Readers,

I wrote… too much, frankly, last week. I’m going to take it easy on you this week, which probably means I’ll do 2,000 words instead of 4,000. I’m not going to go too in-depth on any cards yet but I do have some impressions based on preliminary EDHREC data. Let’s rank every commander by popularity based on the first little bits of data that are trickling in and then see if there’s anything in the most popular deck that everyone else missed, although people have been pretty thorough (they spiked Enchanted Evening to $35 today, for example, and who knows where it ends up? Could stabilize north of $30 – that’s what happens when things don’t get reprinted.) and the decks are sort of obvious, at least some of them. Estrid is probably a bit more obvious than Tawnos, for example.

Let’s see how many of each deck has been registered on EDHREC and see if that tells us anything.

Lord Windgrace – 64 decks (4 as part of 99) JUND
Aminatou, the Fateshifter – 63 decks (16 as part of 99) ESPER
Estrid, the Masked – 60 decks (16 as part of 99) BANT
Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow – 49 decks (27 as part of 99) ESPER
Saheeli, the Gifted – 35 decks (25 as part of 99) IZZET
Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer – 33 decks (28 as part of 99) IZZET
Tuvasa, the Sunlit – 29 decks (50 as part of 99)* BANT
Arixmethes, Slumbering Isle – 16 decks (31 as part of 99)* BANT
Xantcha, Sleeper Agent – 16 decks (22 as part of 99)* JUND
Varina, the Lich Queen – 16 decks (10 as part of 99) ESPER
Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign – 13 decks (33 as part of 99)* ESPER
Kestia, the Cultivator – 10 decks (36 as part of 99)* BANT
Thantis, The Warweaver – 8 decks (15 as part of 99)* JUND
Gyrus, Walker of Corpses – 5 decks (10 as part of 99)* JUND
Tawnos, Urza’s Assistant – 3 decks (21 as part of 99)* IZZET
Varchild, Betrayer of Kjeldor – 1 deck (23 as part of 99)* IZZET

This tells us quite a few things, I think. I am going to do a little bit of analysis and there will be supposition involved, but if you all didn’t trust my expertise in the field of EDH finance using this data, I’m not sure why you’re reading a whole article about it so I’m just going to state my opinion as fact and if I’m wrong, that’s because I’m bound to be some of the time.

Conclusions

The “Precon Effect” Is Alive And Well

A while back in an article on EDHREC, Sam Alpert talked about what he called “Precon Syndrome” and we later changed to “The Precon Effect” because it was pithier. What he was describing was a tendency for deckbuilders who start with the precon to include stuff that shouldn’t be in the deck. WotC put it in there for beginners and when you start with 100 cards, you cut everything obviously bad and keep the rest and replace the bad cards you cut. That means stuff that is just good enough to include stays in even though they are cards you would never consider jamming if you started from scratch. I would never think to put Ninja of Deep Hours in an Aminatou deck in a million years if you locked me in a room and made me generate list after list and wouldn’t let me out until I included it. 22% of the people who registered an Aminatou list on EDHREC included Ninja, though, because it’s in the precon. Early on people over-include bad precon cards which reduces the number of good cards they run, and they’ll add more good cards later as they jam games.

I put an asterisk by the cards that were in more decks as inclusions than they were as commanders and the list is nearly divided in half. With the exception of Varina toward the bottom of the list, every deck that’s popular out of the gate is in more command zones than 99s and the reverse is true for unpopular commanders. I would venture a guess that a lot of Tawnos’ current play is people thinking he’s too good to take out of their Saheeli deck. Also, the fact that the bottom 2 decks are Izzet but both have much higher inclusion ranks than build ranks, I think there is more synergy in the Izzet deck. Loose copies of Tawnos and Varchild will be hard to come by because people are inclined to leave them in rather than sell them when they build Saheeli and Brudiclad whereas no one is keeping their copies of Lord Windgrace if they build Thantis.

Lord Windgrace Is Most Popular?

