Readers!

I usually have a lot of preamble just because I like to type a bit to get into the mood before I bang out an article. It’s my process. You remember that movie Finding Forrester where Sean Connery has the main character type his work and then once he’s had a running start, write his own thing? This has nothing to do with that, I just usually write a paragraph where I tell you what the article’s about but I spent so much time talking about how it’s going to be a shorter paragraph than normal that it isn’t anymore so I guess never mind. Anyway, the point of the article is that there are cards in Mystery Boosters that will probably tank and go back up and some that will tank and not go back up. A lot of obvious factors like a rarity shift don’t need to be explained, but some cards recover better than others and we need to try and figure out all of the factors that matter and which apply. Sound boring? Well, it’s not. I did one of these articles when Iconic Masters came out and Austere Command hit a buck. Did you buy any when that happened?

I’m not going to catch a dectuple up on all of these, but I’ll sure try not to miss something obvious. So what kind of card always recovers?

Eternal Witness is not rare and never has been. However, Eternal Witness gets a non-zero amount of play outside of EDH (though less than it used to) and is staple-tier in EDH.

It’s the 14th-most-played card in EDH as far back as they’re displaying data. Still. Despite not having been printed in the last 2 years. Staple-tier cards shrug off reprints. Which cards don’t?

Cards where the price was predicated more on scarcity than demand. This is the same set and same rarity as Rhystic Study, a card with more printings. It cost less at its peak and costs a LOT less now. Is Rhystic Study liable to tumble to $0.25 like Fog Frog did when it was printed in Modern Horizons before I could sell my dozens of copies? Let’s figure out what the difference between Rhystic Study and Fog Frog is in terms of demand.

One of these cards is play SIGNIFICANTLY more than the other. Sure, Rhystic Study is nominally a common in the Mystery Boosters, and while it can’t maintain $20, it will likely rebound from its floor in a way that Fog Frog never will. Is there a number that will help us figure out which cards will rebound? I don’t know if it’s worth trying to find one. I think that perception of a card’s worth is going to contribute to it maintaining or regaining value as much as anything else so if you don’t mind me using my gut a bit as long as I report the numbers for you to make up your own mind with, I’m going to talk about some cards in Mystery Boosters that are going to take a hit and come back. I feel good about how much money I made people on cards like Rune-Scarred Demon and Austere Commander in Iconic Masters, so let’s find the next Austere Command, shall we? OK, that’s the last time I’ll say “austere” during a global pandemic.

Mystery Boosters basically chopped this price in half already. Aura Shards is about halfway between “Fog Frog” and “Rhystic Study” on the “will it rebound” scale and while it’s a different rarity and a different set, it did manage to climb quite a bit, especially recently with all of the crazy enchantment stuff running around. Who knows what a whole Theros block rather than just a set would have done?

I personally think Shards isn’t done going down, but it’s bound to recover quite a bit. In terms of the raw number of decks it’s in, it’s closer to Fog Frog than Rhystic Study which puts this on the low end of “likely to recover” but I think if this is the low end, we’re in good shape with anything played more than this. This was printed as uncommon twice and was printed at “uncommon” in a commander deck so it was one per deck. This has more printings than most cards in the Mystery Booster set and if we could graph the trend in adoption on EDHREC as a function of time, I’d imagine it’s declining a bit, but until something comes out to replace this, it will reign supreme.

One more thing to consider is the topic of “discovered demand” as I call it, which basically states that the demand is what it is partially on the basis of the barrier to owning the card. Would this be in more than 9,538 decks in the last two years if it didn’t cost $20? Seems likely, and now that it’s $10 rather than $20, we’re about to see if it goes up. It’s an older card, only people who could afford to pay for it could show it to players who hadn’t seen it and the Enchantment block didn’t give us nearly as many Enchantments worth caring about as the Estrid Commander deck did, but this is still top-tier removal and I think it ends up between $10 and $20 when the dust settles. If this is the low end, again, I have a lot more confidence in these other picks.

