Readers!

Using EDHREC or, if you want to do it the hard way, I guess, other sources, it’s easy to see which cards are getting played in Commander and which aren’t. Look at a set and see what’s getting played with. That used to be enough information for us. Barring reprints, cards were printed the same amount, roughly, foils were flat and still special and older cards went up when new cards made them matter again. The problem is, the more they wanted us to buy, the more the cards had to be good. They need to keep pushing the gas, which means more good cards per set, more sets, which means more cards you need to play. Do you build a new deck or take cards out of the 3 week old deck you’ve played twice to make room for the new cards that made your old ones obsolete? And if a card is too good to be made obsolete, do you take comfort in that and invest or do you worry about what the card that makes people stop playing Dockside Extortionist is going to look like? I personally worry about how just getting played a lot doesn’t matter, and also doesn’t seem to be useful for figuring out where prices will go. Let’s look at a few cards, shall we?

Forgive my hasty alignment using paint of all programs, I don’t want to take the time to fix it because I wanted to make a point. Both of these cards are played a lot in new Elesh Norn decks, and in the format in general. One costs more than the other despite being newer. Does that mean Terramancer is played more across the format?

No, in fact. There are lots of versions of Welcoming Vampire, and Deep Gnome Terramancer was in a set that has a lot of really good cards. Do I expect Terramancer to hit $10 when Welcoming Vampire is played more and hasn’t come close? How many reprints and variants and promos does it take to drag a card down to being a buck less than a card played half as much? As there other factors at play here?

The real question here is that whether Deep Gnome Terramancer is a good pickup at under $5. We’d love for it to hit at least $10 if we’re outing at retail prices, much more if we want to clear our shipping costs buylisting them. Is this sort of spec dead? Moreover, is being a format staple even good enough anymore?

We used to be impressed by a card being in 10,000 decks as far back as EDHREC measured, and one of the reasons I cautioned against arbitrary levels like that was that the number would have to constantly change and no one would know where it should be. At this point, is 22k enough? Why can’t 41k and a year of time offset multiple promo versions? What trajectory is Terramancer even on?

If 4 is the floor on this card and it’s already rebounding, will it pull farther away from Vampire despite being played less? What are we to make of these contradictions? Worse, is being in 40 or even 50k decks enough anymore? With all of the new keywords comes enablers and that means cards get more and more specialized until the decks build themselves. We used to be at a sweet spot where staples were an index and individual cards being buoyed by new releases meant some narrow cards would get a new look and that scrutiny would lead to buying and price increases. Now, the cards are so specialized that people are basically leaving the precons as-is a card being in a 40K deck matters more than being in 40k decks, you know?

The neon Hidetsugu and the promise of extended art foil Boseiju and foils of the EDH precon cards continued the unsustainable trend of collector boosters being opened until the prices were all meaningless. Is The Reality Chip a buy at $3? More than that, are we OK with a game where the 9th most played card in the most popular format is $2.50? Let me rephrase that, of course I want a game like that, but is it worth doing Mtg Finance the way I have done Mtg Finance the last decade if the demand can’t ever catch supply?

The days of snagging like 100 cheap copies of something you think is going up on TCG Player seem over. Mtg Finance has always been “adapt or die” and after taking a month off to grapple with how I felt about my current approach to Mtg Finance, I think I am ready to adapt. To that end, I’ll be spending the next few months developing and reporting on new techniques and pointing out times where my old approach pays off.

It wasn’t that Kibo, Uktabi Prince couldn’t move prices, it’s that Ravenous Baboons were the only card the really went anywhere. The price immediately went back down as there wasn’t much real demand since the card doesn’t especially synergize with Kibo and it was more likely just an old Monkey people remembered because they’ve been playing as long as me.

My current method, which we’re updating, is still useful for paying attention to movement, usage, relative ubiquity. Staring at the Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines page on EDHREC doesn’t feel like it used to where specs would leap off of the page at me. I just see the same mono-White Blink deck stuff that I said would go up based on another White Blink commander but didn’t. Cards used to be cards, but now the product matters a lot. Limited releases like Baldur’s Gate give us stronger signals, faster. Look what is in 40k decks and has been out exactly as long as Deep Gnome.

