Greetings!

I know in this series we like to use data in the weeks that it begins to trickle in to try and predict the future. It’s been working out pretty well for us and it makes us look particularly prescient when someone says “Did you realize Squandered Resources was  $25?” and you show them a big stack of them, or at least the Legacy duals you bought with the profits of your 10,000% gains. It doesn’t always work out like that, obviously. Sometimes this is way harder and the tea leaves are way tougher to read. Sometimes, though, stuff is way easier because sometimes we get a new commander for an entire deck archetype that already exists.

Why Would a Deck People Already Have Built Help Us?

It’s worth addressing this point because if I don’t, it threatens to fundamentally undermine the entire thesis of this piece (which, I guess, is “lol, look how easy it’s going to be to figure out all these cards that are going to pop by looking at what popped the last time this deck was a thing”). Are people going to run out and buy a bunch of cards when the thrust of the deck isn’t really all that new? Is someone who bought the cards for the deck going to buy new copies if they like this new commander better, or will they just change their old deck up a few cards, jam the new commander, put the old one in the 99 and call it a day?

I think there are a few things going on here. Obviously, yes, if someone is going to dust off an old deck with a new commander, they already have most of what they need and they aren’t likely to need to buy all new copies. The more similar the deck is (and we’re discussing very similar stuff today) the less likely it is that they need anything at all but that’s not that bad a thing for us, actually. If they sold the cards, they need to buy them again. If they didn’t sell the cards, they took them out of circulation.

When Nekusar decks first hit, they launched a ton of cards from the $0.50 range to the $5-$10 range by virtue of being the first deck to really incorporate them. I made a ton of money off of cards like Teferi’s Puzzle Box due to Nekusar decks and other cards like Forced Fruition, Windfall and Tolarian Winds became interesting. You could find $1 copies of Forced Fruition in dollar boxes, shops that didn’t update their prices often, trade binders, shoe boxes – what I call “the woodwork.” Copies aren’t coming out of the woodwork anymore meaning anyone who comes along and wants to build the deck is fighting for copies with the people who already have them. So while at first, we may think that the decks existing already means there isn’t as much demand for the cards as before, I think we’ll see more second spikes. The first spikes ferreted the copies out of the woodwork and now everyone who wants a Puzzle Box for a new deck can’t get one from a dollar bin – their only recourse is to pay retail. When everyone has to pay retail and buy from a small number of sources with finite copies rather than myriad sources all over, price go up quickly.

What New Card Is Doing Old Things?

Niv-Mizzet looks pretty similar to older Niv Mizzets but he also seems to be the most popular. He’s a bit of a combination of the Old Niv-Mizzet Curiosity decks and Nekusar. The spellslinger clause is interesting because it helps mete out even more damage when you do what I assume you want to do, which is cast wheels and recycle your deck. Here’s what I am looking at based on the following EDHREC pages.

Nekusar

The Locust God

Niv-Mizzet, The Firemind

Arjun. The Shifting Flame

Puzzle Box is the queen of all kittycats here and while the overall price trend is up and up, I have had a few opportunities to buy cheaper copies of these when the demand seemed to have died down a bit. Nekusar into Leovold (briefly) into The Locust God into the new Niv-Mizzet, though, has given us a lot of chances to make money here and I think this new Niv-Mizzet is another chance.

Arjun seems like a low-risk buy-in with some decent upside. Mindmoil effects in general are good right now because rather than deck yourself you’re just shuffling your cards back in so you can tutor for them (except not Mystical or Personal, I guess) or just draw into them again rather than throw them in the bin so you can keep the pain going longer. Arjun is good as the commander of a deck and also as an inclusion and Psychic Corrosion may be a good inclusion for it but with Niv-Mizzet, we want to just keep pinging them a ton. There are hundreds of $1.50 copies on TCG Player to slog through but once that happens, I think this could get there and at least getting these when you’re $1 off in a trade and socking a few away for when we’re another year removed from the Mizzix deck’s printing and we hit a tipping point on Arjun, I think you won’t be disappointed. It may take a few more Niv-Mizzets to push this but I am patient.