While a lot of this card’s price is predicated on scarcity and it sees less play than Aura Shards, I think this has cross-format applicability with casual and more of a future. It’s a newer card, more people know it, and being printed at mythic twice means far fewer copies, which is the biggest knock against Aura Shards that was in Invasion, Commander, Commander Anthologies and now Mystery Boosters. With the large number of cards in the set, an uncommon isn’t the same as an uncommon in a set like Modern Horizons – with roughly 1 uncommon per sheet, they’re basically mythics, but I still think Archive is more scarce and buying in at $5 feels OK. Waiting to see where it ends up feels better. People aren’t aggressively updating prices during this crisis (I’m rhyming, a week cooped up does things to my brain) so we may want to give things a while to stabilize, but I think this is a good buy when it hits bottom and starts to recover.

This card’s price is NOT predicated on scarcity and is all about playability. I don’t think this recovers quite like Eternal Witness but it might not be far off. Witness is played in 5 times as many decks but it also has 5 times as many printings, so we’ll see.

Vessel seems like it’s going to sell for what it was selling for within a year. That’s predicated on paper Magic not going away entirely. Depending how many LGSs shut down in the wake of social distancing and how inclined people are to play cards in person in the future, the strength of the game overall remaining basically what it was means this price will be basically what it was. We’re not getting nearly as many new copies of this card as people think.

I think there are a few cards unlikely to recover because their price is predicated on scarcity more than play or because this one last reprinting was the last nail in the coffin. As a rule, anything played in more than 10,000 decks on EDHREC is probably a slam dunk price rebound if it doesn’t have a ton of printings, but there are other factors to consider, obviously. If you want more picks, I’ll cover this same topic next week. Covid has slowed things down enough that we can take an extended look at the set. Until next time!

Readers!

Go read last week’s article and the one from the week before if you haven’t yet or need your memory refreshed. I’m sort of eager to just get into it.

We identified War of the Spark and Core 2020 as having a lot of potential, but based on those criteria, Shadows over Innistrad and Ixalan actually have the most potential. Are we waiting for them to pop or do we just not know what we’re talking about?

In any case, let’s look at Ixalan because there are bound to be interesting cards in that set, even with them randomly yanking the rug out by reprinting cards like Revel in Riches. Let’s begin.

I wouldn’t have predicted a year ago that Gishy would be the number 1 commander, but here we are. There are a lot of EDH “staple” type cards here which means they’ll be somewhat easy to reprint, which may attenuate a lot of our potential growth here, but let’s look at what matters in any case.

This is a little tricky to reprint and I think this shows that the best time to buy in was peak supply, as is always the case. That said, this is going to be an important EDH fixture forever and this could hit $20 despite it doing a very bad, clunky impression of Gaea’s Cradle. It turns out Growing Rites of Itilmoc is sort of like Frank Caliendo’s impression of Casey Kasem – it sort of sucks but it’s the best thing we’ve got and we should recognize that.

I liked this a lot as a bulk rare and picked up a ton of copies and while it’s not rising as much as I would have liked and seems to have plateaued a bit, it’s tough to reprint, is very powerful, and there’s every chance a new card gets printed that makes this $10 overnight. Barring that, this slowly climbs to $5 and I’m OK with that.

This card is 100% getting a reprint, probably soon. When it does, buy in hard. The price will tank in the near term and I need you to know that I’m betting my own money that this recovers. For whatever reason, they don’t seem to be able to print something stronger than this in a Standard set. If you make it better, it’s too good unless the set has no tribes and they wouldn’t print something like this in a set with no tribes. Players want this card and they’ll always build tribal. I’m not that bullish on its current price, but if a reprint comes along soon, I’m all in.

Compass is in the process of selling out and with double-sided cards particularly tricky to reprint, expect this to hold value well. While you’re at it, why not look at the promo editions that had the treasure maps on the back? Those are Ugin’s fate tier promos and basically unreprintable, but they’ll also shrug off reprints of the regular versions.

Briefly, other cards I like include Spell Swindle, Herald of Secret Streams, Settle the Wreckage, Arcane Adaptation, River’s Rebuke and Primal Amulet. 

In fact, there’s a good case to be made for buying quite a few copies of Arcane Adaptation.

