick Draconic Roar. I still think this card has a little more room to go, probably another couple dollars after we see it tearing up an SCG open or two over the next couple of weeks, and there’s a pretty good lifespan in front of it if either Magic Origins or Battle for Zendikar feature a five-drop playable dragon to replace Stormbreath.

Analog Lag

One of the biggest pitfalls of Magic speculating is the idea that everything is a quick flip and a quick double up.  This is the finance equivalent of playing roulette and putting a stack of chips on black, repeatedly. Sure, the first time you hit, you’ve doubled your money (never mind that this poorly thought out metaphor doesn’t take into account the physical shipping of cardboard thousands of miles ).

Nobody can deny the appeal of buying  in a ton of copies of cheap rares at $2 a piece and “selling” them for $4, because maybe making $2 on a $2 card feels cooler than making $3 on a $7 card, (shout-out to Dragonlord Silumgar). But high liquidity is hard to achieve in paper cards and one of the biggest risks to these types of spec targets is the “analog lag” we see in the time it takes orders to be picked, packed, and shipped. The lucky ones had their orders shipped out on Friday, but I’m sure that some sellers didn’t get them into the delivery pipeline until Monday.

The Good News

There is good news, I promise. And by “good news” I mean “there’s still hope” that Den Protectors see an uptick in play over the coming months as more cards round out the archetypes

When I tuned into coverage on Friday, I saw a ton of sick plays with Protector on camera, so I added a couple copies to my PucaTrade wants list to fill out a playset. After waiting ten minutes and seeing no trades confirmed, I added two foil copies and two prerelease copies as well, figuring that I would take whatever editions sent first and remove the rest… then I fell asleep on the couch and woke up to find that I was to be the proud owner of too many copies of this card.

So now I can speak from experience that going too deep on DPs is not where you want to be.

I still have hope that all is not lost: I threw my Den Protectors and Deathmist Raptors into a Sultai Reanimator shell and had an absolute blast taking the deck out on its maiden voyage. Protector is a really sweet creature that allows for so much value to be ground out in the long games … I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of this card.

Completely Unrelated

This weekend, I also had the opportunity to work as a buyer for Nerd Rage Gaming at the SCG States in Indianapolis. Some of the things you notice when looking at binders all weekend for hours at a time are the cards that everyone wants to get rid of, the cards that nobody wants to get rid of, and the cards that nobody even had in their binders to make offers on.

I bought a ton of Monastery Mentors this weekend, even after lowering the buy price. This signals that players just aren’t as excited about this card going forward and there is a good chance it’s going to keep creeping downward over the next couple months.

Another card I bought way too many of was Tasigur, the Golden Fang—I couldn’t offer a number low enough to make people say “no” when it came to selling these guys. There’s a good chance that the supply of this card has reached critical mass and the people that went deep on these have lost confidence in further (short-term) gains.

I saw virtually no Silumgars, Atarkas, or Ojutais over the weekend, which signals that all of these cards are going to remain strong going forward. We sold every copy of Atarka or Ojutai within a few minutes of buying them—both of these were wildly popular all weekend long.

The cards that most surprised me this weekend were Dragon Whisperer and Ojutai Exemplars. I only saw one copy of each of these cards in anyone’s binders over the weekend, which is somewhat puzzling to me. I know Dragon Whisperer definitely has a fan base out there in both the mono-red and the dragon lovers communities, so I could understand that this card was being held onto by someone. But where were the Exemplars? I don’t even have an operating theory on this one outside of coincidence plus variance.

Fetch lands were very liquid all weekend long: we brought them in easily and sold them just as fast. Fetch lands are a good holder of value and people’s willingness to sell them shows that they’re still readily available in trade binders. Multiple people selling me fetches over the weekend commented in one form or another that they’d be easy to replace, so that signals that it might be a while before these see any significant upward pressure.

Until next time, you can find me on Twitter at @GoingMadlem, and I encourage you to check out my article on MythicMTG.com later this week, too. I’ll be going over the most fun Standard brew I’ve played in quite a while.