I was pretty surprised. I thought it would go Estrid, Aminatou, Saheeli, Windgrace. In fact, Saheeli was below Yuriko, a ninja commander with 9 ninjas to build with. OK? Saheeli has competition from other artifact builds whereas Windgrace (likely with 99 new cards) is the first “lands matter” Jund Commanderand will unite The Gitrog Monster and Angry Omnath, both obvious possible inclusions that spiked hard after they weren’t in the deck.

Also, if you look at the total number between the precons, the numbers may tell us more.

Jund – 93 decks

Esper – 141 decks

Bant – 115 decks

Izzet – 72 decks

Jund was the 2nd least popular deck and Windgrace represents 69% of all Jund decks registered whereas Saheeli is 49%, Estrid is 52% and Aminatou is 45%. Windgrace seems like the most popular but he just has the lion’s (or… panther’s? I’m not Vorthos, someone tell me what he is) share of the second least popular deck whereas the other Planeswalkers had to compete more with interesting commanders in the decks that Jund forgot to include.

Varina Is An Outlier

I suspect that Varina is not included in the rest of the decks because she has 0 synergy with them and seems like a very glaring inclusion whereas the Precon Effect kept stuff like Xantcha and Tawnos in the decks. A 0 synergy inclusion is useful to look at because they tend to spawn disparate archetypes because they need 99 cards that aren’t in the precon. I think Varina is a lot like UW Taigam from last year – practically no synergy with the deck it’s in and basically included because it was a cool design and they needed somewhere to throw it.

Given Varina’s outlier status, I will select Varina to discuss this week because it’s likely the cards for this deck won’t have spiked yet because, like Tawnos, it’s not obvious how to build the deck to people who don’t play EDH the way Serra’s Sanctum was so obvious my 2 year old bought a copy of it on the iPad half by mistake when I mentioned in a conversation to someone else that Enchantress was the new archetype.

Varina The Queena’ Mean…a

I think Varina is secretly very good and could create some really unbeatable card advantage once left unchecked for a minute. The problem is, attacking with creatures is for casual EDH players and drawing cards and knowing that discarding isn’t a disadvantage is for more competitive players. Varina may be a card that exists in a very small Venn diagram overlap area. The mere 16 decks generated so far (though that’s more than 6 other commanders) make me think people just haven’t figured her out yet. The problem is, a lot of people will be turned on by seeing Varina demonstrated and if the card is taken out of every Aminatou deck due to lack of synergy and discarded, how will that happen?

Varina is currently like $3-$4 which isn’t bulk and is a bit more than a lot of the other new commanders, even ones in decks that aren’t worth as much. The Esper deck is easily the most expensive and it’s the most-built currently. It’s the “good” deck this year and while the “bad” deck is almost always the one to buy for finance reasons in two years, it’s still interesting that a deck with $4 Magus, $17 Yuriko, $3 Golemn, $8 Aminatou, $4 Entreat the Dead and $3 Entreat the Angels can maintain $4ish for Varina, which isn’t getting built that much compared to the other cards. UW Taigam started at $4, too and quickly plummeted to $2 and belowish and it’s currently doing nothing.

Taigam currently helms 227 decks compared to 896 Ur-Dragon decks, so it’s in a third as many decks as the precon-suggested commander (and 297 of the 755 decks it’s in as a card are Ur-Dragon, which seems weird given its lack of synergy – Precon Effect indeed). Meanwhile, Varina is in 16 compared to the 63 for Aminatou. If that proportion holds, I don’t like Varina as a pickup but I think it will spawn 1/4 as many decks as Aminatou but with all new cards which means older cards that didn’t get reprinted have a chance to go up. Anecdotally, Varina is performing better for people than Taigam did and I think enough casuals will get onboard with having access to White Zombies (the cards, not that godawful band) and cards like Swords to Plowshares and Teferi’s Protection. One thing Varina has going for it that Taigam didn’t – there are decks ready to upgrade to it.