That little blip was when people thought about using Turntimber Ranger to generate an infinite number of tokens. Anything that can mess with tribal affiliations like this will always get tested and has the capacity to spike to $5. If it could hit $5 when it was in print, imagine how high it would go now if some other new card made it relevant again. Is Thassa’s Oracle THAT much better than Laboratory Maniac and Jace that Inverter went from a non-deck to Tier 1 overnight? Maybe yes, maybe not. Either way, Inverter went banana pancakes, as did bad cards like Paradigm Shift when Oracle came out. They won’t stop making tribal stuff because it’s an easy way to appeal to casuals and competitive players alike and with Arcane Adaptation gettable for literally a tenth of a Euro on MKM, it’s not the worst idea in the world to throw a few European monopoly bucks at 100 copies or so to make you look like a genius in a year or two when they accidentally make this a $10 card. It could get reprinted, in which case you’re barely out anything, otherwise you look like Nostradamus. If you must speculate, speculate in this manner, I beg.

Speaking of begging, please comment on this article. I’m going to be stuck in my house for 2 months and I need some diversion. I’ve watched everything worth watching on Netflix and Prime so I either talk with you about cards or I rewatch 6 Feet Under or something. I know what I’m voting for. Until next week!

Readers!

Last week I did some minor number-crunching with sets using Dawn Glare data and I think we can add to that article without rehashing it, which means I can cut to the chase and give you the sweet, sweet picks you crave. This is an excellent time to go back and read that article because I am going to act like you read it. I’ll wait.

I’m sure you read it last week, but thanks for refreshing your memory. Last week (or 10 seconds ago) I hypothesized that War of the Spark had a lot of growth potential once recency and pack availability stopped enforcing the box price. With a lot of cards above bulk but not a ton above $10, there was a lot of potential for growth in a lot of cards, and War of the Spark has a lot more valuable uncommons than a lot of sets. Let’s look at those tables again and see if there are other sets we should dive into as long as our hypothesis panned out. We may identify a set with a lot of potential before it blows up just by virtue of comparing…. well, made-up metrics I invented. That said, I’m using made-up metrics to determine which sets deserve a deeper dive, not which cards, so I don’t see a problem with using an untested method – that’s sort of our thing. Let’s begin.

To review, the “average” column is the set EV divided by the number of cards over $1. That tells you the average price of a playable card. My hypothesis was that the lower the number, the more potential the set had. Instead of of having one or two cards worth a ton, it has a lot of cards, any of which could go up in value. They’re not worth nothing now so there is potential there. If a low average price is what we are looking for, of the current sets, the only set with more of what I consider potential than War of the Spark is Core set 2020. Like War of the Spark with its powerful, uncommons, including Planeswalkers, 2020 has quite a few good uncommons as well. Let’s look at 2020 in hindsight. That was not intentional, but I’m leaving it, this is my article.

Core Set 2020 has a LOT of good EDH cards. There are a ton of very popular commanders in the set and a few cards that will likely impact the format for a long time, such as Agent of Treachery, Field of the Dead, Flood of Tears and Moldervine Reclamation. A lot of these cards are in 5 or more percent of the eligible decks from the last two years and are under $5, which means barring reprint, we could see them approach $10. There is a lot to like here.

Initial hype for this card was high and I think we are likely seeing the last of the price’s decline. You can be glad you waited to buy in but I don’t know how much longer you want to wait. More competitive players will see the drawback as disqualifying but more casual players both relish getting a $3 Tutor and also like the utility of being able to strategically help another player out. The unique mechanics of giving another player a card attenuates the reprint risk on this card quite a b it and I think this easily reaches its previous price of $5 and grows beyond. How long you want to wait for that is up to you, but I think we’re at the floor.

The foil price graph is even better if you don’t have copies already. This barely even had a spread if February when the price seemed to finally plateau and I think this could grow at 2 to 5 times the rate of the non-foil. It’s risky to pick up foils of cards that casual players prefer, but I think this has potential utility in cubes. $3 seems like a very friendly entry point for a foil tutor.

I’m glad I looked at this set when I did because the slow, steady growth of Shared Summons from bulk rare to $2 utility card was so slight that it didn’t trigger any algorithms that catch cards having meteoric rises but did manage to double the price of the card in about 6 months. The Promo Pack version is sold out on Card Kingdom at $1.50 and the non-foil is going for about that now so I think you get in on these while you can because there is still room to grow.

Card Kingdom priced the foils to move but sites like Cool Stuff have one or two copies left of the foil at around $2. With non-foils going for $1.75 on Card Kingdom, I don’t hate foils at $2 where you can find them, obviously. Again, foils aren’t my thing and they’re tougher to move on casual cards, but the non-foil price trajectory is astounding and when the price of the foil is practically the same, buy a few, you rarely lose if the card goes up at all.