 Moileyboi on the other hand has demonstrated a willingness to flirt with $7 on the basis of other factors and this second spike which could be incoming is likely to stick. This is a Ravnica rare and while its inclusion in 1984 decks hardly makes it a staple, it’s in over half of the registered Arjun decks and it’s a good bet that if either card catches on they both will. This is going to dome people for significant damage with a Niv-Mizzet deck and also find you the Curiosity or whatever you need to win the game on the spot. This deck isn’t fun but that hasn’t stopped it, ever.

Magus really took a bath when a Masters 25 printing cut it down from $12 to $2, which really nerfed all the RW precons I bought because I could flip them for basically double. Magus has demonstrated it can be $12 with the huge supply from a Commander deck and while there were a lot more copies injected from Masters 25, that’s still a $10 booster pack set that isn’t being opened anymore and Magus likely claws its way back up. It’s a good idea to buy Masters set stuff at its floor anyway so I think this would make sense even if they hadn’t printed another juicy commander for it.

What is taking meltyboi so long to pop? It may not be super apparent from the graph, but do you see that little region of daylight below the blue line in the middle there? That’s an arbitrage opportunity – for a brief period of time, buylist was actually above retail. The price went up after so the dealers were clearly right. This is a rare I still get for a dime when I buy bulk rares from people, which is a surprise. I think a second spike on this goes to $5 but I don’t know if Niv-Mizzet does it. Still, this is hard to reprint given its metalcraft ability and while it feels like the 8th, uncecessary wheel in the deck, it’s actually pretty savage if you get the metalcraft boost and you plan to wheel some more. You even get to draw another card when you play this off of Niv-Mizzet.

In conclusion, I think while Niv-Mizzet is sort of boring like the other one where you just slapped a Curiosity on him and won , I still expect there to be building around him and if there is, a lot of stuff that is in low supply goes to no supply. I think there are a bunch of kittycats that you buy before people get wise and sell on the basis of hype and if a sexier-looking commander gets spoiled next week, you best believe I’ll talk about it. Until then, keep buying cards, keep asking me questions and see if you can help me buy all of the Mindmoils on TCG Player. That’s a big domino and if it falls, so do a lot of other sites. I think if you scrutinize the pages of the commanders I linked, you may find a few more cards that pair nicely with the new Niv-Mizzet. If not, I’ll be back next week, probably with an article called “Everything Old is New Again Again.” Until next time!

I feel like 5 or 6 years ago I wrote an article called “Foiled” with a bunch of Blue October references in it and the biggest difference between now and then isn’t that back then I would argue if someone said Blue October sucked and now I won’t and it’s less that I don’t think they suck (they probably suck) but now I am not going to bat for bands I like that apparently I’m not supposed to (Can you imagine if I took time out of my day to engage every person who said 311 sucks? Whatever, I like 311 for some reason and I’m too old to care what some 23-year-old hipster with a tattoo of Jeff Magnum lyrics or some other pretentious BS thinks) and it’s more that I just don’t have the energy to try to fit a bunch of Blue October references that no one is going to catch into an article.

I wrote an article about Mairsil on Gathering Magic (sorry, Coolstuffinc) a year ago where I jammed like 25 references to Pretenders songs into it and no one caught on and that felt like a huge waste of time, so screw it. You don’t read my articles because you find me clever, and that’s the second biggest difference between me now and me 5 years ago. I used to think people read my articles because they thought I was smart and good at finance and now I realize you just want me to think thoughts so you don’t have to and you’re paying me a small portion of the money you make using your time more wisely and I’m actually super OK with that. So, yeah. No song lyric references (I mean, not that you’d try to catch them either way), just cards I think this year’s crop of EDH decks could nudge in the right direction. This will go quickly and I’ll probably cover more than one commander but I think there’s value here which is how I get away with how I structure my articles.

I normally am not a huge fan of foils because I think the demand for EDH foils is overstated but when there is a large multiplier already, I think it’s fair to assume that there is room to grow. Let’s look at some I like predicated on C18.

Aminatou

Oath of Teferi

I catch a lot of heat for referencing Card Kingdom prices and I do it for several reasons.