Varina is a better Scarab God than The Scarab God (I think) and you can jam The Scarab God in the 99 of Varina, which is cool. You’re going to draw a ton more cards and have access to white cards which makes Varina a great choice. I think people who don’t port over The Scarab God decks will make Varina decks from scratch. All of these factors make me think that things are going to go up because all of this info isn’t that trivial or obvious – you saw we had to dig to find it. Leave Replenish for the kitty cat collectors, let’s delve into what makes Varina tick.

This card is showing up in 1/3 of the Varina decks and I think that number may increase the more it’s built. I don’t know if this is a spec, but I think you can pull these out of bulk, people don’t know this is $0.50 and people REALLY don’t know foils are over $10. This does so much work but has a decent reprint risk. It’s easier to reprint out of core set than into it. If you see these in draft chaff, $0.10 card boxes at the LGS or in bulk, stash these. I think this is a $2 card in a year with no reprint and everyone is going to act surprised.

Unfortunately, I think this card has hit its floor or is just about to. Market Price is like $3.50 on these, and as briskly as Card Kingdom is outing them at $6, I think TCG Player is the ripe for a correction. Death Baron is a zombie staple and it’s demonstrated an ability to hit $20 if left unchecked. I don’t think it hits $20 again but I don’t think it goes below $3.50 ever. You can’t lose here. Would they jam this right back in M20? I doubt it.

I don’t get this card’s deal but it’s got to go up sometime. It’s a mythic in a set with a bunch of stupid dragons and no one is opening the boxes. Sure, there is no pressure on this card to take up more of the box price but as the box price goes up, why doesn’t this? Its reprint risk is low given how amenable WotC seems to be to printing new Zombie lord and while the glut of Zombie lords means some don’t make the cut, this should.

Then again, it’s in fewer decks than a worthless card like Zombie Master, so who knows?

With moderate reprint risk, I don’t advise paying cash, here. However, with rotation approaching, I would advise taking everything that is propped up by Standard play and won’t see play outside of it and trying to trade for cards like this. Even with reprint risk, this stands a better chance of holding value than something like Glorybringer.  This is an absolute shoo-in for the deck and it’s one of the reasons you switch to a version that can run white, honestly.

I think if you check out the page for Varina,  you can find other cards that maybe aren’t as sexy but which will for sure get jammed. Zombie decks never got to run Necromancer’s Covenant, Anointed Procession, Wayward Servant or Tidehollow Sculler in the past. Is this an improvement? I hope so! If not, at least we know the reasons for looking at Varina in the first place was sound.

As an aside, anecdotally, people are more excited about Varina than they were about Taigam. I think that Yuriko is going to tank soon and when it does, something needs to step up and take some value. Could it be Varina? The parallels to Taigam right now prevent me from saying yes, but if the cards begin to diverge, I think we could have a good buy under $4. We’ll talk more next week. Until next time!

Readers,

I use this phrase a lot when I talk about new sets and it’s half me doing some hand-waving to explain how some cards go up unpredictably and it’s half a reminder to myself that not every presale price is too high. Sure, stuff goes down, a lot of it, but there are always cards that go up. Sometimes I am on top of it and order a ton of Blade of Selves or Deepglow Skate. Sometimes I am NOT on top of it and order 0 copies of Teferi’s Protection and Herald’s Horn. You know, when I put it like that, it looks like I’m slowly unlearning how to do mtg finance. To prove I have learned some stuff and some things from the past few years of doing this, let’s look at all of the factors that influence a card’s price and affect where it ends up and let’s look and see if there is anything that likely goes up.

Since the factors are all concepts you should be familiar with, I’ll just give them whatever names I want and we can discuss each factor before we look at Commander 2018 presale prices. The factors as I see it are mystery, corollary, ubiquity, proximity and trajectory. I didn’t have to name these like an actual anthropomorphic ascot with a monocle but I did it for my own amusement. Mystery was a bit of a reach so let’s start with that because it’s the first one in line, anyway.

