By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

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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.

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I don’t know about you guys, but I was glad to have a long weekend away from Magic. Putting everything aside for several days to sit out on a lake and never think about anything important is necessary occasionally. What’s less necessary is eating the entire 96 hours that you’re gone and making yourself sick constantly with all the garbage. That’s the real Magic finance, right there. Not making yourself sick on Memorial Day with brownies.

Ob Nixilis, Unshackled (Foil)

Price Today: $9
Possible Price: $15

Game Knights, the Commander focused video series put out by Josh Lee Kwai and Jimmy Wong, has become fairly popular, to the point that they’re able to influence card prices with the content produced (unintentionally, of course). Most recently an Atheros deck utilizing Shadowborn Apostle appeared on an episode, and now suddenly Athreos is one of the most-built decks on EDHREC this week. Let me know the next time you’re going to do this, Josh.

Browsing Athreos, Ob Nixlis (the Unshackled one) jumped out at me. Ob Nix is deliciously obnoxious in EDH, chunking players for a whopping ten damage every time they search. Opponents that aren’t dumb as bricks typically aren’t going to be losing much life to this, since they’re not going to be casting Rampant Growth if it costs two mana and ten life, but you do get to basically Mindlock Orb the table. Such an effect will vary between annoying and debilitating, depending on what strategy your opponents are employing.

Ol’ Shakleless came around in Magic 2015, and not since, which makes him about four years old now. That was before every card could show up as a prerelease promo, which means the only foil copies were pack foils. That foil supply has dried up fierce, and the few copies that are left will run you about $8 to $9. Once those last few copies get snapped up, we should see foils land comfortably in the $15 to $20 range.

Kambal, Consul of Allocation (Foil)

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $15

Another nugget on the Athreos page is Kambal, Consul of Allocation. Kambal is especially juicy because he’s flying under the radar in two formats, not just one.

Obviously he’s useful in EDH; that’s how we found him. He clocks in at just a scoch under 5,000 EDH decks, which is a respectable volume, if not overwhelming. Needling players the table round for only three mana is something that all those Rhystic Study players will enjoy thoroughly when their deck doesn’t have access to blue. As long as players in EDH cast noncreature spells there will be room for Kambal in the format, so uh, he’s not going anywhere.

Meanwhile, Kambal has been doing work in Modern too. You’ll find him in sideboards in Humans, Mardu Pyromancer, Eldrazi Aggro, and various other brews. He’s something of a Eidolon of Great Revel, except not in red. For a deck that’s trying to get low to the ground and then make it difficult for opponents to get back in the game, Kambal is an excellent angle of attack. At worst he’s a three mana flag bearer that also drains your opponent for two, and that’s if the very first spell they cast is removal targeted at Kambal. Any other spell they cast first is gravy.

You’ll find a couple more copies than Ob Nixilis on the market, but we’re not talking about hundreds. There’s twenty or thirty floating around on TCG right now, which isn’t red alert levels of supply. It’s like, orange alert? It’s blackwatch plaid alert. It’s “people are going to keep picking these up for Modern and in a few months they’ll be over $10” alert.

Hostage Taker

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $12

As we enter June (the month), we find ourselves hitting the nadir of Magic prices. Summer is always a slog for basically every price index in the game. People simply don’t think about or play as much Magic when it’s nice out. Friday nights people want to be grilling, at the beach, at the park, and generally somewhere other than humid, never-air-conditioned card stores. I’ve memories of sticking to tables trying to play in July and August and it was miserable.

Point being that cards that will hold double digit prices in the fall can be quite cheap right now, as everyone ignores them and goes off and does other things. Speaking of which, remember when Hostage Taker was $15 and one of the best cards in Standard? That may come to be true again! We don’t know yet. Hour of Devastation gods will be absent, of course, so exiling Scarab God won’t be as crucial, but that doesn’t mean she won’t have plenty of targets. Depending on what Ravnica brings us, the exile ability may be especially useful once more.