1. If a card sells out on Card Kingdom, I don’t care if it sold for more than it sold for on TCG Player. There is a segment of the population that only knows about Card Kingdom and their demand matters, too, and this is a way to study it in isolation.
2. EDHREC uses Card Kingdom prices and has an affiliate linking deal. Everyone who browses EDHREC sees a Card Kingdom price on every card and those numbers get embedded in their unconscious mind and are used as a reference. Also, they click the links on the cards and are taken right to the sales portal which is convenient and a non-trivial number of people do this daily. Again, not everyone knows about TCG Player.
3. If a card sells out on Card Kingdom, it doesn’t matter if it was cheaper on SCG or TCG Player or freaking Card Shark, Card Kingdom now needs to restock which means they’re raising their buylist price. Card Kingdom has a very competitive buylist and almost always pays the most PLUS they have a high trade-in bonus and are generous with grading (though that may be changing).  I like to know what they’re low on stock of.

Card Kingdom isn’t TCG Player but they’re down to their last $4 copy of a card that goes in Atraxa, which should be enough. The fact that it’s a good fit in Aminatou, also is great news. Nearly 2/3 of the decks registered run it.

Now a bulk, non-mythic rare in the best-selling Magic set of all time isn’t super exciting, but there are significantly fewer foils and this has a 16x multiplier already and is still selling out. I predict this could hit $10 in a year or two and $4 seems like a pretty reasonable entry point to me. I don’t know foils as well as James does so I’m not going to tell you what I think of Combustible Gearhulk Masterpieces (Actually, no, I will tell you. Combustible is in a mere 800 decks fewer than Noxius Gearhulk’s 6,350 decks [just under Massacre Wurm and just above Painful Quandary in the EDHREC Top 100 Black cards] and Noxius Masterpieces popped already, so I guess I do have an opinion) but I will tell you Oath of Teferi is in 685 decks between Aminatou and Atraxa and that’s not bad for a card that was printed AFTER Atraxa. This has legs.

Gonti, Lord of Luxury

This is a double threat given its efficacy as a standalone commander as well as an inclusion in many decks.

I like the underlying metrics here, I don’t think Gonti is particularly reprintable and even less so in foil and I think $4 is pretty cheap for something like this. Again, it’s a 16x multiplier but we’ve seen wider divergences than that and I think this has real legs. If I’m totally off base, I’m sure I’ll hear about it but despite my relative inexperience with EDH foils, I think this is pretty solid.

Arcane Denial

Can you try to guess how many decks this card is it? It’s a Counterspell you have to pay mana for and it draws your opponent  cards. Probably not too many, right?

It turns out a lot of people like this card. It’s the 12th-highest-played Blue CARD on EDHREC. Not Instant, CARD. At $2 for a foil from a set that’s at peak supply currently that was the first time to print this card in foil despite there being 5 other versions of it, I think we could see a 2.5x increase pretty trivially. I am surprised it’s this low. I know it’s common but this is also the only foil version of an insanely popular spell from a set with expensive boosters.

I know I am dogging my abilities a tad here, but I made a call at around a buck based on its combo potential with Isochron Scepter in competitive decks a while back and it was pretty controversial and I figured I whiffed and forgot about it. Then I checked today.

Guess this method has some legs. Speaking of legs, we saw Dramatic Reversal go from $1 to $4 in under a year, how many decks is Reversal in compared to 20k for Arcane Denial?

Lol. Ok, then. So we have confirmed 400% growth on a card in a fifth as many decks? That would seem to indicate $8-$10 for Arcane Denial in about a year is pretty reasonable but I don’t really know what foils do. I do think there is a 0% chance you don’t make money buying foil Arcane Denial at $2 and I don’t care that there’s a foil in every M25 pack. I don’t think you can lose at all here. I’m inclined to throw a couple hundred  bucks at this just because I always forget to buy my own specs. If my articles had the power to spike cards on their own, Seance would be $10 and I could afford to retire.

Let’s look at another commander.

Tuvasa

Plea for Guidance

This isn’t all that likely to get a reprint in foil and I don’t even know about a non-foil reprint either. All of this could get nerfed by them deciding that there is no good reason not to do a Commander’s Arsenal every year at Christmas but until they come to their senses, this seems safe, it’s in both Estrid and Tuvasa, tutors for Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood in decks with access to Black and White and generally does work.