Despite being the second-most-played card in the set in terms of percentage of eligible decks playing it, non-foils of this card are dirt cheap. The foils, however, appear to be making moves and while the buylist remains mostly unchanged, the retail price briefly flirted with hitting its day-1 impatience price, which is good news. I think this card is a $5 foil barring reprint in foil. I think the reprint risk is medium to medium-high on the non-foil but buying in foil insulates you from a lot of reprint avenues. Pick the non-foils out of bulk and set them aside – you’ll be glad you did for sure if these don’t get a reprint soon, and even if they do, these still likely end up far above the bulk rate.

For comparison, Risen Reef, a card that got some Standard attention, is played a nearly identical amount compared to Reclamation. Reef’s price is dropping but it’s still around the $5 level despite not seeing play outside of EDH anymore. Obviously price memory and a lack of desire to slash the price to $2 is propping this up a bit, but a card played the same amount is worth twice as much. I think in the near term, these cards probably meet in the middle at $3 and probably both grow together from there.

Here is something else I noticed.

Yarok is built 1.19 times as much as Kykar but costs 3.4 times as much. Is there something to be said for being a top 20 commander of the last 2 years versus top 30? Sure, but I think those numbers are bound to shift. Let’s look at trends.

Both are trending down in price slightly over time but Yarok saw a big bump early, probably when some streamer made the deck that’s obviously very good and people followed suit. Neither card really did much outside of EDH but I think the prices may be done falling. Buy prices seem to have stabilized and I think both graphs are worth watching. One of these cards is priced incorrectly relative to the other one and once people aren’t able to get copies as easily, that will change. One thing I will say is that Yarok goes in the 99 way more easily than Kykar and also, the prices of commanders are a little risky for me considering they print about 200 new Legendary creatures a year. Yarok’s ability makes him one of the best BUG value cards, and very playable in the 99 of another one, Muldrotha. Kykar seems like the next Jeskai spellslinger commander will be better than he is. Does that account for the price discrepancy? Maybe, maybe not.

Banned in Brawl? This is definitely the price floor, then. Give this a tick to finish cratering, then scoop up a card that’s the most-built commander, most-played card and is good enough to ban in other formats. It’s a non-mythic, non-foil in a core set, but it also flirted with $6 for a time. This is a 5-color deck staple forever and I think once this bottoms out, you scoop these and wait. If it dips more at rotation, good, buy more.

If I don’t get a better idea before next week, we can take a look at Ixalan with its paltry 1.58 average price on our made-up index. Is there an explanation for that or is Ixalan pregnant with possibility? That’s your homework for next week. Until next time!

Readers!

Rather than my usual article, I’m going to dive into a discussion about EV and talk about why I think War of the Spark has a lot of potential. That’s it. That’s the whole intro paragraph.

This is the paragraph where I talk about what my methodology will be because we need some copy above the fold otherwise it will look really awkward when the paywall slams down in the

middle of a paragraph. No time for that today, we have EV to discuss.

If you go to the website Dawnglare (I just learned today it wasn’t spelled “Dong Lair” and now I’m disappointed) you’ll see box EV for each set, which is a bit misleading for a few reasons I’ll get into. First of all, they don’t count foils. They don’t count foils for any of the sets, so it’s even, but it also doesn’t accurately tell you the ceiling for boxes. Danwglare if very much a worst case scenario for the EV over about 12 boxes or so if you don’t get any sexy foils rares or chase uncommons. Considering foil Veil of Summer is the most expensive card in Core Set 2020 and you have a fairly decent shot at cracking one of those in 12 boxes, it seems silly to always omit foils. Dawnglare ignores a lot of factors but what it’s very useful for is comparing sets heads-up. That’s the first stop on our journey today.

These are the approximate values in cards you’ll get if you bust an average box of each set, and while averages can be misleading, comparing them to each other seems fine since the average is basically equally misleading for any given set. Foils will throw this way off, but you can’t bank on getting good foils so I’m fine ignoring them for the sake of our exercise. Besides, since we are thinking about which sets will have singles we’ll want to buy, foils won’t matter unless we plan to buy foils.