Prices on Hostage taker have cratered, thanks in part to a shifting metagame and the time of the year. Come this fall, if things break a specific way — that’s an if, by the way, not a when — prices could skyrocket north of $10. Keep an eye on Hostage Taker and any Ravnica leaks; Hostage Taker may once again have her time in the sun.

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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.

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By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

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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.

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In what may be the strangest announcement day so far, we heard nothing about any future Masters sets and nothing about Commander. We did get a single spoiler for Battlebond — which has full spoilers starting today — news that there’s a three set Ravnica block this fall (which we all knew already), and finally that China is getting its own Standard format. Huh? Announcement day should be exciting and build hype for things to come. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that literally nothing here was set up to make people excited about the next six months of Magic.

History of Benalia

Price Today: $19
Possible Price: $40

Losing Masterpieces has had at least one benefit for our types; Standard prices aren’t flattened nearly as hard as they were over the last few years. No longer are high value bonus cards shackling singles prices to an average price closer to $50 or $60 a box. Now they can stretch up towards $80 and $90, which means the highest demand cards can really stretch. Just take a look at Karn and his $60 price tag.

While Karn has been the quickest and biggest winner, there’s still room for others. We’ve seen Teferi, Lyra, and History of Benalia pick up ground too. My suspicion today is that of those, History of Benalia still has room to grow, as odd as that may seem.

Looking through a variety of Standard results, you’ll see that nearly every deck with white in it is playing Benalia. And not just one or two either, typically all four. Walking around the floor of GP Toronto I saw the same thing; knight tokens galore. History of Benalia is shaping up to be one of the best cards in Standard. If you’re control, it provides another strong axis to attack on. If you’re aggro, it’s hard to find a better use of three mana. And if white midrange shows up, I expect it will be useful there as well.

Twenty dollars isn’t a cheap buy-in price for a Standard mythic. But we’re seeing that singles prices are very different in a post-Masterpieces world. When this October rolls around and 45% of decks are running a playset of Benalia, it’s not going to be $20.

Mycoloth (Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $20

Dominaria brought with it several appealing new appealing new commanders, including the (literally) dank Slimefoot. The Saproling King, Slimefoot has given new life to an array of saproling-related cards that had otherwise languished in obscurity, Elvish Farmer chief among them. Then there’s Mycoloth.

Mycoloth is found in 10,500 EDHREC decks. That puts it in the top 50 or so most played green cards. Considering the competition, that’s impressive, especially since you probably didn’t realize how popular Mycoloth is. I sure didn’t. Not only is Mycoloth remarkably popular, but he (it) was popular long before Slimefoot made the scene. Which means we’ve got a strong base of popularity to start with, and now we’re throwing fuel on the fire.

You can find some — very few — foils around $6 right now. They’ll be gone in short order and then foils will post up in the $15 to $25 range, where they’ll sit until the return of devour, whenever that is. It’s not looking to happen anytime soon.

Grand Abolisher (Foil)

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $50

While I didn’t realize Mycoloth was so popular, I knew Grand Abolisher is. Making everyone shut up while you take your turn is great in all decks, and especially so in others, where you’re able to execute your combos in relative peace. Nice Path to Exile you’ve got stranded in your hand, idiot!

While non-foil reprints have shown up three or four times now, there’s still only a single foil copy available; the Magic 2012 printing. Those came out in 2011, which means this June or July Grand Abolisher will turn seven years old. How time flies, eh? Since then, Grand Abolisher has ended up as the 11th most played white card in Commander. What a fun coincidence this year; born in 2011 and now he’s 11th.

There’s a handful of foils still floating around at $20, and given how old Abolisher is, and how popular he’s been for so long, we aren’t going to see any more flooding the market. These will continue to get snagged, and then the cards just going to be $40 or $50 and we’ll all just say “oh, ok.” So if you’re interested in abolishing at a great rate, don’t sleep on this guy.

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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.

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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 was a common thread between the two Grand Prix; in one, the winner wept in a touching display of humanity, and in the other, everyone wept after seeing the top eight was nothing but vehicle decks. October is going to be fun, if for no other reason than we’re going to get a hard reset with the loss of Kaladesh block.