Mystery

A lot of presale prices are guesses. 23 of the cards in Commander 2018 are between $4 and $5 and there is a reason for that. There are 307 cards in the set but there are only 52 new rares. If they set the price of every unknown rare to about $4 (with the exception of Planeswalkers which they set at $10) and put the reprint rares at roughly half their pre-reprint value, they don’t lose money if they buy a bunch of sets for singles and someone buys one of every card x times. If they charged $0.50 for every rare, they’d lose money and they wouldn’t sell every rare if they charged $10 for each one. This is all… barely scientific. There’s a lot of “Well, let’s see what happens” and sometimes what happens is you presell Blade of Selves for like a buck and it keeps selling out when you relist it higher and you sell like 100 Blade of Selves which ends up a $10 card for 10% of its value before you even get the product in your hands and if you’re SCG, that feels bad. TCG Player does a better job of establishing prices because it’s multiple vendors with like 4-8 copies they’re committing to and if there is a run on multiple vendors for a card, the others adjust pretty quickly.

Coolstuff sold out of their presale allotment of Treasure Nabber at $5 a few times before they gave up and declared it out of stock but TCG Player and its multiple vendors peg it around $9 right now. Remember, Pain Seer wasn’t a $12 preorder card because Star City is run by idiots and they pegged it at $12, it was a $12 preorder card because the community is populated by idiots and SCG sold out at $1, $2, $4, $8 and finally $12 because no one bothered to read the card or they thought it would be way easier to tap a 2/2 without killing it. Deepglow Skate was like $2 preorder for a minute because no one knew and we voted on its price by how many times we bought out all of the stock at a given price. When we stopped buying it out, they stopped raising the price and we crowdsourced the answer for them.

Corollary

Why DID the community get so excited about Pain Seer, by the way? When Dark Confidant was first spoiled, people had visions of getting domed for 6 from an Ink-Eyes and were kind of hesistant. It took time and testing and results for people to realize that card advantage trumps everything and even if your Ghost Dad dings you for 4, it will make it up by being an extra card, and one that does stuff to boot. The establishment of Dark Confidant as a ridiculous, format-warping advantage machine made people look at Pain Seer and made the really dumb ones say “I’m selling all of my Bobs, this is just Bob with an extra toughness” and made the people who read the card say “I bet I can make this work with a little effort” and even a few weeks after the card was printing, people were so hyperbolically in support of the card that I bet the /r/mtgfinance subreddit that if Pain Seer was above a certain dollar amount (I feel like it was something insanely generous like $4) in a month, I would eat a foil playset.

We would prefer not to have to make any blind guesses more than we have to so we look to corollaries when we can. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s very difficult and sometimes we pick the exact wrong card to compare it to. Is Whiptongue Hydra the new World Breaker? Arashi, the Sky Asunder? Apocalypse Hydra? Bane of Progress? We search for cards to compare cards to and usually come up kind of short. It’s hard. But it’s not as hard as taking a blind stab at it and thinking Teferi’s Protection seemed overpriced at $12.

Ubiquity

We come to the part we can measure first, and sometimes there’s time to look at this measure and see if there is time to buy accordingly.

(A brief aside)

I used to say “this card is in X decks on EDHREC” and while that’s useful information if you already have a general sense of which kinds of cards are in how many decks, that’s great. Having a numerical value assigned to a card’s ubiquity is super useful. However, I think for illustrative purposes I’m also going to start saying “And 4,100 decks is more than X,Y,Z card you might have a better sense of.” I’ll show you what I mean

(End aside)

When I bring up Teferi’s Protection, it’s easy to see why it’s expensive when you understand all of the factors that go into determining the price and not the least of those is in how many decks on EDHREC it is relative to other cards whose prices are firmly established, provided they close corollaries. There are more copies of Teferi’s Protection than there are Alpha Air Elemental despite one being rare and one being uncommon and even though Air Elemental is in way fewer decks, it costs more.That’s an absurd comparison because we ignore myriad factors there like number of printings, set size, number of copies, playability – the list goes on. But if you compare it to something close, the roughly 4,100 decks Teferi’s Protection has some more context – it’s in more decks than decks than Dispatch and fewer than Secure the Wastes; far from a White staple but it is the 3rd-most-played White Instant in the whole database. The 100th-most-played overall White card, Citadel Siege, is in 4438 decks. Why is Teferi’s Protection worth so much more than Citadel Siege? Well, because Ubiquity isn’t everything, but it sure matters. This brings us to…

Proximity

This is the term I’m using to describe what else is in the deck it’s in. This is an important factor and while it’s not unique to things like Commander precons, it’s most obvious in them and we’re going to rely on it pretty heavily.

