Category Archives: Watchtower

The Watchtower 2/4/19 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin


Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.


Over the last week Magic’s hot topics haven’t had too much to do with hot cards or hot prices. WotC’s announcement of the…oh, what the hell is it called. “MTG Arena Mythic Invitational.” Sure. Anyways, their announcement of the invite list incited quite a bit of bile. While a chunk of the invites went to those who had earned slots on MTG Arena, several went to “personalities.” This ranged from LSV, someone that I’m confident most players feel deserves to compete, to Hearthstone streamers, a subset that hasn’t particularly “earned” a slot in the highest EV Magic tournament to date. Amusingly, LSV probably loves that those people got invited, because now 25% to 50% of the room is at an FNM skill level while playing for tens of thousands of dollars per finish. TRGR, as they say.

Sidisi, Undead Vizier (Foil)

Price Today: $15
Possible Price: $25

It’s an unfortunate fact that the top slots on EDHREC for black are basically all tutors. Demonic Tutor, Diabolic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor. These are bad cards in the format and if you play them you should feel bad. This isn’t the first time I’ve made this pitch though, so I’ll cut it short. After those three tutors, in 7th place is Sidisi, a de facto Demonic Tutor. EDH players love their tutors, and Sidisi gives you a lot to work with. He comes with a reasonable 4/6 body, can be tutored with effects similar to Chord of Calling, is easy to reduce his total cost, provides a sac outlet when you steal an opponent’s creature, etc. There’s a lot there to appreciate.

Sidisi is without a doubt already popular, and his price (almost) reflects that. I don’t care for non-foil copies, but foils are worth considering. You’ll find them at about $15 to $16 each on a few sites. Supply drains quickly as you scrutinize inventory, and it’s not long before you’re finding vendors charging $20+ a copy.

With Tesya’s recent popularity, Sidisi is going to find a whole new slate of players that are in the market for a high-value sacrifice enabler. Supplies are strained and there’s no surplus of copies on the horizon. $15 is a slightly high buy-in price, but I suspect we’ll see prices in the $25 to $30 before long.

Dark Petition (Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $15

Along the lines of Sidisi, Dark Petition is a Demonic Tutor that requires a bit of work to be Demonic Tutor. In Sidisi’s case you’re getting the tutor attached to a 4/6 body (which makes it abusable in the right circumstances). In Dark Petition’s case, it’s at best a Demonic Tutor, but the work necessary to get there is considerably less, especially in EDH, where you’ll have spell mastery reliably once you’re out of the first few turns. For the type of jerk playing multiple Demonic Tutors, it’s one of the easiest second copies to play.

Petition is in about half as many decks as Sidisi, surprisingly. One may expect that spell mastery would be easier to trigger than the exploit trigger on Sidisi. I suspect that Sidisi’s abusability – copying the trigger with Teysa, blinking her for repeated effects, being able to tutor or reduce her cost – make Sidisi more desirable in decks looking to play unfairly. Still, half as popular as Sidisi is still popular, with Petition finding itself in about 11,500 lists.

While you’ll pay $15 to get in on foil Sidisi, Petition is a relative bargain, with copies beginning in the $5 and $6 range. I’d call supply on Petition ‘moderate.’ There’s probably 40 to 50 foils floating around on TCG right now, so it’s not going anywhere in the next few weeks. Still, we’re talking about probably the second or third best Demonic Tutor in EDH, and supply isn’t going to keep up with that forever. There’s also always the outside chance that someone figures out a Modern brew that makes use of Petition. After all, spell mastery is trivially easy to trigger in that format, so the real question is whether your combo deck is hitting the five mana prior to casting Petition easily.

Myr Battlesphere (Foil)

Price Today: $10
Possible Price: $20

Alright, no more tutors this week. I wanted to find something for Standard or Modern to talk about, but nothing jumped out at me. Pteramander jumped out at me as a possible sleeper foil, but they’re $15, so never mind there. Nexus is probably about as expensive as it’s going to get, and nothing else seems lined up to spike. I’m hopeful we’ll see some fun lists come out of Modern, but none of the latest MTGO lists are doing anything new and novel. Maybe some of the Twitch brews will start to permeate the membrane of greater awareness within the Magic community, but until then, there’s still a bunch of humans, dredge, delver, and lantern.