That’s not exactly 20K, but it is pretty close to what we saw for Dramatic Reversal and that showed some nice gains. CK has 1 copy left and as much as I want to buy it, I’ll leave it for one of you. They can only increase their buylist so much before it becomes possible to arbitrage from TCG Player and if it gets even close, the price will adjust. This seems like an obvious buy at $3.

Cleansing Meditation

This used to be more than a 2x multiplier but with more people playing Enchanted Evening (which spiked to $35 based on its status as a kittycat more than anything else) the non-foil went up so much the multiplier is 2x. One of those prices will correct. Let’s try and guess which one.

This is old, low supply, powerful, part of a try-hard combo played by people more likely to do shenanigans like this and also foil their decks and in general, seems underpriced at 2x. Card Kingdom’s last copy being EX rather than NM may be the only thing keeping the price from changing already – TCG Player has one seller trying to get $25 from a NM foil. If you can get there around $10 in good shape, which may not be possible anymore, I would.

Starfield of Nyx

This is pricey a bit but it’s also barely a 2x and with the reprint risk of this being very low, I think this climbs. I don’t know how much – I can’t imagine someone shelling out $50 for this, but I sold a Ydwen Efreet for $100 this week so I don’t even know what to think anymore.

Foils. They’re harder to reprint, WAY harder to sell and really hard to predict. I can pick boxes of commons and uncommons all the way down to a nickel without having to refer to the sheet more than a few times a minute and I look up every. Single. Foil. Good stuff is usually worth a lot in foil, but it’s the stuff I had no idea about that really gets me. Foil Sea’s Claim is worth more than foil Thirst for Knowledge? OK, then. Until I learn a bit more about foils, I’m going to continue to challenge myself to find these picks using my traditional method. In the mean time, hitting on a 3x gain on 15 copies of Arcane Denial will pay for a year of Pro Trader and I think it’s a really low risk scenario. Thanks for reading and I’ll be back next week with some Jund and Izzet picks. Until next time!

Readers,

You want specs, right? That’s why you read this column. So why don’t I just trust you understand that I understand my methods by now and just give you what you want? Specs.

If you’re a new reader, welcome. I’ve been writing this column for like 5 years and it’s a work in progress. Every once in a while I’ll tweak my methodology but for the most part, I’m going to use EDHREC data to see what people are playing and then I’m going to use my expertise in both MTG Finance and EDH to determine if anything used a lot will be worth more money later by virtue of that playability. That’s it. I don’t know what I try to make it sound more complicated than it is. It’s not like I’m afraid of one of you taking my job and if someone told me “I don’t need you anymore because I learned all I can from you and now I’m going to be the best EDH Finance writer ever!” good, but also I don’t believe you. If you really want to write an EDH finance column I’ll hire you to do it on EDHREC. I mean, maybe.

Anyway, I said no preamble and there I go writing a whole paragraph of it. That was your fault. What happens next? That’s all me, baby.

SPECS!

Lord Windgrace, maybe not to anyone’s shock, is the second-most popular deck on EDHREC out of all of the new commanders. Aminatou to no one’s surprise is number one, possibly Yuriko at #3 is a surprise, maybe not. But as much as Lord Windgrace’s “Lands matter” deck with barely any cards that care about lands was maligned by people during prerelease season, this isn’t prerelease season, this is “I bought the deck, now what?” season and I think “now what” for quite a few people is “Take Lord Windgrace, Windgrace’s Judgment, Turntimber Sower and Nesting Dragon out of a box and throw the rest of the junk away” and that’s fine. The thing is, the deck you can build with Lord Windgrace’s precon minus all of the cards in Lord Windgrace’s precon that aren’t Lord Windgrace is a pretty good one. Lands matter, and people have been waiting for a commander that recognizes that for quite a while. Now they have it and first off, they spiked two cards that really should have been in the precon.

The Gitrog Monster flirting with $9 on Card Kingdom makes people think they have found the next The Gitrog Monster.

It’s possible. There is a lot of Dominaria out there and this will take a while to quadruple but it doesn’t hurt to stock up on these IF you think this could go up. I’m not 100% convinced, but I think if you can get these under $2, maybe on TCG Player or by trading for them, you could sock enough of these away to make some scratch on a double up in 2 years.

Back to Windgrace!