All of these factors help us determine the last one – the trajectory. Right now the prices are what they are and the next few weeks will determine if they move or stay the same. So what do I mean by proximity? Well, first of all, the set is divided into 4 decks and you always get the same cards in a given deck so there is no randomness. The cards you want are in the deck you need to buy and if that sells a lot and your LGS cranks the price on it, you pay more. If enough outlets crank the price, the singles go up to compensate. That’s how you get a $25 Atraxa in a deck that was $35 MSRP. There’s no question where the value is going in this deck – it’s everywhere and that’s why a copy of Breed Lethality isn’t $35 anymore.

This dude wants $160 AFTER Breed Lethality was reprinted in Commander Anthology.

For the most part, though, the decks are a little more calm.

That’s $42 bucks for, admittedly a Japanese copy, of a Commander 2016 deck, arguably the second-best one.

Here’s all of last year’s for an average of $22 each. Japanese EDH cards are less desirable but still, English is closer to MSRP a year on, which means MSRP still basically constrains the cost of singles.

So what does a reprinting do to a card?

It really depends on whether it’s a first, second, third, etc. Since the decks are sold with both kinds of cards (new and reprinted) together, they will affect each other. Currently, the cost to buy the Saheeli deck individually on TCG Player is $90, Aminatou is $126, Lord Windgrace is $81 and Estrid is $85. It makes sense – the most popular commanders are in the Aminatou deck – Yennet and Yuriko taken together are close to $35 value. Aminatou could become this year’s Atraxa, but given how grindy and tough to play Yennet is likely to be and how short on ninjas Yuriko is, I don’t know if the hype will hold up.

Looking at reprints, we see the data we really want to see. In Saheeli, there are 16 reprints worth more than $1, in Aminatou it’s 17,  Lord Windgrace has 9 and Estrid has 6, but also has the best reprint and the ones most likely to regain lost value, Enchantress’ Presence and Bear Umbra.

Do cards that are around $1 ever recover? This data would suggest no. Daxos is $85 because of $6 Bastion Protector, $9 Phyrexian Arena, and $9 Grasp of Fate, mostly. How does Grasp of Fate hit $9? Well, it’s in 6,457 EDH decks, more than Anointed Procession, Academy Rector and almost as many as Iona and Stonehewer Giant. Grasp started out at $3 and when it was $3, the deck was closer to MSRP. Black Market, Phyrexian Arena and Sol Ring rebounded, Thought Vessel realized it was $6 despite being in every deck and cards like Underworld Coinsmith stayed $0.22

Cards over $5, especially EDH staples or close-to-staples will rebound but the really cheap stuff doesn’t have much of a prayer.

Next week I will be going into each of the 4 decks and categorizing the stuff that won’t rebound, the stuff that could, the new stuff that could go up and the new stuff that could go down. The release date is a week from Friday so next week won’t be too late to take advantage of most of the presale prices but as a brief cap to this article, I will mention 5 cards I like that I might not wait on. Next week they may be more than they are now and I want you to get as much value as you can, especially since this article was all about methodology and not much application of it.

What I Like

Directive is trending down from its initial $4 price tag as sellers race to the bottom in an increasingly-crowded TCG Marketplace but I think we can wait this card out a bit but ultimately it could rebound. This is a red Genesis Wave that makes up for the fact that we don’t have as much access to easy mana as Green does by having Improvise. In an artifact-heavy deck, you’re not going to whiff on this and this goes in new decks and old alike ranging from Saheeli to Daretti to Jhoira to Feldon. You even put the stuff that isn’t an artifact into the yard where Feldon can have a crack at it. This card is good and I expect it to go back up, but it’s probably not done going down so there’s no real hurry here.