Anyways, Myr Battlesphere. You may be shocked to hear that Battlesphere shows up in something like 14,000 recorded lists. If you’re shocked to hear that, you probably haven’t played much EDH. Battlesphere comes down fairly easily, especially as an artifact, since you get cost reduction bonus’ on two card types. It’s got that army-in-a-can effect, with four bonus bodies hitting the table alongside it, you can use the myrs it comes with – and possibly copy or otherwise create more of – to give it some serious power, and the ability to fireball people right in their dumb face means you may be able to close out games against opponents that you otherwise wouldn’t find victory in battle against.

There’s only six – 6 – foil NM copies on TCG right now, each $10. After that it’s a bunch of foreign language copies at a significant markup. I don’t see any parituclar event on the horizon that would cause Battlesphere to spike, as it’s not really a Teysa or Nikya card specifically, but with supply this low, all it’s going to take is one person deciding to drop $50, and then they basically get to set the new price.


Travis Allen has  been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.


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The Watchtower 1/28/19 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin


Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.


Ravnica Allegiance’s first legal weekend is behind us, and I think it’s safe to say that the top 8 of the SCG Open (the GP was limited) is not what most of us would have expected. Four midrange decks and two control decks? Only a single Mono-Red Aggro deck in the top 16? Evolving Wilderness at like, 30th or something? It’s clear that Simic is bringing the tools these days, and whether you pair it with black or white, you’re going to have a lot of powerful tools. It appears that much of the strength of the deck leans on the trio of Jadelight Ranger, Merfolk Branchwalker, and Wildgrowth Walker. Who knows if this core of creatures will persist through the Pro Tour, but given that they were a common set of creatures even before RNA dropped, I expect this to be a common sight in the months to come.

Lyra Dawnbringer

Price Today: $12
Possible Price: $22

Looking beyond the piles of midrange decks that used virtually no Ravnica Allegiance cards, I noticed a fair bit of Lyra Dawnbringer sprinkled in the Bant, control, and otherwise various WX decks. Lyra Dawnbringer is of course Dominaria’s Baneslayer Angel (sort of). Lyra is a generically useful card: midrange cost that can slot in as the top end of an aggro strategy or as a finisher in bigger decks, solid stats-to-cmc ratio, evasive, and lifelink to get away from anyone attempting to race your life total.

Lyra appeals to me as a card well situated to grow in price relative to other, more frequently seen cards this weekend. Jadelight Ranger was everywhere, but that’s already a $9 rare. While it could still rise a few bucks, and may even top $15 if this level of midrange persists, it’s not the type of bet I want to be making. Same goes for most of the other rares that we saw a good deal of this weekend. Lyra, on the other hand, is from an older set (good), mythic (good), and showed up in a variety of strategies (good). Her mana cost is easy, which means she slots into plenty of color combinations (good), and with how flexible Standard mana is right now, it won’t be hard for decks to add white (good). I’d consider the biggest barrier to be that a player is unlikely to want four, and we saw a lot of sideboard action for Lyra this weekend. This is counterweighted by the fact that even if she’s “only” a sideboard card, if she’s a key sideboard card that’s important to the strategy, that’s still good demand. And not being needed in full playsets is tempered by the diversity of strategies making use of her.

If Lyra’s play pattern moves up from here, which it may as people decide it’s a strong tool to combat various midrange and creature based strategies, her price will too. $11 is relatively low for a playable mythic angel, and if she becomes solidified in Standard as a go-to tool for anyone with white mana, we could easily see her cresting $20.

Whir of Invention (Foil)

Price Today: $8
Possible Price: $20

This is going to be a curious card, and you’ll see why shortly. Whir of Invention showed up in third place at the Modern classic this weekend, in the Whir Prison deck. It’s an Ensnaring Bridge deck, and it uses four of the blue Chord of Calling to find whichever component is necessary at the moment. It’s an obnoxious deck that works by looping Ipnu Rivulet with Crucible of Worlds to mill you out. Whir isn’t exactly new to the format, having been introduced during Aether Revolt, and it seems to have become the main version of the Lantern deck, now appropriately titled ‘Lanternless’ on mtgtop8.com.

