I really tried. I thought about the Elliot Page movie “Juno,” or Runo the red-nosed Zombie Cleric, or Runo nothing Jon Snow – I probably spent two hours and 45 minutes trying to come up with a good pun for the title of this article so you’d know that I am writing about Runo and also that I am very funny and clever. Disarmed by my wordsmithery, you’d immediately drop any pretense of skepticism and follow my finance advice to the letter. I’m sad to report that I wish I’d spent that time teaching my daughter to read instead and that I’m still no closer to pulling off a decent pun title. I hope that’s not a problem because I’ll be honest, I’m feeling some pretty bad writer’s block, but just about puns. You see, this week I aim to let my specs do the talking for me. It’s an installment of my Pulitzer-prize-eligible series, my babies, and it’s all about Vampire Clerics and the betentacled sea monsters that they somehow make clones of.

First up, why Runo?

Umbris is last week’s news, this week we’re all about Runo. And Grolnok? @#$%ing Grolnok? There are like 6 total frogs in Magic, and it’s just another boring self mill- you know what? I’m not going to let myself get angry at data today. I don’t get paid to be angry at data or I’d be a climatologist. I’m someone who has to digest and regurgitate the data for my hungry spec babies and if I don’t like how some of the data tastes, it’s not my job to pass that info on. I just look at it and say “Oh wow, I guess Umbris isn’t as popular as a stupid tribal Frog deck that doesn’t even make the Frogs harder to kill in combat, which is great because they’re all like 5 mana 2/2s. Let’s all buy Xenograft since, you know, no Frogs.” The data has me mad enough to dump on a Simic deck. Jason Alt is disrespecting a Simic deck.

Toxrill at #2 seems legit to me, it’s a -1/-1 counters deck that doesn’t interact with any of the previous cards that gave creatures -1/-1 counters, so that’s neat. I hope you own Swiftfoot boots because Dimir decks do not have a good track record when it comes to paying 11 mana to get their commander out of the command zone. Dimir also doesn’t have a good track record of supporting Krakens and Sea Monsters and Leviathae (I assume that is the plural of Leviathan). No color combination supported it, until a Vampire came along and did it for us. I bet the high synergy (played in a large percentage of Runo decks and a small percentage of decks in general, meaning they’re overrepresented here) cards are going to be a trip.

I know I normally like to look at High Synergy cards first, but in this case, it’s going to be a lot of garbage cards under a buck. I think foils might be in play, and maybe some alternate art versions, but in general, we’re going to look for cards that can give us some more help.

A lot of the high synergy cards that were going to pop because they’re obvious have. Sure, Wrexial is good in the deck, but it’s not something you think of when you think “Sea Serpent tribal” the way other cards are.

Wow, you just straight cannot even blame Runo for this. If anything, this is actually a good buy at $5 since it has flirted with $9 without any help from Runo. I have to assume Koma did this? Imagine having a deck where you can tap all of their blockers and paying 6 mana for a card that makes some of your creatures unblockable. Maybe I’m the one who sucks at building Koma? All I know is that people complained when I play the deck so I took it apart. That’s right, I’m THAT guy, I’ll build any Simic deck, and even I don’t get Grolnok. Calm down, Jason, you said you weren’t going to do this. Just bring it back around to a spec and stop losing your cool, you can do this OK everyone I think this is actually not a bad buy under $5 but I bet there are better picks. File this under “maybe” and I’ll show you something remarkable.

You can be forgiven for seeing a $6 serpent that looks like it should be a bulk rare sitting there and thinking “Oh man, all of the good Serpent cards spiked already” and abandoning this page entirely, but I think that despite Quest for Ula’s Temple (BSB potw) popping, people just don’t know what goes in a Sea Serpent deck and don’t all know how to go to EDHREC and check. Also, there wasn’t a ton of data last week. We knew less than, so obvious stuff like Quest and SOYD for short popped but the meat and potatoes of the decks were tougher to sus out. Know how I know there is more money to be made than there is money made already?

You see it? Just in case you don’t, let me help.

This isn’t that unusual, though. You see this a lot when a card sells out on Card Kingdom. They went out of stock at the old price and it never updated, meanwhile TCG Player has been getting cards back in stock all day as individual sellers, responding to the spike, list their copies for more. If you click the link and go to Card Kingdom, you’ll see they’re out of stock.