I think there is some urgency here. This sold out at $5 a few places and while people are looking at this like an $8 card, I keep thinking of $30 as the ceiling for a card in a bad-ish deck. Teferi’s Protection is in a deck with 2 other cards over $3 a year on. If we’re wrong about Saheeli’s Directive, we can predict Unwinding Clock will go to about $8, Mimic Vat may go to $5 and Sol Ring may go to $3 leaving us with a ton of bulk. Chaos Warp, Aether Gale, Blasphemous Act et al could hit $5 each and that would still allow for Treasure Nabber to be $15. I think this could hit $20 and if you can get these for around $8, do it, I think. I think this is the Deepglow Skate of the set.

This could be the set’s Bastion Protector at least. I think a double up on this is possible. If the unthinkable should happen and you buy in heavy at $2.50 and it falls to $1 or so, just buy twice as many. Then your average cost is a little over a buck and that will feel good when these very likely hit $5. This is in the deck no one cares about but the deck no one cares about always surprises people. Remember the terrible Kalemne deck? Well that deck has Blade of Selves, Fiery Confluence and Urza’s Incubator and a ton of other value and it’s now the best value deck, even after the Commander Anthology. Sower is versatile and even if Windgrace doesn’t end up the “lands matter” deck people wanted, The Gitrog Monster, Angry Omnath, Tatyova, Thrasios and a few others are still very popular and this has future homes possible as well. I think you can probably wait and see what this does, but I don’t hate it at its current price which is why I’m mentioning it today. If it’s cheaper when I look at it again next week, I’ll probably buy.

I think this goes down more but I think it’s secretly the best of the cycle and in decks where you have a cheap commander and it dies, this could end up being better than Wild Ricochet, which is in about 7,500 decks which is more than Daretti and almost as many as Insurrection. Richochet doesn’t matter financially and didn’t manage to shrug of 4 printings, but being in the disappointing Windgrace deck means that there is a lot of pressure on $2 cards to pull more than their weight.

Slimeyboi is a bit of a pet card of mine and I bet that the price goes down a bit before it goes up but I think it’s going to be one of the cards that goes up. I’m notoriously bad at predicting which Green cards people will latch onto (most of us are. Quick, without looking it up, how much is Stonehoof Chieftain. Now look. Surprised?) but this has a lot of room to grow and there will be pressure on it as a card in the “bad” deck. People are racing to the bottom on this, but this feels like a $7 card to me, especially since I feel like Xantcha is going to give up some of the ground it’s currently holding.

Wow, I went way long on my word count. You’re welcome! Next week we’ll tear into the decks with the method we developed here. Should be a hoot. Until next time!

Hey guys. It’s National emoji day and if I knew how to make emojis I’d do a bunch of them right here. If I knew how to make the gray boxes that made it look like I tried to do a bunch of emojis and failed, I would do that, too. I sort of wish I knew how to do the kittycat emoki, though, because as soon as they announced the four themes for Commander 2018 decks, the internet found its kittycats for the year 2018, and that kittycat’s name is “Enchantress.”

What’s A “Good” Spike?

I think there are two major classifications of spikes – let’s call them simply “good” and “bad” so you know how you’re supposed to feel about them. A “bad” spike is one that feels forced – it’s a bunch of dudes on Reddit all getting together to buy Catacomb Dragon because it’s on the Reserved List. The justification for it is always ex post facto as if they thought about how to make the case for it after they bought it. You’ll notice them calling it an “EDH staple” and if you mention EDHREC, there’s always an excuse; EDHREC doesn’t get competitive EDH data, no one uses the site anymore (what does that even mean?), it’s good in their deck so that means it’s a staple. If the person making the case for the card seems allergic to data and has two anecdotes for every data point you come up with, stay away. “Forced” or “bad” spikes have a familiar graph shape.