Whir is seemingly going to be a standard in the Ensaring Bridge prison decks for the forseeable future, and possibly any other artifact-based combo deck that arises. After all, Chord of Calling has found itself in a variety of creature strategies over the years, and I expect Whir will do the same. All of this points to foils setting themselves up to look great over the next several months to two years, as a key engine piece in at least one major Modern strategy, as well as a fairly popular EDH deck – it’s in over 6,500 lists on EDHREC.com, an impressive stat for such a new card.

Where Whir is odd is in the inventory. Look up Whir foils on TCG and there’s only 12 vendors, half of which want $10 or more. That’s great, right? Except one of the vendors selling copies for $7 is ChannelFireball. And they’ve got 50 listed copies. Huh? 50? What the heck happened here? Do other vendors have that many and they simply haven’t listed them? One wonders. Regardless, Whir foils at $7 are tempting. I’m currently staring at my CFB credit and wondering how many I should buy, 0 or 50.

Thousand-Year Elixir

Price Today: $8
Possible Price: $20

Meanwhile in EDH, we’re starting to get more RNA commander lists in, and to nobodies surprise Vannifar is showing up in the top lists this week. (Although, perhaps surprisingly, both Tesya and Nikya are more popular. Nikya?) It’s not hard to figure out what the most common cards in Vannifar are; every Pestermite effect and Intruder Alarm is the first 10 or 15 cards into the list.

Looking just past that, you’ll find Thousand-Year Elixir. This is an old Lorwyn favorite that has a nifty effect. It grants pseudo haste, in that your creatures can tap for their abilities immediately, but can’t attack yet. One could argue in EDH that ‘attack haste’ is worse than ‘ability haste,’ making Elixir a powerful effect. Tack on that Elixir can also untap a creature once, and you can see why Vannifar players are going to want to make sure this ends up in their 99.

Elixir has been printed three times; Lorwyn, Commander 2013, and Commander Anthologies. Lorwyn is older than 5% of the room at a GP, Commander 2013 is about 25% of Magic’s lifetime ago, and Commander Anthologies was a limited run. All of this is to say supply on non-foils is actually quite low. I count something like 40 total across the three printings on TCG. You’ll find roughly that many elsewhere across the major vendors, with SCG holding most of the additional inventory.

100 copies of Elixir isn’t much when you consider that EDHREC is showing 40 submitted lists for Vannifar in the last few days. How many Vannifar lists do you think will have been built by spring? A couple in each state would rapidly outpace the available Elixir supply. Commander reprints aren’t until November either. Looking pretty good for Elixirs in the next few months, I’ve got to say.


Travis Allen has  been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.


The Watchtower 1/14/19 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin


Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.


While there’s no major news on the Magic front today, there’s plenty brewing. The Ravnica Allegiance spoilers wrapped up last week, and the full set will be found in players’ hands shortly. There’s plenty of tasty cardboard in this one, and I know I’m not alone in looking forward to seeing how it reshapes Standard and Modern. I’m especially excited to see Electrodominance do some work, maybe balancing out the format.

The format needs balancing too, what with the way Arclight Phoenix has been going lately. Apparently something like 17% of decks at SCG Worster were Phoenix? That’s a whole lot for Modern, where non-PT numbers tend to top out at single-digit percentages. It’s not the first time we’ve seen a UR deck reach that level of play, and the last time it did, Splinter Twin paid the ultimate price. We’re only a few weeks into really understanding Modern with Arclight as a tier one strategy, so Wizards isn’t going to be in a rush to answer it with heavy hand, especially since all things considered, it’s a fair strategy. Expect some time for the format to adjust organically before action is taken.

Amulet of Vigor

Price Today: $22
Possible Price: $40

There’s been whisperings of Amulet Titan in Modern for a few weeks now, and it managed to take first this weekend, beating out piles of Phoenix decks. It’s a strategy whose popularity was hit harder than its efficacy by the Summer Bloom ban. It would seem a good foil to Arclight Phoenix, considering that we’ve been seeing an uptick in play along with the growth of Phoenix decks.