Moving forward, I’ll be targeting older cards for specs and only straying into newer card territory when it makes sense to do so, or if it’s in a dynamite set like Baldur’s Gate. I think Baldur’s Gate has more to give us, so I’ll be diving directly into that set next week. Until then, I usually include specs and this week I mostly told you what not to buy, so here are some presented without explanation.

Until next time!

Readers!

2022 was a big year for me, both professionally and personally and looking back over everything that happened and that we put up with, it’s amazing we survived this year intact. It was full sensory overload for us 24/7 and it feels like everything I used to like is coming at me too fast, from superhero movies to Magic releases to family and personal milestones. We’re going to wrap up the year by reflecting on how we got better at picking out cards that were going to pop based on clues from EDHREC.

The first thing I acknowledged was something that I had hinted at privately but felt like I didn’t want to exacerbate by drawing too much attention to it was what is dubbed the “Command Zone Effect.” I wrote about the impact of that show on the price of a card like Fervent Charge and how it’s worth subscribing to their Patreon to see the episodes early. Cards that do something crazy, even in a contrived scenario, are bound to pop in the short term and being ahead of the curve.

It is always noteworthy whenever I show tips or tricks about using EDHREC, it might be worth refreshing your memory about it from time to time. I sometimes forget things I’ve learned about the site, and I am looking at ways to make more of our data presentable. 2023 will be a great year for analytics, even the ad hoc, self-taught analytics that you could do yourselves.

This is the first time this year I mentioned Setessan Champion, but I mentioned it a lot after. That card is still way too cheap and if you take nothing else away from this year, get that card. Sell it whenever. If it gets reprinted, buy a bunch of copies. It’s very, very good and it has a extended-art version that is less impacted by a reprint. It’s crazy good, even now.

Baldur’s Gate was one of the biggest sets for EDH of the year and it’s going to be the gift that keeps on giving for a while. I highlighted the cards that mattered then in this article, but I really think it would behoove you to take a look at the set’s page yourself. We got a TON of cards, a TON of cycles, a new kind of companion, Gates support and a ton of Legendary creatures. The set is so dense and we’ve only scratched the surface.

I am not sure how to categorize “Buy The Bottom” but I think it’s the best thing I wrote this year, or at least the article I’m proudest of. Give it a read if it’s been awhile.

With Wizards inundating us with new Legendary creatures all the time, Legendary-only decks seem more and more possible. I wrote about the cards that will get played no matter what the rest of that deck looks like.

This was the first year I really made a habit of going back and checking high-impact sets a few months later to se where the prices ended up when the dust settled, and doing the same for decks was a revelation. This was the first but not last time I made a point to write about my process.

Sometimes I think a card is underplayed and that’s all I have to say about it.

It pays to go back through the EDHREC Top 100 cards, because any cards that got added to that list in the last year are very pertinent. Some of them haven’t quite moved in price despite being very high on the list, so if you want 5 examples of cards to watch, here you go.

In this 2-part miniseries dubbed Brother Vs Brother and Brother Vs Brother 2: the ReBrothering we widened our scope a bit to look at the cards that in general will go up as a result of lots of new artifact decks being built. It doesn’t matter what the individual decks do if you know what the next 6 months of releases will do, so stock up now.

2022 was a year full of slight improvements to my methods and I’m glad I took the time to document them. Signs of growth in my skills at picking specs are encouraging and despite doing this over a decade, I’m pot committed to this life and ready to charge into 2023 with all 3 guns blazing. Until next year!

Readers!

We talk in this series a lot about what is new and impacting things, as we should, but sorting by set can obscure the picture a bit and sometimes it pays to zoom out a bit and get a view of the format as it’s shaping up by the week or month or last 2 years. EDHREC has modes for all of those and some of the results may surprise you the way they did me. We have paid a lot of attention to the commanders that are the most popular within their respective sets, but once a month when they’re previewing a new set and therefore we don’t have any new cards in hand to write about, we can take a break from the constant assault of new products and take a look at the ones that came out a month ago and are already forgotten about.