Birmingham was Legacy and, as a result, doesn’t mean anything to anyone, really. New Karn showed up in a couple of sideboards, which is cool, and bodes well for the card. Beyond that, there wasn’t anything in the lists that stood out as noteworthy, and even if something did, it would be hard pressed to move any needles hard. I was tempted to talk about picking up Lion’s Eye Diamonds, but they’re already $250, so forget it.

The Gitrog Monster (Foil)

Price Today: $13
Possible Price: $30

Gitrog was, at the time of his spoiling, a card people were awfully excited to brew with. He did things players loved — drawing cards and putting lands into play — and he was also a giant frog. What’s not to be attracted to here? A frog, for god’s sake.

With Muldrotha’s release in Dominaria, and the subsequent popularity of….it, Gitrog has found another yet home. He fits right into the strategy of playing things from graveyards, and again, he’s a frog.

More importantly, he’s a single printed legend with dwindling supply. Shadows Over Innistrad isn’t an underprinted set, per se, though one look at stock on foil Gitrogs and you’ll see that doesn’t matter much. Given that his EDHREC numbers are actually a touch more anemic than I would have anticipated, it seems that there’s probably strong kitchen table demand for everyone’s favorite evil frog.

A couple copies remain below $15, and beyond that, there’s isn’t much left at all. People are going to keep adding Gitrog to their decks, whether as a commander, or as an include in Muldrotha, or anywhere else, and foils are going to hit $30 right along in the process.

Goblin Chainwhirler

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $10

Making sense of Standard results at this point in the format can be difficult, since it’s such a wide open brawl (heh). Once the fall and rotation comes, and card prices begin moving in the good direction, the format will be so different that it will be tough to figure out what cards will be important. Our best bet is to try and find strong cards in each color that are seeing play now, that could remain or improve their position after rotation.

Aggressive decks have remained popular after Dominaria, and they’ve come in two stripes, those with a heavy vehicle presence and those without. In all the decks without a vehicle component, Goblin Chainwhirler has been a key figure. Hitting everything on the other side for one damage can be a nuke depending on the board setup, and a 3/3 first strike is no joke either. Given that we can expect Llanowar Elves to remain a key card in the format regardless, Whirler will almost assuredly have targets.

Four dollars isn’t as cheap as we’d normally like our Standard picks. Ideally you can spot them in the $.25 range and then get out above $10, ala Nightveil Specter. They’re not all going to be that good though, and in the meantime, Chainwhirler may (I emphasize “may” over “will”) end up as a tier one card between now and the end of October.

Zendikar Resurgent (Foil)

Price Today: $8
Possible Price: $20

Of course I have to include at least one solid, slow burn spec. Resurgent was obvious in the same way a baseball bat to the temple is obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less valid. It’s taken about two years to get there, and now we’re just about at the point where the price is poised to jump.

Resurgent is guaranteed to be reprinted at some point, if not this year, then next year is certainly on the table. And at the same time, it’s guaranteed not to be in an expansion set, since it’s so closely tied with the Zendikar plane and story. (Although the return of core sets changes that math a bit.) Most likely, we’d see it in a commander product — in non-foil, of course.

A few copies are floating around $8 or so, and it’s not a deep well after that. How could it be, when it’s in 13,000 decks on EDHREC? This will sit comfortably between $15 and $20 once it runs out the first time, and will keep creeping up after that until it shows up in foil again, whenever that is.

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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.

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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.

---

All anyone in Magic can talk about these last few weeks is the reserve list, and how everything there is going wild. Undoubtedly a few players with deep pockets are picking cards off left and right, with plenty of smaller time operations joining in the fun where they can. Is there any meat left on the bone at this point? Hard to say. I can’t imagine there are many reserve list cards that haven’t been targeted yet that you could actually sell after buying into, but who knows. Wilder things have happened.

I’m confident in two things at this point. One is that the prices on many of these won’t decrease too much, and in many cases will continue to improve, since reserve lists cards obviously aren’t showing up again. The second is that it’s almost definitely correct to sell most of them, since the rate of appreciation in most cases won’t keep up with the opportunity cost associated with holding them.