A precipitous climb followed by a meteoric descent. Usually the price ends up somewhere between where it started and where it peaked, but lately these dumb spikes haven’t panned out very well and the card goes back down to where it started – usually because the people behind the buyouts are used to being able to buy out TCG Player and letting everyone else think they’re geniuses for buying out Cardshark.

So what characterizes a “good” spike? I think that a good one has two major components.

This Heading Break Is Where I’m Blocking Off The Rest Of The Article So Only Pro Traders Can Read It At First

I think the two characteristics of any good spike are sustainability and predictability. A good spike looks less like a spike and more like a plateau because the new price is agreed upon as the right price. This comes from organic demand. The card actually is an  EDH staple, spiking as the result of a new deck being viable and not the result of dickery and wishful thinking.

Notice how even though the price went down a bit, it went back up over time and the overall trend is in an upward direction? Do you think  Reparations will trend in a similar manner? Hard to say – Reserved List cards have nothing pushing their price down per se besides a race to the bottom as dealers who sell by being the lowest available price leapfrog each other trying to be the first to sell their copies of a useless card off. You didn’t have to dump your copies of The Chain Veil as soon as they spiked – you had time to try and get the best price and the card is now worth more than its initial spike price. In fact, current buylist is nearly at that amount. The sustainability of The Chain Veil is what makes it a “good” spike – Superfriends, Atraxa, the combo with Teferi and speculation that Commander 2018 will be Planeswalker-helmed decks because of one mention of the word “Planeswalker” in the Commander 2018 press release have all driven this card to where it is. Imagine that, a card that’s not even on the Reserved List going up in price! I didn’t even know we did those anymore.

The second aspect is predictability. Could we have possibly predicted that The Chain Veil would go up in price? Of course we could have – and we did.  We have mentioned that card several times over the past 4 years and every time it was more expensive than the last time we mentioned it. It was a solid albeit a niche card when it was printed but the Teferi combo and the prevalence of Atrxa Superfriends decks created the perfect environment for it to go up. Superfriends existing as a concept was enough for me to mention it was a spec and all we have to do was wait for conditions to exist for it to be indispensible in a deck everyone wanted. Atraxa gave us that. if it hadn’t been for Atraxa, The Chain Veil would be worth less than it is now but it still would be worth more than it was every time we talked about it in this column, and that’s the important thing. That’s a card that is both sustainable given its demand from a number of different decks as well as predictable given its unique and powerful effect. I like “good” spike candidates because there is no sense of urgency to dump them before people realize they shouldn’t be paying $9 for freaking Aelopile, no matter whether or not “no one is sitting on a stack of these, guise.”

We Saw The “Bad” Spikes

Commander 2018 is giving us another chance to shake our heads at Team Kittycat. Not all of their buys are as bad as Waiting in the Weeds but they are as obvious. I don’t think Serra’s Sanctum is going to go back down from over $100, for example but that’s because it’s a Reserved List card, had some Legacy and EDH demand before (I called it at $30 when the Daxos deck was printed and that didn’t do much for its price although a few people made some money). Idyllic Tutor, though, seems like a bit of a Kittycat to me. It’s in quite a few decks on EDHREC, mostly Voltron decks, but its recent interest seems as much predicated on its text box containing the word “Enchantment” than on an understanding of the format. Remember, Waiting in the Weeds was a stupid buy because it was bought out before we even knew what the decks would be like and it turns out none of the 3 commanders really benefit all that much from having a bunch of cat tokens. I’m not saying an Enchantress deck won’t benefit from a tutor, it will, I’m saying anything else we buy at this juncture is purely speculative, may look stupid later and isn’t quite the slam dunk we think it is. I mean, unless you think one of the 3 commanders in C18 is going to be “sacrifice your enchantments” themed, Femeref Enchantress is probably a bad pickup or a kittycat if you will. An “obvious” spec that doesn’t actually work with the deck is a kittycat and I think we’re about to see some more kittycats go up.

What Do We Like Instead?