Or are they? As much as new product is coming out way too fast and it’s hard to keep up, we can tell with data whether people are blowing by the new stuff or going back for it. Not only that, when we expand out to look at all decks rather than by set, we see which sets are making an impact. I think there are a few clear winners.

This is this month, where we see Jodah, Urza from the precons and Mishra all newly in the mix, as well as Ghyrson Starn from the 40K decks. When you look at weekly, you’ll see some jump up you may not have expected.

Urza and Mishra continue to be huge players, and Kibo, a deck we went into in depth because I had a good feeling it would make an impaft, is 14th this week, beating out Propser and Kenrith which are always Top 20 decks. Surprised? I am a bit about Urza and Mishra because I didn’t really expect them to be popular for more than a week or two but so far they’re hanging on on in there. The shine is off of the 40k commanders a bit, probably because everyone stopped theorycrafting and went to their LGS who was charging $100 for the Black precon and they came home and built Kibo like I did. Still, Urza, Jodah and Mishra are nuclear hot and they all get a look today.

Before I get too deep, I noticed a LOT of the cards in the Urza deck are out of the “Buckle Up” Kamigawa precon with Shorikai and I want to point out a few images.

I expected Kappa Cannoneers to be $10 on its own by now, and if it ever takes off in Eternal formats (read “if those formats come back”) despite being reprintable, there will be a period in time where you’ll benefit from being stocked with these guys. The deck has a LOT of $5 cards in it – I realize that a lot of that “$60” is bulk rares being assessed at a buck, but there are quite a few $5 cards despite it being a precon they sell bricks of on Amazon and with those cards including Parhelion II and Swift Reconfiguration, you have a lot of chances to make money buying at $30 (there are more for this price on eBay, I don’t know why I assume you’re reading this and thinking I’m an idiot but I should also point that stuff out in case you’re new).

This JUST got a reprint, which it’s not taking well as it heads to $5 and maybe below. I love this below $5 given its past capability of hitting $20 and flirting with $23 on CK. Will it get that high again? Doubtful, but while we’re getting an influx of supply, we were getting an influx of players, too, at least we were before Chris Cox took over Hasbro. We’ll see if this recovers, but it’s going to be very useful in a year of Artifact sets.

I just like this card at $5 even given the overall shape of the graph. This was on its way to $10 before we had a ton of Artifact sets right in a row.

I feel like people skipped over this card because there are too many new cards, but this is one of the strongest EDH cards I’ve ever seen and I can’t figure out why I’m the only one who thinks so. It’s slow and clunky but it’s also, at worst, a 4 colorless mana graveyard wipe that comes with a really big body. This is exactly what I want to be doing in EDH, and if people want under $5 for it, I’ll oblige them. I am willing to concede I could be wrong here, but I know these cards take some time – it took 18 months of sweating for my Aetherflux Reservoir spec to pay off and when it did, I got to feel like I understand EDH for the first time in 18 months. I would like to think I understand EDH better now than I did then.

I think there is only one question we need answer here. Can an erstwhile $20 card on its third printing, the second of which it shrugged off effortlessly (Can you even tell where on the graph it got reprinted?) make you money if you buy in absurdly cheap?

This seems like a nice price…

The new frame looks great, too. I realize Brother’s War is a smorgasbord of reprints and not all of them are going to rebound, but, come on. If this doesn’t rebound in a year or two then I don’t know anything about anything.

Last but not least, it’s a card whose text box I haven’t been able to make myself read it its entirety. You Legend cascade? This is a lot of fun to a lot of people and they’re building it, STILL, so let’s sell them some singles.

This has to be the worst card people like. Still, it’s a big, dumb Timmy card and those are a buy under $5 if you can get it for that, still. I like this as a pick-up very much though I’d never put this in a sleeve ever. It’s like the opposite of Nautiloid Ship – one card I think is too good to be this cheap and one that’s too bad to be this expensive. For reference, they’re both like $5.

That does it for me. I think we’re going to see Artifact stuff as a whole go up, so if you can buy some preconstructed decks with a lot of those cards, you’re basically investing in an index fund and that’s way safer than playing the market, especially when the market seems unable to stave off Hasbro wringing us all out until we stop excreting money. Will the game collapse under its own weight or is having 9 different versions of a pushed Elesh Norn that is going to be absolutely MISERABLE to play against in Commander good, actually? Find out when I do. Until next time!

