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.

Commander 2018 previews have wrapped up, and the general consensus is that while there’s some true gems, overall it’s a slightly less exciting release than it’s been in the past. Primarily there’s a sentiment that while the MSRP has been raised $5, the value in the box is less than in the past. You’ll find fewer high dollar reprints than you used to. That doesn’t make it a bad product, of course, but Reddit needs to be angry about something.

 

While the value in the box isn’t setting a watermark, it has a less tangible value, and that’s that the themes presented are less explored in Magic’s history. Opening up space to work in means you aren’t just pulling out your same list of 50 EDH staples for those colors and tossing 10 unique cards in; if you try, you can get a good 30 or 40 unique cards in the lists. Most of those are also going to be dirt cheap, since demand on them has been low up to this point.

Rooftop Storm (Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $20

I’m focusing on Varina, Lich Queen a lot this week, because she could very well end up being the sleeper commander of the product. Varina is a zombie deck in Esper colors, something we haven’t had before. Sure, people have played Ertai, the Corrupted or Oloro, Ageless Ascetic as a Zombie deck before, but that’s not a zombie deck. Furthermore, not only is Varina our first true Esper zombie commander, she’s actually good. Attack with zombies, get cards and life. She’s not clever, but she’s useful, and that’s great.

Zombies are just about the most popular EDH tribe that exists, and I’m actually sort of shocked that foil Rooftop Storm is still only $6. The time for this to be $15 or $20 has long since passed, making this a real freebie this week.

With only a single printing in Innistrad, Rooftop Storm is approaching “there are EDH players that weren’t born yet when this was printed” territory. We’ve got no reason to think it’s coming back anytime soon, and those foils are especially going to be less and less common. I can’t see how these aren’t approaching $20 in the real near future.

Necromancer’s Covenant (Foil)

Price Today: $3
Possible Price: $10

Varina bringing white to the table for zombie builds is exciting because it opens up a suite of cards to the most popular tribe in the format. For example, do you see many Varina lists existing without Anointed Procession? (I wanted to make that a pick this week, and while I do see it trending upwards over time, it’s going to be a slow ramp.) Amonkhet brought about white zombie cards, but there wasn’t really a place to play them yet. Now, they’ve got a true home in the 99 format.

One card that would be phenomenal in my Sidisi deck is Necromancer’s Covenant. This does a bunch of things at once. 1. Exiles every creature in someone’s graveyard. Eat it, Meren. 2. Makes a boat load of zombie tokens. 3. Gives them all lifelink, so you aren’t just completely dead on the crack back. If you can find a way to bounce it, even better. (It’s possible this card should be in Aminatou, actually.) Overall, just great stuff.

Having white in the casting cost has historically made Covenant nearly unplayable, simply because there weren’t many BWx strategies that would have wanted to devote a slot to it. Varina is a huge avenue for this to make a splash in the format. Add in that it’s a single printed card from Alara, and you can see how the foils are ripe for profit.

Staff of Domination (Masterpieces)

Price Today: $70
Possible Price: $150

One of the less-celebrated new commanders is Tawnos, Urza’s Apprentice. Let’s be honest: this guy’s a jerk. His whole shtick is copying stuff that’s already going to be broken and annoying. I looked at a couple of sample lists, and it was thirty mana rocks, Paradox Engine, and Planar Bridge. Who wants to play with that guy?

Even if he’s a snot, people are going to build the deck, and they’re going to need cards for it. One of those cards is undoubtedly going to be Staff of Domination. That card is rarely fair, and for that reason, it’s going to be popular. In fact, it was on the EDH ban list for three years. (Kind of a short prison sentence, but whatever.) I’m sure there are infinite combos in there with Tawnos and the untapping ability. Doubly so with his namesake Candelabra.