While there have been various versions of the deck, and several strategies for deploying as many lands as possible, two pieces are non-negotiable, and I hope unsurprisingly, they’re the two pieces whose names make up the archetype’s title: Amulet (of Vigor) and (Primeval) Titan. Amulet of Vigor’s effect with Karoo lands is what makes the deck tick, after all.

Amulet has been a worthwhile spec for awhile now, and the new attention is probably going to max this card out in a hurry. If Amulet Titan really is a strong choice for battling a Phoenix-infested metagame, players will flock to it in a hurry, especially as a tested strategy that’s already proven it has the chops to compete. When that happens, the single-printed rare is going to undergo extreme supply duress. Even though prices are already $22-$23, I don’t doubt at all that prices could climb into the $40 to $60 range, especially if it’s good without leaning on “Phoenix predator” as a feature.

Spirebluff Canal (Foil)

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $45

While we started with the Arclight foil, we’ll turn back around and hit an actual Arclight foil. Arclight is an Izzet deck looking to cast a tremendous number of cheap red and blue spells each game. It’s fast, looking to top out at four mana or so, and has an impressive array of selection. It is a perfect candidate for fastlands, as it wants to leverage them hard early, and can eschew them later when they slow down.

Of course, this is only one in a long history of strong Izzet decks in Modern. There always seems to be one hanging around, and even when there isn’t one, there will be shortly. It’s a powerful color combination, and I’m expecting to see another soon with the printing of Pteramander, Delver’s amphibious cousin. And it will be a quick, spell-heavy deck looking to satisfy two mana colors early in the game.

We are now more than eight years past the printing of Scars of Mirrodin, and we’ve yet to see a fastland reprint of any sort. If we assume the same timeline for the Kaladesh fastlands, we wouldn’t see a reprint of Spirebluff Canal before, well, we’re all dead. Which means foils are going to be in short supply (right up until there’s no one left to buy them and it’s all rather irrelevant). There already isn’t a deep pool of these, and several more weeks of Phoenix hysteria, paired with constant pressure from other Izzet strategies that pop up in Modern, is going to empty the market soon. Foil Blackcleave Cliffs are $95, and nobody is even playing Jund today. I’d consider finding your Spirebluffs soon.

Butcher of Malakir (Foil)

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $10

Wrapping up the week we’ll look in on EDH. With Ravnica Allegiance around the corner we’re going to get a few new commanders, and they’ll for sure be hitting the “Top Commander” lists for a few weeks. Don’t forget too that EDH players take awhile to buy into their decks, unlike constructed players, who will shovel playsets into their cart at a moment’s notice. New commanders will easily take months to move large volumes of cards to those intending to play them, simply because on the whole, 99s aren’t built in one afternoon.

Anyways, Edgar Markov has held steady on popularity for months and months now. There’s a deep pool of vampires to draw from, and sitting across three colors allows some flexibility in what you’re able to include. I’m not expecting an explosion in popularity any time soon, but he’s a consistent fan favorite.

If I’m looking for specs in a tribal deck like this, I want to find cards that are excellent in the tribal build, but still playable elsewhere, in order to capture the largest demand profile. Something like Door of Destinies, a card which otherwise defies my expectations regarding pricing, is a good example. Any vampire deck is going to want to be in the Door business, and at the same time, many other strategies are too.

A not-Door of Destinies card in Edgar Markov lists is Butcher of Malakir. She’s a vampire, which is uh, about all the checkboxes that need to be checked for an Edgar list. She benefits from all the tribal synergy floating around, and even moreso, she provides an extremely powerful effect in her “Grave Pact on a stick” deal. Grave Pact is of course a long-standing EDH favorite. This is reflected in Butcher’s play stats – over 15,000 decks on EDHREC, to be specific. That’s the cross-deck synergy I’m talking about. An excellent choice in a popular tribal strategy, and also a great pickup for plenty of non-vampire decks.

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Travis Allen has  been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.


The Watchtower 1/7/19 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin


Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.