OK, then. I’m stumped. It seems like there wasn’t actually a run on this card yet, despite it being in a third of all of the instances of the most popular deck from this set. Surely this is the only example.

OK, this is really shooting a lot of my holes in the “we missed the boat” hypothesis. We missed the boat on 2 cards, both of which went up when Maro wrote that teaser article and we went through it. Didn’t I even call Quest for Ula’s Temple IN THIS ARTICLE SERIES like 3 weeks ago? I want to say I did. If it was obvious to a dip#$% like me who didn’t notice that the wording on Necroduality was NOTHING AT ALL like the wording on Parallel Lives, it was obvious to savvier people who scooped up those obvious Leviaspecs. Eww, that doesn’t sound good to me, give me another crack at it. 3 colorless and 2 Blue chips. Eww, no. Krakenvestments. This is hard! The point is, there are more cards to make money on, so let’s do that.

These are at an all-time low, Gyruda is actually kind of good in Commander even if you don’t run him as a commander or companion, and this is collectible (within reason, come on). Gyruda is good in this deck and in general. Does the existence of a $0.50 copy or a $3 extended art foil dampen things?

Sure does! Extended art foils may be a better play. Gyruda is very good in the deck, but there are a lot of copies and there are a lot of cheap ones before the good ones go up. What is older than Ikoria? How many more cards from the Teferi precon that’s already insanely expensive can hit $10 this month?

3 printings, already went up in January and one of those printings is “The List?” *audible fart noise*

Who’s next?

Neither at an all-time high nor low. Maybe we can look at another graph for comparison to see if we see a similar shape.

Cryptbreaker, a card with many more copies out there, suggests the ceiling for Kederekt Leviathan could be as high as $10 a copy on Card Kingdom. Is that good?

Paying $4 a copy for a card you can flip into $6.50 in credit isn’t sexy, but it does seem safe, and I’ll take safe sometimes.

I have buylisted Heartless Summoning for $3 more than I paid on more than one occasion. It seems only right that it should happen again. Heartyboi would be a little tricky to reprint, synergizes well with the raft of expensive creature tribal decks we’ve been seeing lately, is popping up more and more, is between its historic low and historic high and is one weird Modern card away from being $10 again. This isn’t as sexy at $2 as it was at $0.50, but it doesn’t suck at $2 if you ask me.

You know I don’t like foils, but I don’t hate them, either, especially since a lot of this deck outside of “tribal deck” staples is $0.39 cards, making it an attractive deck to try and foil out.

If this stops at its historic high, it will hit $6. I am not sure it will stop at its historic high. That said, there are a ton of copies of the Commander Legends foil out there – I singled out M11 because the first printing is usually considered the “best” foil, but that stuff barely applies here. That said, stock is very low. Not trying to trigger that Fight or Flight response some human brains have to FOMO, I’m simply, as they say, sayin.

This is a lot of specs, I did a good job this week and I had fun doing it. Did you have fun reading it? Who asked you? Rude. Anyway, your homework for the week is coming up with 3 specs of your own and posting them in the comments section. I bet there is a lot that I glossed over. Always remember to investigate every instance of Card Kingdom being cheaper than TCG Player and don’t take any wooden nickels. Until next time!

Readers!

Usually the first second we have some EDHREC data, I write a “quick hits” article where I very briefly go over everything I think is in play, but with the EDH decks being spoiled, I think it doesn’t make sense to do that for this set specifically for a few reasons.

First of all, there is a card that’s lapping the other commanders, and it has been revealed for less time.

Second of all of the Vampires cards were either reprinted (the precon is actually packed with gas, to an insane degree) or they went up weeks ago when, frankly, every finance writer told people to buy them and, also frankly, you already knew that. If you care enough about finance to read this, you pay enough attention to know the writing was on the wall for Vampires. What wasn’t anticipated, however, was a card that is a Commander card but a set booster exclusive? I guess? It’s really unclear where this card came from. What I do know is that it’s not in the Commander decks but it’s a Commander card and people are excited.

Excited it putting it super mildly, sorry for burying the lede. People are hype.

If you add the number of Stefan decks projected to the number of Olivia decks projected, there are more Umbris decks being built right now than the two top Vampires combined.

Is that a lot? Is it not a lot? I don’t know. I do know that Umbris hasn’t been known as long and it’s making a ton of waves. Since the Vampires stuff is basically picked clean and Umbris came out of nowhere, I want to focus on it. Since the Umbris stuff is very specific, very potent and a lot of it is much older stuff that people forgot about it, I really want to focus on it. Focus on it I shall. Let’s get into it!