Of course I’m talking about the Inventions copy, not the the pack copies. People sitting down to build Tawnos are going to take a long hard look at the Inventions copies, decide that it’s worth plunking down the extra $50, and picking one of those up instead. After all, the Inventions overall feel so safe, everyone’s heard about the prices going nutty, and you’re guaranteed to find a use for the card even after you pull apart Tawnos in a few weeks after your friends refuse to play with him again.

Given that the price gap between pack copies and Inventions is a lowly 2x multiplier, there’s certainly vertical room on Staff of Domination. A price tag well north of $100 is an easy threshold to hit, as it’s a well known component of the format, and the Inventions copy is going to be the only good foil with the original art, ever.

---

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.

---

[/hide]

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.

---

There are not many weeks that are as exciting for the Magic market as Commander preview week. Standard preview weeks are fun and exciting of course, but they don’t move too many needles outside of that format, and it’s not a particularly profitable format at that. Commander previews though? Hoo boy. Here’s an example: Varchild, Betrayer of Kjeldor. She’s got the odd ability to create tokens under your opponent’s control, and then even odder ability to take them all when she leaves play. (Most odd of all is that they’re 1/1 survivor tokens. Probably not finding those in that new minifig run Hasbro is putting out.) A card like Varchild is going to draw attention to all sorts of cards that otherwise have gone unnoticed.

A lot of cards are going to get bought up this week. If you’re quick on the draw and have a good read on what people will find popular, you can clean up over the next few days. Even if you aren’t paying attention, some of the stuff in your bulk box may suddenly be worth pulling out.

Temporal Mastery (Foil)

Price Today: $17
Possible Price: $35

I said last week that the Esper ‘top of library’ deck was the most curious, and with the reveal of all four commanders, I still think that, although in a slightly different way. Each of the other three — Jund’s Lord Windgrace, Bant’s Estrid, the Masked, and Izzet’s Saheeli, the Gifted track closely to their ascribed theme. It’s not to say that they won’t be popular, but rather, looking at them, we can see what the deck inside is (mostly) doing. It’s fairly spelled out. Aminatou, however, is still somewhat of a mystery.

We can read the text on the card, and see what she does, but extrapolating that through the rest of the deck falls flat. Her +1 allows you to swap the top card of your library with one in your hand, which of course is what’s behind me talking about Temporal Mastery here. Following that is a generic blink effect, which on its surface, doesn’t do much with the top of your library. What’s going on there? (Aside from being an infinite combo with Felidar Guardian, and an easy turn-four win if you toss Altar of the Brood in there.) Finally her ultimate is one of the most curious in the game’s history, which picks has every player pick up all their nonland permanents and pass them one seat to the left or right. What? (Also: Teferi’s Protection lol). Reading through Aminatou, it’s still tough to understand what’s happening in the 99.

Anyways, Temporal Mastery. There’s no more obvious auto-include if you’ve got Aminatou as your general. Putting cards from your hand on top of your library is the entire reason to play miracles in your deck. I would have picked some others too, but you’ll notice that basically every rare or mythic miracle has been reprinted enough to make sure there’s no real slam dunks in there. Devastation Tide foils are the closest, but eh.

Temporal Mastery though — about $17 or $18 for Modern Masters 2017 foils right now, and not many out there. It’s an already reasonably popular card that sees action in a variety of places, and now we’re getting a commander that demands you use this card. Supply should dry up fairly soon.

Eldrazi Conscription

Price Today: $12
Possible Price: $20

Bant’s commander is Estrid, the Masked, and as promised, she’s all about enchantments. Truth be told, Estrid doesn’t do much Eldrazi Conscription on the face. Sure you can untap whatever creature it’s on, but like, whatever. Conscription itself doesn’t make untapping the creature particularly thrilling in the way that something like Burning Anger would. (Which you can’t play in this deck.) Her minus ability doesn’t do a lot with this either. And really, even her ultimate only interacts with it inasmuch as it does for all other enchantments.