Sorry. Anyway, lands have mattered for a while and with Thrasios and Tatyova making lands matter cards in green matter for a while, we’re looking at stuff that was teetering on the brink of going up getting another push but we’re mostly looking at chasing stuff we should have bought when it was cheaper. I don’t hate Splendid Reclamation around $2 currently, but I liked it a lot more when it was much cheaper a long time ago .

It’s already quadrupled, so getting in late obviously feels bad. However, it’s not done going up, mostly likely, due to every deck that comes out seeming to want to dump stuff in the yard and how many times I have killed someone with this card with Avenger of Zendikar in play.  Amulet of Vigor is pretty good, too.

I still think there is meat on the bone here and I think there will be more “lands matter” cards to come later. I might get out of mine in a year, though, before the next Commander decks come out, but then again, what are the odds they make another deck where lands matter so soon?

Here’s a little snakeyboi that I think, unlike most snakes, has legs. As a spec. Like, the spec has legs which is incongruous since it’s a snake and that’s funny. Look, I don’t have to impress you. I do have to convince you that Iconic Masters stuff is still nearish its floor and with a Lands Matter deck being super popular, why not play the snake? It’s in half of the 133 decks on EDHREC this week and that’s a good indication that people are aware of it, the Iconic Masters printing has enfranchised some people and we’re going to sell a ton of these at like $13 in a year or two. It has Lotus in the name – this seems like a winner to me.

Speaking of cards from Iconic Masters that were originally in Zendikar as mythics and are in a lot of Lord Windgrace decks and will likely go up in price because they were going to anyway but the new demand from a popular archetype doesn’t hurt, I present this. Ob Nixilis basically follows what Cobra does since the cards are very similar in a lot of respects. Total demand for Ob is less, and it’s less likely to break in Modern and therefore it has less upside potential but if nothing explosive happens with Cobra, this is as safe a bet. I like Cobra better, though, because of Modern and how playable it is there.

 

If you look at the robust recovery of Exploration, Burgeoning seems like a great buy. Conspiracy packs are radioactive and supply is peaked so with demand growing every time they print another Thrasios, Muldrotha, Tatyova or Lord Windgrace, even people who bought Burgeoning already will need to buy it again. This is a $15 card, it just doesn’t know it yet.

Crucible’s price is pretty established at this point. It’s in a set that doesn’t have very many great cards and we’re getting close to starting to spoil cards from Guilds of Ravnica so at this point, we’re basically at peak supply of M19. A lot of people aren’t as bullish on Crucible but I think at $20, it has some discovered demand. A lot of people cited low EDH inclusion numbers as a reason for being hesitant to take a look at this card, but at $20, it’s much more affordable and it’s pricing itself into decks. It’s also in more EDH decks than Coat of Arms, Illusionists’ Bracers, Paradox Engine and Aetherflux Reservoir and a lot of those decks were registered before Crucible was affordable.

An artifact in 12,000 decks is nothing to sneeze at. If it doesn’t go below $20, it will likely start climbing north of $30 if it isn’t reprinted again. I realize that’s not the sexy “$0.50 into $5” like we saw with Realms Uncharted when The Gitrog Monster was spoiled (or $0.50 into $22 like with Squandered Resources, a Reserved List card that was allowed to be $0.50 because it was 2016) but it’s still a pretty solid card with growth potential and they’re in trade binders right now, more importantly.

Remember, this card has 3 foils versions (Set, prerelease and game day) and one regular version and they’re all about the same price. I would go for set foil since that’s likely to diverge the most from the non-foil, but it’s hard to go wrong with any version of this. It’s a Crucible, but it’s also a Crucible that can go in a deck that already has Crucible AND you can Green Sun’s Zenith or Wordly Tutor for it. Sounds like a winner to me.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print about our Lord Windy, here. A lot of this stuff went up already by virtue of decks like Tatyova, Muldrotha and Thrasios but there is still money to be made and some of these cards have a lot of potential. Ulvenwald Hydra, Bobo Enraged, Ghost Town, Dust Bowl and a ton of other cards are getting twice the play they were a year ago, so make sure you check prices on stuff you speculated on already.

Thanks for reading, readers. I’ll be back next week, likely to talk about why Brudiclad is so much more fun than Saheeli. Until next time!