I could literally call it an article here and it would be nearly as valuable as me continuing. If a picture is worth 1,00 words like I’ve argued it is, here is 14,000 words on why Umbris is a game-changer for EDH. Some of these cards are EDH heavy hitters, but some of them have never really made an appearance and are going to go from 0 to 100 real fast. Let’s look at the very underplayed ones first.

Very, very, very good in the deck, mythic, from a set full of gas so the value is basically already established for the set, historic low price – believe me when I say I considered posting this and like 2 more graphs without comment and calling it a night.

You’re telling me that there are 2 Ashioks that are going from trash to treasure? You can’t miss here. Remember, I established that Umbris is very popular and that’s going to take these bulk gems that are at your LGS for their old price right now and make them into real cards people want. The demand looks like it will be there, and the supply is very much still in the woodwork. These have me salivating.

I LOVE this pickup. This card is very good but for some reason, people needed a better excuse to play this. Well, here it is. On the podcast this week, Corbin mentioned that irrespective of everything that is great about this card, we’re one “whenever a card goes to your graveyard, gain a life” away from this drawing your whole deck, also. This is not Griselbrand, but it’s legal and that has to count for something.

There’s even more gas here! I might argue that a few of these cards might be even better because they’re high play but low synergy but not generally considered staples. Once you filter out format staples like Cyc Rift and Rhystic Study, you wonder; which decks are playing Sire of Stagnation and Hell’s Caretaker enough to drop the synergy score? If Sire and Caretaker, and I suppose Forgotten Creation are getting help from other decks, but their supply is low because they’re not attractive buylist fodder, they could go up as high and hard as the high synergy cards.

This has been very sneakily going up. Buying at $1 feels better than having to pay $4, but this is a mythic and it could easily hit $10. Would Umbris be enough to get it there? Well, no, but something made it quadruple over the last couple of years and that trend seemed likely to continue.

Sire sees quite a bit of action and some more is absolutely not going to hurt, especially when supply hits a tipping point.

7 NM copies left and that’s all she wrote for CK’s supply, a site that, whether you like it or not, is a better indicator of EDH demand than any other site.

I love to talk about the reverse-J shape that is the first half of a u-shape, right? The U shape is a price recovering, so when you see that nice J shape, you know you have a choice to make – do you bet money that the price will recover? I would absolutely bet $7.78 a copy that these can flirt with $15 or more again, if not from this than from something else. Phenax being on the list kind of sucks, but I don’t know that it will be enough supply to keep Phenax down.

This is this set’s Chain of Smog and I don’t see a single person talking about it. Will it go up like Chain of Smog did? No, because Chain of Smog was obvious to people who don’t play EDH and this pick is only obvious to people well trained in sifting through EDHREC data. I bet there are half as many Planar Voids as there are Chains of Smog, though. This is really looking good to me and there is no reason not to play this unless it’s a nonbo with other cards you have.

It is difficult to overstate just how many cards are ripe to pop off on the basis of this new deck. Gravestorm was a middling card, but in this deck, it’s a painless Phyrexian Arena when it’s not growing your commander. Umbris is going to straight 1-shot people, I can’t wait to get a copy and built this dirt.

Safe to say we’re shaking off the Double Masters printing.

Seriously, just go to the page yourself and look. There is insane value in this deck. If it’s played as much as people say it will be, which is to say as much as the top 3 Vampires combined (and people are spit building Odric because other people said it sucked on Twitter, I think it’s just bad) then we are going to see a ton of cards go off hard. Be someone who has them because you heeded my warning. That does it for me, nerds. Thanks for reading. Until next time!

Readers!

My time is valuable, as is yours, so I want to get you this info as quickly as possible in case there is anything you can do with it. You know I prefer the ling, sustainable specs, but every time a new set comes out, some stuff pops in the short term and the window to react to it is fairly small. I feel like I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t at least apprise you all of what’s going on and leave the decision whether to chase these quick, fleeting specs up to you. You’re adults – if I can trust you to follow my methodology without misrepresenting or failing at it, I can trust you to decide whether you want to fight with a few other people over the last few copies of a card that popped based on something that was spoiled this week. I’m not here to tell you what to do, merely what there is that you could do if you were so inclined. If that makes sense. Anyway, here are your picks.