Still, that’s all beside the point. Here’s what matters. There’s a new commander that wants you to play with enchantments, and as far as auras go, Eldrazi Conscription is as big and bad as it gets. (Bonus mid-paragraph pick: foil Sovereigns of Lost Alara.) Your dude is huge, you get annihilator triggers, they trample, it’s the whole package. The only thing that’s going to be annoying is that there’s rarely going to be a creature on the battlefield that’s more of a target than the one that’s been Conscripted.

And that’s where the Estrid, and the deck’s theme comes in. There’s going to be plenty of support in this deck for returning enchantments from the graveyard, cheating them into play, and in general getting as much use out of them as you can. Just like graveyard reanimation means you see the best creature at the table over and over again, a deck built around enchantments is going to mean you see the best enchantment over and over again. Thus, your support for Eldrazi Conscription.

Someone bought a foil copy from me recently which is what got me thinking about this card. It’s a little tough to tell you to buy in at $25, which is where the foils are, mostly because even if they hit $50 or $60, they’ll move slowly. (Still, probably not terrible.) I like the non-foils more, since everyone that plays this deck will want a copy, and even if they only go from $12 to $20, that’s still a healthy move, and you’ll sell a lot more non-foils than foils. All of this with the caveat that it doesn’t show up in the Estrid deck of course, which may certainly come to pass.

Splendid Reclamation (Foil)

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $10

Over on the Jund side of things, Lord Windgrace dumps lands into your graveyard in exchange for drawing more cards. A couple of +2s and suddenly you’ve got an entire extra mana base in the yard and you’re almost at ultimate. Fire off a Splendid Reclamation and you’re getting a huge boost in mana production at the low cost of having drawn a bunch of spare cards.

We don’t have to work hard to figure out that Reclamation is good; it’s in over 6,000 decks on EDHREC at the moment. It’s one of the most popular cards in The Gitrog Monster, a commander with a similar engine. You’ll find it in various other places too, although it’s certainly at its best in the frog horror deck.

Eldritch Moon product was sparser than some of the other sets that year, in part based on when it was released, popularity of Standard at that time, etc. Other cards from the set, e.g. Collective Brutality, have done quite well. As far as sets go, it’s more fertile ground than most other recent releases for valuable cards.

With Lord Windgrace coming in a month or so and a new batch of players on the Jund land lifestyle, there will be another pile of players looking to pick up Reclamations. Foils at $4 are going to dry up with no new line of supply, and we should see them land comfortably around $10 sometime later this year.

---

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.

---

[/hide]

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.

---

We’re in a lull this week, with Magic 2019’s official release behind us, and Commander 2018 spoilers next week. In the interim, we’re left with Mercadian Masques and Legends cards getting picked off a few copies at a time, with little guarantee to how quickly any will sell. People are arguing about the Reserved List (again), and Battlebond foils are still proving quite popular with speculators.

Without much to go on, this week I’ll be considering some of what we do know of Commander 2018 so far, which is the four general themes – ‘Top of library matters,’ ‘Lands matter,’ Artifacts, and ‘Enchantments matter.’.

Thassa, God of the Sea (Foil)

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $50

Of the various themes coming this year, the Esper ‘Top of library matters’ deck is by far the most fascinating. It’s a theme we haven’t visited much previously. There was the Clash mechanic back in the Lorwyn era, in which players got bonuses for having a higher CMC card on top of their deck. There’s also been a few singletons here and there that stand out; Future Sight comes to mind. Overall the theme is under-explored relative to something like artifacts, and as such stands to generate a lot of excitement in previously low-interest cards.

Thassa is hardly a low-interest card today, but that’s sort of the point. You’ll find her in nearly 12,000 EDH decks, which puts her just outside of the top 30 most popular blue cards in the format. Scrying every turn is helpful, and making creatures unblockable is especially useful in EDH, where there’s no shortage of blockers and plenty of creatures that offer big payoffs if you can actually get them to deal damage.