2019 brings with it plenty of exciting Ravnica Allegiance spoilers. So far the biggest jump has been on the heels of Prime Speaker Vannifar, a creaturefied Birthing Pod. Astute readers immediately jumped on Intruder Alarm, which when paired with Vannifar should provide you a win on the spot. She sacrifices a creature to find something bigger, when that enters play it untaps her, she sacrifices sit again, etc etc. Throw a persist creature into the chain to double the bodies you have available to you. Really, the difficulty isn’t finding the win, it’s finding the setup necessary to put both cards on the table together.

Engineered Explosives (Promo)

Price Today: $70
Possible Price: $120

While they may already feel like old news by now, Ultimate Masters Box Toppers are still quite fresh in the Magic timeline. Only officially released thirty days ago, box toppers have been available for purchase in quantity for a few weeks right around Christmastime. Yet it feels like we’ve collectively moved on to Ravnica Allegiance already. I assure you though, while Allegiance is the fun thing to look at and talk about on Twitter, movement on cards like the box toppers is still going to be happening.

Explosives doesn’t need me to outline the card’s qualifications. It’s a top 25 in Modern, common in Legacy, and a staple in Cubes everywhere. There’s a reason non-foil copies are $28 despite having been reprinted a month ago.

Take a look at Inventions copies and you’ll see they’re around $120 at the moment. Those are great copies which look excellent and are truly unique. In contrast, UMA Box Toppers are clocking in around $70 right now. They’re not quite as dramatic a departure from the standard Magic appearance, but that’s no knock against them. Their borderless design is going to appeal to a wider range than the Inventions copies will. Supply is decent for a card of this nature right now, with roughly 50 on TCGPlayer (far fewer than that under $90 though). We’re rapidly approaching the end of new box topper supply if it hasn’t already stopped, which means this is as deep as the pool is going to get. When people see the borderless box toppers are $50 cheaper than the Inventions copies, they’ll gravitate towards these. It won’t be long after that before the UMA promos end up close to the Inventions.

Stony Silence (MM3 Foil)

Price Today: $13
Possible Price: $22

Six slots down from Engineered Explosives on the list of top Modern cards is Stony Silence. Like Explosives, long-time players need no introduction. Not only has it been a core piece of Modern since the format’s inception, along with Affinity, it continues to find new applications as the format evolves around it. As of late it’s useful as a tool to battle Krark-Clan Ironworks, a deck whose entire gameplan is activating artifacts. Not a bad card in that match-up, I’d say. So long as KCI keeps churning, and keeps winning, this will become more and more important.

Furthermore, we’re heading into a period where there’s an expectation that Modern staples will begin to pick up steam at the same time that the Magic index generally rises anyways. If there’s one card type that’s looking good over the next few months, it’s Modern staples.

You’ll find a few foils of this hanging around the $13 mark, but not many. (And possibly none by the time you read this.) The Modern Masters 2017 foils hit $15 quickly, and then…they’re out. Innistrad foils start close to $20, where you’ll find about two playsets, and then…they’re out. Supply is shallow on foils on both copies of this. With MM3’s arguably better art, newer frame, and cheaper entry point, this seems guaranteed to pick up to the $21 to $26 range.


Thing in the Ice

Price Today: $12
Possible Price: $23

It’s Modern Monday today, and we’re finishing with Thing in the Ice. And non-foil to boot! How often do you see me recommend those? Non-foil Modern cards. What year is it, 2013?

Thing in the Ice is just outside the top 30 cards in Modern, and an easy top 10 creature. It had modest application in Modern when it was printed in SOI, and has only managed to increase in utility with the introduction of Arclight Phoenix. That deck is proving itself capable time and time again lately, and is looking a lot like Grixis Death’s Shadow at this point. It’s going to have an insane few months, and while the format will eventually stabilize and adapt to it, it will remain a meaningful component of the Modern tapestry. That’s all very good for Thing.

You’ll find a couple Things hanging around $12 and $13, but not many. It’s into the $15 and $16 range rapidly, and supply dries up not long after. Most major retailers are out of stock. There’s been a huge run up in price on this since the development of Izzet Arclight, but frankly, if the deck keeps up, I see no reason why this won’t be a $20 to $25 card.


Travis Allen has  been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.



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