Readers!
Occasionally, I like to take a trip back through Magic’s history and look at old sets and see if there is anything we can learn. Released all the way back in December 2022, a set called Jumpstart 2022 came out, and while reviews were positive, the set was quickly abandoned by players and collectors later in the week when Starter Commander was released and the Dominaria Remastered spoiler season kicked off. What went wrong? Was the initial hype unfounded? Why did most people only play one Jumpstart prerelease event or fewer? Today we’re going to take a look at Jumpstart 2022 because no one knows what’s in that set and see if there is anything we can learn for the next time a set comes out (Friday). 

If you remember back to December 2022, Jumpstart had a very popular commander named Kibo, Uktabi Prince. If you can’t remember all the way back 3 sets ago, that’s OK. Not many people remember this, but there were actually 14 total Legendary creatures in Jumpstart – a sane and rational amount of Legendary creatures. It was a risky gamble and WotC, to their credit, learned their lesson and haven’t had a set with fewer than 50 Legendary creatures come out since. With only 14 Legendary creatures, did such a small (lol there are like 900 cards in this set and Ben Bleiweiss tweeted about it today but I deactivated my account so you’ll have to take my word for it) set impact the format?

As it would turn out, the impact of the set never truly materialized in the window between its release and the release of the next set and no commander got even 400 decks built around them in that period. The likelihood that builders would return to the set after this many products have come out in the interim seems unlikely, leaving me to believe that Kibo will remain the most popular commander. I think, however, there is some merit to discussing some of the other commanders because it’s very likely commanders with identical abilities will be printed in the next year due to the law of averages and we can apply these lessons to that product.

Get it? He’s a rabbit and his name is presto and he’s a magician and he pulls stuff out of his hat! That might not sound that funny to you, but when you realize that they only had a few weeks to work on this 819 (literally) card set, it’s amazing that anything this flavorful made it into the set.

First up, we have the new cards which people who built Preston when it first came out might not have had access to. These cards are all solid in a Preston deck, but I don’t see anything financially relevant. If these cards haven’t popped after this much time has passed, it’s unlikely they will because of Preston.

I fully realize that Teleporation Circle is NOT Conjurer’s Closet and never will be. But, like…

Closet really likes to be $10 despite multiple printings. I think with one printing, Circle can be $10 and I am betting on it.

I really hope it’s not obvious to you why this card never got there because it isn’t to me. This card is bonkers and it’s from a terrible set no one wanted to buy. And yet…

One nudge can get this from 15 pennies to 15 dimes, 15 quarters is not out of the question imo. I’ll take that. This card isn’t great and instant speed versions of this with upside like Otherworldly Journey exist but if you build this deck, you play every Flicker and that includes Flicker.

I’m personally building this as Bant landfall and relying on my lands to give me all of the triggers I need, but a lot of people insist on playing a bunch of dumb snow cards and I only like one or two of them.

Don’t even love this as a spec as much as I like it as a card and I’m marveling at how cheap every snow card from Kaldheim is. They tried to make snow a thing and Isu isn’t going to be enough. MH1 gave us good Snow stuff, but also made the boxes so irresitable there is too much of all of it.

Second spikes are great, but look at this graph to see what third and 4th spikes do. If you’re worried about the Mystery Booster printings, there is always the foil that costs… something.

CK does indeed have a $45 NM copy and 3 MP copies for 20ish but I am not convinced this is a $100 NM foil. CK has one if you think it is, though. There are a lot of MP copies on TCG player closer to $50 than $100 and this isn’t unreprintable, but the foil did get a little help from not being on The List.

Most of you will recall what a wild year 2022 was and though several products have been released since early December 2022, we’ll always fondly remember the two days we were thinking about Jumpstart before we started Dominaria Remastered spoiler season in earnest. Could we have had something special with Jumpstart like we did with Emiel and Tinybones and Allosaurus Shepherd, plus great reprints like Craterhoof? Maybe, but it doesn’t do us any good to look that far back and wonder “what if?” That does it for me this week, folks. Thanks for reading my words and brooking my tone. Until next time!