It’s Thassa’s scry ability that has me interested here. With a ‘top of library’ theme, being able to get a free scry every upkeep could provide a lot of additional value. Of course we haven’t seen any actual card spoilers yet, so I don’t know what mechanics we may end up with, but I’d be surprised if they couldn’t make use of Thassa’s scrying.

With her already substantial appeal, the introduction of a new theme that’s been relatively unexplored up until now, dwindling supply of the foils, and almost no chance of a foil reprint in the next year or two, foil Thassa is sitting pretty heading into the C18 spoilers.

Titania, Protector of Argoth

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $12

Over on the Jund ‘land matters’ front, I find Titania to be worth keeping an eye on. Returning a land from the graveyard to play is rarely not useful in EDH, even if your group doesn’t play targeted land destruction. Utility lands are likely to be milled away at some point, and recovering your Gaea’s Cradle is occasionally life-saving.

There’s a lot to be gained with that second ability, too. Titania can turn into a serious source of 5/3 token generation. Sacrificing your entire manabase to generate some advantage, getting a 5/3 for each land that you trashed, and then casting Splendid Reclamation to get your 10 to 20 lands back the same turn is a big play. (And don’t forget that Eternal Witness is green.)

It’s hard to envision a ‘land matters’ theme that doesn’t have room for Titania. That’s also the biggest concern here. Titania has so far only been in Commander 2014, and the much smaller rerun of Commander Anthology. Supply is low-ish, and a sudden surge of interest could drain the entire online inventory quick. That also means that she’s possibly on the slate to be reprinted. Wizards loves to reprint Commander-product cards in Commander, and since she’s so on theme, I’d put her reprint viability pretty high. However, if we get to the other side of the 99 and she doesn’t show up, I’d start watching inventory levels closely.

Exploration

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $35

Even moreso than Titania, what type of ‘land matters’ deck wouldn’t want Exploration. What type of deck of any sort wouldn’t want Exploration? None of them. The card is awesome, and playing lands is awesome, and green is awesome.

Just before the Conspiracy reprint, Exploration ran up to $40. It’s wildly popular in EDH, and I think it would be even moreso were it not currently $20 or so. One needn’t be an EDH expert to understand why “play two lands a turn” is so appealing. Especially when it’s a format that’s easy to keep your hand stuffed with cards, which means you could be making two land drops a turn, every turn, for a solid 10 or 11 turns in a row, starting on turn one. God that sounds awesome.

Exploration carries a good price tag today, and is flirting with the soft ceiling for EDH staples. I’d say any EDH legal card that’s been printed within the last seven or eight years is roughly capped at $40 or so. Cards seem to stagnate near that price point, as any higher than that and players decide it isn’t worth buying in. They know at that price, Wizards will eventually reprint it, and then they can buy it at a much lower point.

I suspect Exploration could get close to that ‘soft ceiling’ later this year, assuming it doesn’t show up in Commander 2018. And I doubt it will, given the current price tag. That’s a lot of value to put into the precon. If they do, it will be one of, if not the banner card from that particular deck. Assuming it doesn’t make it in, it will be one of the first cards people will want to add to the strategy, and we could see it nearly double as a result.

---

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.

---

[/hide]

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.

---

Another Monday, another batch of cards to be on the lookout for. Otherwise it’s been a quiet weekend; we’re all still processing the Silver Showcase news, and the Legacy shakeup, and laughing at people that bought Stoneforge Mystics in hopes of it getting unbanned. Piles of irrelevant and useless Arabian Nights and Legends cards continue to disappear, and whomever is buying them is “making” money, assuming they can ever sell them. Oh yeah, Magic 2019 just had its prerelease too, so watch for those to start hitting display cases and online inventories. I don’t know about you guys, but Dominaria and M19 are completely running together in my head.