Since people are redeeming fewer sets on MODO than they used to, the price of a box isn’t as enforceable as it used to be. Set EV used to be fairly rigid because if the EV of a full set got to be too high, people would just buy in on MODO, cash out and redeem the set, putting more paper copies into the market and satiating some of the demand. It wasn’t QUITE as efficient in practice as in sentence form but it was a system that worked. Sets like Dragon’s Maze were redeemed less because it wasn’t worth bothering and it kept the price of Voice of Resurgence from tanking. Sets with a ton of value were redeemed more and there was more supply. Absent MODO redemption and before weird stuff like collector’s boosters and other wackiness, we can at least look at why these numbers are the way they are. We can use MTG Price to zoom in on individual sets.

We’ll be looking for whether the value is spread out or concentrated. If it’s concentrated, the packs are bad because anything that doesn’t have the chase card in it is worthless and the chase card is the chase card. If you pay $100 for a box of a set with $45 box EV, you better hope you crack some foils. Sets that are recent and have the value more spread out seem much more interesting to me because any number of those cards could go up and bring the overall set EV up with them. If there is one $100 card in a box, it’s going to get reprinted and tank everything. If there are 30 cards worth $4 and they’re all played in EDH, they could all potentially go up and add 30X to the set EV for every dollar they all climb. I think (before I check) that War of the Spark has a flatter distribution than most sets and I’ll verify that.

There is more analysis to do here, we could list the number of bulk rares because a bulk rare going from unplayed to played like in the case of Inverter of Truth has the highest potential but for the most part, this sort of jived with what I had assumed. The sets in bold are currently legal in Standard but I went back farther because I wanted some historical context for what likely happens to these Standard sets after rotation.

You can figure out a kind of average price for a playable card if you divide the set EV by the number of cards over $1.

With this new metric, War of the Spark has the second-lowest average price per card over $1, which is almost what we expected. I didn’t count on Core set 2020 throwing things off with an astounding 48 cards over $1. With supply generally lower in a core set, there is more opportunity for good uncommons to be worth more than $1 and the core set had quite a few of them. Of the sets that already rotated, let’s look at the sets with lower values and see if we can guess what will happen with War of the Spark (and I guess Core set 2020).

I think a set like Ixalan shows what we could expect War of the Spark to eventually do. Ixalan has a lowish box EV right now but it has a lot of cards over $1; 41 to be exact, and a lot of cards over $5. I think with the high number of Planeswalkers, good removal spells and EDH-playable uncommons, we could see War of the Spark maintain its current value and have quite a few cards that could increase.

This is everything over $2 in Ixalan. With the exception of Search for Azcanta, these are almost all EDH cards. Barring a reprint, Growing Rites should continue to grow, Banner will approach $10, Amulet will see some growth and Revel in Riches will weather the storm caused by the printing in Mystery Boosters.

Here are the interesting cards in War of the Spark.

It obviously would have been better to get these for $1, but we can’t do that anymore. That said, I still think this can hit $5 barring a reprint, foils are only $5-$6 right now and this may be better than Windgrace’s Judgment in a lot of decks, but why not play both? I like Judgment, by the way.

I don’t know if you buy these yet since the buylist price is tanking, but the retail price appears to be stabilizing. Supply is what it’s going to be so demand will be the driver here and demand for this card is good – it’s the 10th-most-played Gold Instant on EDHREC. This and Casualties are very different, but they both do a ton of work and they both have upside.

There are a lot of copies of this card, but I said the same thing about Inexorable Tide and Atraxa sent that into the stratosphere. I think Atraxa demand is known but there will be another commander where you’ll want to proliferate sooner than later and this goes in that deck. Does the name Karn insulate it from reprint risk a bit? Not sure. This seems fairly reprintable, but that’s why foils exist and those are currently only a few dimes more than non-foils.

These have to be at the reverse-J shape portion of the eventual U-shape, right? The price was high due to impatience from Atraxa players, supply caught up with demand and then supply stopped. So what happens to these foils now? I’m not sure but I think when they look like they’re recovering, it won’t just be Atraxa players who want these.

This is worth as much as it’s ever been worth and I think it’s not done. Barring a reprint or obsolescence from a better clone, which is likely, I think this hits $5.

Major stores are sold out of this at $2.50, and I think t his could be $5.

Foils of this flirted with $5 and I think we could see that price again.

That does it for me this week. I normally don’t like to work this hard so next week we will make up fewer of our own metrics. Until next time!