This is a fairly unnecessary Magic card. At first, people theorized you could do some relatively busted stuff with this card if you had bouncelands, but since that doesn’t work, basically the only thing you can do with this is the least fair thing you can do with this, which… I don’t know how to feel about. Colossus has caused people to take a second look at Abundance, for one.

Abundance was probably too cheap for how good it is given its relatively high number of printings, but a lot of those printings are weird and obscure and copies are drying up, fast. Abundance is a two card combo with Cultivator that dumps every land out of your deck which you may or may not find exciting. The issue is that this is a 2 card combo and neither one of those cards is your commander. I am fighting a losing battle trying to convince people not to run Grolnok as Frog tribal, and maybe this goes in a deck like that because Abundance can help if you’re milling yourself a lot, but a two card combo that plays all of your lands and draws you quite a few cards is still sort of difficult to do anything with. You need a way to win from that state, which isn’t THAT tough given the advantage, but which will still require more work, and the combo is two cards, neither of which is your commander. It’s doable, but I don’t see Abundance being $10 on the back of it. That said, perception is reality, and people perceive Abundance as a card worth getting.

Conversely, Runo IS a commander, and cards that pair well with Runo seem like a good play, whether or not he ends up popular. In general, anything that pairs with your commander is essentially a 1 card combo since you always have access to the commander, making it much more appealing than the Abundance shenanigans we mentioned above.

There is no reason to think a card that has already flirted with $10 before can’t get there on the back of Runo making people build a dumb tribal deck. If you check out the sea creature tribal pages on EDHREC, you’ll likely find some other cards like Whelming Wave and Fleet Swallower and it’s up to you to decide how compelling you find those. Personally, I don’t think they’re too bad. I don’t know how good Runo will be, but it won’t take much for people to buy in on spec, so get your copies to sell to them if you must.

There are a non-zero number of decent opportunities here, imo.

I think Blood tokens are pretty bad, but some of the cards that make them are pretty good.

Ultimately, Blood tokens likely end up in Vampire decks, which is a good thing because rummaging is a great way to trigger madness. Of all the Vampire cards that benefit, I think there’s a clear winner.

Not that Red struggled with this too much, but this is another way to grant instant speed to your spells, and Blood tokens make it easier than ever before to trigger Madness. Gorger has historically not been that good an investment, and the low price means there was little incentive for people to sell a lot of copies to dealers, meaning as the price starts to try to go up, a glut of loose copies from all over will flood in before you can realize a huge gain on your copies. That said, this is a solid card, people are buying any and all Vampire cards just because, and if this isn’t reprinted in the EDH precon, this is a card that we at least know will be in decks.

We don’t have any EDHREC data right now, but we will next week so tune in for hits that are less quick. Until then, get out of this stuff ASAP and buy longer-term gainers like I try to help you do. Be greedy when others are fearful, fearful when others are greedy and Cultivator Colossus is a $10 card. Until next time!

Readers!

It’s the best time of the year for speculators! Mark Rosewater has released his giant, cryptic puzzle and it’s up to us to scramble to solve it and post our guesses that will likely end up being hilariously wrong. If there is anything that makes me think we should pick something up or get out of it, I’ll mention it. This should be fairly straightforward and involve a lot of guessing, but it’s going to be fun and stupid and we all need that. Let’s look at what Maro said, shall we?

I’m going to go point by point down his list and see if there is anything we should care about. Sound good? Too bad, here we go.

• The following counter types: bloodline, croak, invitation, judgment, omen, slime, and suspect

I don’t think there is much here. New counters are whatever, and without any clues, I’m eager to just move on.

• A new mechanic that removes something never removed before

A lot of people are speculating that this is emblems. That certainly makes sense – emblems are impossible to interact with and it’s annoying sometimes. I don’t think there is much doing here, but if the ability to remove emblems is unique, the card itself could matter. That said, it likely won’t – most emblems aren’t a big deal.

• A popular and powerful creature card from an Innistrad set gets reprinted

Of course this isn’t Snapcaster, but there are a few cards it could be. I am not sure which, but I have a few ideas.

With several printings already and a low price, this fits the bill description-wise but a lot of other factors make me think it’s not it.

I don’t think this card is safe for Standard.