Astral Cornucopia (Foil)

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $10

I spend a fair bit of time looking for cards with new demand profiles in EDH. Cards that suddenly find themselves with a new vector of demand can run low on supply rapidly, and prices often follow. This is not that type of card.

I may have written about Astral Cornucopia before, although it would have been quite some time ago. Whatever it was when I first talked about it, I still like it. Atraxa continues to be the most popular general, according to EDHREC, and I don’t just mean of all time. Every week, the most new decks logged are Atraxa. People keeping showing up and building that deck. Why? I don’t know. But they do, so she’s popular.

Once you’re sitting down and listing out cards for Atraxa, it’s a crime to not write down Astral Cornucopia. Depending on your board state it may end up mana-neutral the very turn you play it, with huge generation each turn after. In most decks, it’s too expensive to be worth it, but when those counters are basically free rather than three mana, the value equation catches up quickly.

So what’s going on with the card? Well, there’s a few copies left dotted around at $4 or so. It ramps up to $10 shortly after, so it wouldn’t be hard to bring the floor on that up to my predicted price to begin with. Even $10 is a soft ceiling though. If Atraxa really is as popular as she seems, and people really do keep building this deck, how does this card not completely disappear?

Hardened Scales (Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $20

It’s been a few years since Modern could move the needle on a weekly basis, as many players have sort of “settled in.” That doesn’t mean prices don’t move, it’s just that changes aren’t as frequent, and they’re not as explosive when they happen. Today we’re looking at Hardened Scales, which isn’t exploding by any means, but it is a card being pushed by Modern.

Falling hard on the outside of the bubble at GP Barcelona yesterday was Hardened Scales Affinity. It’s an Affinity modeled more after the original builds, and even has some honest-to-god affinity cards! You’ll also see Hangarback Walkers, Walking Ballistas, and of course, Steel Overseers and Arcbound Ravagers. Every single one of those sees their effectiveness basically doubled with a Hardened Scales in play, since all their activations are separate triggers, which each count for Scales. In fact, if you play Arcbound Worker, then Ravager , then sac Worker to Ravager, you end up with nine counters on Ravager. Then sac Ravager to itself to move the counters onto Inkmoth and you’re at 10 already. Nifty interaction for sure.

Hardened Scales has been popular in EDH since it was printed, and is up to nearly 10,000 decks on EDHREC. That’s certainly in the top tier of EDH playables. (Doubling Season is at 14,000). Khans of Tarkir is also starting to get a touch long in the tooth, as it turns four years old this September. Heck, we’re probably going back to Tarkir next fall or something.

With healthy EDH demand, a possible new Modern appeal, and an aging printing, foil Scales have got a lot of things going for them.

Alhammarret’s Archive

Price Today: $10
Possible Price: $25

There are a few things that are fairly universal within Magic, and one of those is players enjoying A. drawing cards and B. gaining life. It just so happens that with Alhammarret’s Archive, you can do both harder. Draw hard, life hard, win hard.

First and foremost, this is a slower burn than some of the other stuff. There may be a whole 15 copies of foil Astral Cornucopia left under $10. There’s 70 vendors on TCG for Archive, some with multiple copies. It’s a deep supply. It’s a “pick them up here and there in trades, and if someone has one on sale while you’re placing another order” type of card.

I’m bringing Archive up because even though supply is deep, it’s certainly a popular card. It’s in (ugh) over 9,000 EDH decks right now, and this weekend would have been the third anniversary of it having been printed, so like Hardened Scales, it’s starting to get up there in age. It’s going to be popular in casual circles, where they love doubling crap. See: Doubling Season’s popularity, even before EDH existed as a format. Foils aren’t going to be a big sell to the kitchen table crowd, of course, but kitchen demand will still help overall.

Archive could easily end up the next Doubling Season, or something close to it. Most decks gain life or draw cards, and Archive turbopowers both. Without a Commander set reprint, it’s on the way to $20, $25, or more.

---

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.

---