Growing Rites of Itlimoc (Buy-a-Box)

Price Today: $25
Possible Price: $100

So far it has remained unknown to most Magic players that there’s a fourth Masterpiece series. Inventions, Invocations, and Expeditions are the obvious ones. We know about those. The secret Masterpiece set is what I’ll dub Explorations, that is, the Ixalan Buy-A-Box promos. BaB promos from Ixalan, of which there were ten, were flip cards (e.g. Search for Azcanta) that had alternate art on the back. All ten form the map from Ixalan, which is a nifty Easter egg, and a reason to have all ten.

When purchasing a box of Ixalan you received one at random, which means each is fairly rare individually. It’s possible a lot of players have them in their trade binder and don’t even realize they’re different, since the front face is indistinguishable aside from the small “buy-a-box” text in the bottom left corner.

All of this is to say that cards like Rites and Search, which are already popular, have obscure, limited-run special editions. Without a doubt these will get picked up by people in the know while prices are low, and eventually they’re going to get real pricey. I’m thinking $75 to $100 or more for the real good ones, and $30 to $50 for the less popular ones.

Parallel Lives (Foil)

Price Today: $15
Possible Price: $30

The Weatherlight has had many passengers, but so far, only one stowaway. And he’s disgusting. That’d be Slimefoot (the stowaway). He unlocked quite a few saproling cards already, with prices on stuff like Elvish Farmer having gone bananas. (Which is like six bucks, which for Fallen Empires, is bananas.) Slimefoot also plays up well known favorites, which is where we are at the moment.

Parallel Lives isn’t new to anyone; if you’ve created a token in EDH before, you’ve tried to fit this into your deck. It’s the budget Doubling Season, if “budget” is even a fair term here. You’ll find it listed in over 13,000 decks on EDHREC, which is just about as good as it gets. Tokens are a popular strategy in that format, and this is basically the second best enabler out there.

Enterprising individuals will find a few foils at $15, but not many. We haven’t seen a price spike on these recently, which means there weren’t a bunch of sub-$15 copies that were just cleaned out and now supply appears lower than it is. There’s just not that many out there. With Slimefoots hitting binder sleeves now, and our knowledge of how slow to react the EDH population at large is, I expect additional demand to begin applying pressure to Parallel Lives in the near future.

Pyromancer’s Goggles (Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $15

Remember Firesong and Sunspeaker? The two Hurloon Minotaurs that are only available as a Dominaria buy-a-box promo right now? That if they’re accidentally good in Standard will cost $70? Excellent decision on that, WotC. Anyways, they’re also breathing new life into Boros EDH decks, since that color pair now has a general that isn’t some variation on “shove everything into the red zone.”

As a general that rewards you for playing red spells that do damage, there’s a newfound interest in all sorts of effects that were otherwise underwhelming in the format. Heck, even Lightning Bolt is playable in a Firesong deck. Deal three damage to a creature, gain three life, then deal another three, either to the same target in order to finish it off, or to remove something else? I imagine the deck is a bit one-trick pony, but it’s probably a fairly fun pony at least.

Anyways, one of the best cards in the deck is undoubtedly Pyromancer’s Goggles, which let you copy red spells when you use it to cast things. What’s better than one Star of Extinction? Two! Especially when you gain life from the first copy but nobody else does! Goggles are an all-star in this deck, and regardless of what you’re doubling, it’s going to be somewhere between “solid value” and “game-ending.”

At the moment you’ll find foil Goggles in the $6 range, but not many. They ramp up to $10 fairly quickly, then basically straight to $30. Magic Origins is three years old this July, which is definitely in the “EDH cards begin spiking” time frame. As a card that’s unlikely to be reprinted outside of Commander product, foils are an excellent bet.

Plus, if you own this card, you can use it to cast a white spell and then gleefully shout “the goggles, they do nothing!” before passing out from self-induced culture referenced euphoria.

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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.

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