I think the card here is most likely not legendary, not reprinted before and over $20, but I don’t there is money to be made selling and trying to rebuy every card that fits that description. Despite being the most-discussed point on twitter, I don’t think we can reliably make money here.

• A new artifact token, along the lines of Clue, Food and Treasure

Please stop. It’s too much.

• A card that makes red Dragon Illusion creature tokens with flying and haste

OK, that’s pretty cool but I don’t know which cards it will impact. It won’t be a landfall thing, and Dragons are pretty big which means it won’t be something that gives you a lot of tokens so this is most likely something that is cool but middling and we can probably ignore it. As usual, new commanders making new archetypes gives us the most movement, one individual card can’t do as much.

• A mechanic that first appeared as a faction mechanic returns

There are too many to guess which one and whether it would matter. In general, mechanics that have an associated “Fluctuator” type card might see that card move, but not much else.

• A new legendary creature card that combines two characters that previously each had their own legendary creature card

Olivia and Edgar the happy couple, I assume.

• A new card that lets you cast certain cards off the top of your library

The cheapest version of Scroll Rack is $15, and the cheapest foil is… gross, also $15.

Scroll Rack is going to be able to interact with this card no matter what color it’s in, unlike a card like Mirri’s Guile or Sylvan Library. If you want more topdeck ideas, look at a topdeck deck like Aminatou.

My personal feeling is that if the card is in Black, Citadel goes up immediately. If not, Citadel goes up until it’s reprinted. This is a very, very good card and it’s going to see play forever.

I think the buy-in is too high here.

• A new mechanic which is a mirror of an already existing mechanic

I got nothin

• A legendary character returns, but now as a Vampire

People are speculating that this is Thalia and if it is, cool?

Next, here are some rules text that will be showing up on cards:

• “Choose a number between 0 and 13.”

Could be anything

• “with mana value less than or equal to the number of Vampires you control”

All of the Vampires cards are in play, especially ones like Edgar who make tokens.

• “If it’s red, you may cast it this turn.”

This seems like an impulse draw thing. In addition to the artifacts we mentioned before, there is another way red decks can stack the deck.

Goblin Recruiter is another good one. I like Snoopy long-term, especially the EA copies.

Irrespective of whether it pairs nicely with this new card, Snoop is a buy.

• “Zombies you control have flying.”

Gross for anyone on the ground

• “At the beginning of your upkeep, any opponent may sacrifice a creature.”

“may” catches my eye here. This likely lets them trade for something better, which could make this a chaos or group hug card, but it’s impossible to say what would go up.

• “Kraken, Leviathan, Octopus, or Serpent”

Any card that has flirted with $10 is a buy at half that even if it doesn’t pop as a result of this new card, which it might not.

• “twice that many of those tokens are created instead.”

Is this Parallel Lives? It would be INSANE if they reprinted Parallel Lives, but it seems equally insane that they would do a functional reprint. Could this be on a creature? I don’t know, but what I do know is that Parallel Lives is long overdue a reprint, and anyone holding now could get dinged really bad.

I don’t particularly want to lose $50 a copy and this announcement has me spooked enough to consider this number.

I haven’t decided to dump my copies, but I’m sure thinking about it.

• “Whenever a Human you control dies,”

Shrug

• “equal to the number of permanents you control that are Spirits and/or enchantments.”

This could be VERY cool. I don’t think any spirits move that weren’t going to on account of there being a spirits precon, though.

• “Then if you control exactly thirteen permanents,”

Man, I don’t know. Sac outlets? I don’t think telling you to buy Ring of Gix is making anyone any money, though.

Finally, here are some creature type lines in the set:

• Creature – Human Ranger Werewolf

• Creature – Angel Soldier

• Creature – Zombie Scorpion

• Creature – Serpent Egg

• Creature – Eye Horror

• Legendary Creature – Human Peasant

• Legendary Creature – Spirit Warlock

• Legendary Creature – Slug Horror

• Legendary Creature – Kraken Horror

• Legendary Creature – Vampire Noble (two new ones)

I spent a lot of time looking at these without a single smart though occurring to me. I’m fine just letting the chips fall where they may here.

A lot of this was guessing, but thinking about these clues and making safe bets can give you a leg up over everyone who’s waiting for everything to be revealed. I think there is bound to be a big, splashy card in Crimson Vow and if it’s not Parallel Lives, that reprint is coming in the next 6 months at the latest. Thanks for reading my guesses – until next time!