I’m glad I pretended you asked.  I think there are some cards that haven’t gone up yet that could based on Commander 2018. We know it’s Bant Enchantress, so my approach for researching this was look at pages of cards rather than pages of commanders. I don’t know how much you use EDHREC, so I’m going to hold your hand a bit here if that’s OK. Since I already have Idyllic Tutor pulled up from checking how many decks it’s in, this is as good a place as any to start.

Here’s the page I’m on.

Its starts by giving us a list of Commanders and you can tell quite a bit about what kind of card Idyllic Tutor can be in EDH. Oloro decks use it, Uril decks use it and Zedruu decks use it. What are the odds Oloro decks are searching for Bear Umbra, Zedruu decks are searching for Phyrexian Arena or Uril decks are searching for Transcendence? The card is used for three different kinds of cards in those decks. Since we don’t know what any of the commanders do, it’s hard to know how we’ll use Idyllic Tutor but we can get a sense of what kinds of enchantments might be good with other Enchantments. This is where we weigh reprint risk versus power and make our decisions based on that.

Scroll down more, past the top Commanders, New Cards and Reprinted Cards. “Signature Cards” is what we want. Not all of them pair with Idyllic Tutor well (Path to Exile? What?) but they are correlated in that a deck with Idyllic Tutor is very, very likely to run them also (like Path to Exile). Idyllic Tutor has the highest synergy with Idyllic Tutor, appearing in 100% of decks that contain Idyllic Tutor (lol, I’m sure the way to fix this is so hard it’s not worth it and will break every time they invent a new kind of commander like the “pair with” ones from Battlebond which broke the site’s code for a long time) but we see Enlightened Tutor which probably won’t get reprinted and goes in the same decks. I bet Replenish isn’t reprinted and since it’s on the Reserved List it already went up – same as Academy Rector. Team obvious has already been through the list, starting as soon as they got the word about the archetypes. Sterling Grove, though, isn’t on the RL.

Sterling Grove

Reprint risk – Moderate

Power – High

Grove originally went up from a buck or two when it was announced that Theros would be enchantment-based. Grove didn’t really pan out as that good a pairing with… anything from Theros per se. It was vaguely good but Theros mostly made a lot of cards vaguely better rather than making one or two super good.

Grove is very useful in my current Bant Enchantress deck but I am trying to use data to make my evaluations rather than use anecdotes about my specific build. If this isn’t reprinted, it has a bunch of decks where it will be good. Whether you’re Voltron, Pillow fort or some weird hybrid (my deck uses Control Magic effects and the Enchantress triggers are to keep your hand full of answers), you’ll benefit from Grove and it hasn’t really moved much on the news but rather how good it is.

Scroll down to the “Enchantments” section to see the Enchantments that are used most often in decks with Idyllic Tutor.

Starfield of Nyx

Reprint risk – Moderate

Power level – High

This is another card that just shines in the deck. It’s a win condition, it nullifies some of their targeted removal (they have to deal with Greater Auramancy or Privileged Position before they can kill this and you just bring it back). I don’t know what else to say.  If this isn’t in the deck, I bet it goes up.

Copy Enchantment

Reprint Risk – Low

Power Level – High

They don’t tend to put this sort of card in the precons which could mean it’s mostly insulated from reprint risk on the basis of me not seeing them reprint cards like Sculpting Steel in the artifact deck, for example. Mirage Mirror seems more likely to be reprinted, for example. This is a narrow card and if it’s not in Commander 2018, it basically never gets reprinted. If you do buy these and it’s in the precon, just double down and buy as many copies as you can at the new price until your average cost is down to a non-embarrassing amount and then every copy will go back up. This has great growth numbers and it’s not like a Bant Enchantress deck running around will hurt that. I still think you are safe and I think even though an $8+ buy-in is high, I think the ceiling is pretty high, too. I still get these in bulk, also, so that’s a thing – people don’t know this is a card so its growth has been sneaky and secret and if that doesn’t reflect sustainability, I don’t know what does.

There are a few more pieces of higher-hanging fruit that Team Kittycat missed but I think my time next week will be better spent looking at one of the other 3 archetypes. Spoilers start Monday and that will give us a better idea of what we’re looking at. Until next time!