Category Archives: Watchtower

Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 12/26/17

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. And if you enjoy playing Magic, make sure to visit https://scry.land to find PPTQs, SCG Opens, and more events on an interactive map with worldwide coverage. Find Magic near you today.

Merry Christmas! At least, that’s what I’d be saying if I had written this article yesterday. But I didn’t, I’m writing it today. So happy boxing day, I suppose.

Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of hot Magic action around this time of year. As such, I’m going to focus on reviewing some EDH stuff I think is worth keeping an eye on. See you all in 2018! There’s no chance it won’t be worse than this year.

Astral Cornucopia (Foil)

Price Today: $3
Possible Price: $10

At some point a ways back I recommended this card.  While it hasn’t exploded since then, I still think this is about as ripe as they come.

Most decks will find Cornucopia to be a middling mana rock. Put three in, get back one immediately of any color. Fine, but not thrilling. Especially when you can play Thran Dynamo. You can get more out of it later in the game by pumping tons of mana into it, which is a nice bonus depending on the deck, though that’s something of an edge case.

There are certain decks that are well positioned to make use of Cornucopia, and those that are will find it to be the best mana rock in their deck. Chief among those decks are Atraxa, with her ample proliferate effects. With a Cornucopia on the field, ever proliferate also adds a mana, permanently. It also happens to be the case that Atraxa is the most popular EDH general ever built. Fortuitous!

You’ll still find a few foils out there at $3, but not many. Prices tick up to $4 and $5 after a few copies, and then there’s basically none left. It’s a quiet time of year so nothing is going to happen right away, but we’ve got a large base of demand for this card and no product releases on the horizon that would change that.

Champion of Lambholt (Foil)

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $15

No one paid much attention to Champion back in Avacyn Restored Standard, and really, why would they have. It was slow, fragile, and there were a lot of other, better things to be doing.

Champion has found a better life in EDH, where spot removal is sparse and she can be powered up rapidly. (For some truly good yucks, plop down a Craterhoof Behemoth and turn your board of donks into an unblockable torrent of suffering. (Kind of surprising we don’t have a Torrent of Suffering card, right?)) Even when you’re not turbo-charging Champion, two turns of normal EDH play will make her a threat to be reckoned with. Even one or two triggers are useful, since they prevent hornet and zombie tokens from getting in the way.

Her ability to make the declare blockers step infuriating for opponents hasn’t gone unnoticed. You’ll find Champion in an impressive 9,500 decks. There aren’t many tiers of cards above that in EDH. You’ll find foils around $5, but probably not more than three or four sets. A creature this popular, with such low availability, is on trajectory to hit a double digit price tag in 2018.

The Chain Veil (Foil)

 

Price Today: $15
Possible Price: $30

The Chain Veil isn’t a new card to speculators. Prices spiked almost exactly a year ago, with foils leaping from $8 to $20. They settled after that, only to leap again from $15 to $35 this past September. They’ve again started to settle again, with the cheapest copy at $15 right now. I wouldn’t expect that to last all of 2018 though.

Chain Veil is a reasonably popular EDH card at around 3,500 copies. That’s solid, but not staggering. What’s so great about it isn’t massive demand, but rather how unique it is. There’s nothing else in the game even remotely similar to the Chain Veil, and anyone looking for this type of effect has nowhere else to find it. If you’re playing Planeswalkers Atraxa, arguably the most popular of the Atraxa builds, there’s no substitute. You have to have this card. I also like that it’s going to be popular in 60 card decks, since it plays so well with a card type we know is appealing to the kitchen table crowd. I don’t expect a major supply of foil demand from that crowd, but it’s not insignificant.

With Chain Veil’s price history, low supply of cheap copies, and “coolness,” it’s on track to at least double again 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.

Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 12/18/17

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. And if you enjoy playing Magic, make sure to visit https://scry.land to find PPTQs, SCG Opens, and more events on an interactive map with worldwide coverage. Find Magic near you today.

It’s been another quiet week in Magic finance, especially with both GP’s having been limited. We don’t have much in the way of breakout cards to discuss, but that’s fine. The lack of hype or excitement around anything allows us to look to other, less sexy, but still reliable options. With Commander no less popular today than it has been all year, it’s a great place to park money earmarked for longer term investments. (Assuming all that money isn’t just being funneled into bitcoin.)

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expensive cards

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Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 12/11/17

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. And if you enjoy playing Magic, make sure to visit https://scry.land to find PPTQs, SCG Opens, and more events on an interactive map with worldwide coverage. Find Magic near you today.

You’ve heard quite a few personalities talking about how healthy Modern has looked for several months now, myself included. That’s still true, and the two Modern GP’s mostly bore that out. I’m hearing more and more people get annoyed with Tron, though. And it had a great weekend, so it’s not just empty rhetoric. Is it bannable? Probably not, at least not yet. A good weekend doesn’t immediately require excision. It’s not about the performance with Tron though, it’s the experience of the gameplay. Some decks can be a little too good and be completely fine in the format because the nature of the games is fairly enjoyable, win or lose. Think Death’s Shadow. Other decks can be axed not because they’re overpowered, but because they’re miserable to play against. Think Eggs.

Tron is probably a touch better than it needs to be, and while it’s certainly nowhere near as heinous as Eggs, it does have some questionable features. For instance, it can generate seven mana with three lands.

Other than that, it’s a quiet time of year. Players are playing less Magic, money is going to gifts and dreidels, and there will be a dearth of events between now and January. This column is going to be tough to write for the next month.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 12/4/17

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. And if you enjoy playing Magic, make sure to visit https://scry.land to find PPTQs, SCG Opens, and more events on an interactive map with worldwide coverage. Find Magic near you today.

World Magic Championships is a cool component of the greater Magic world, and we’re all better off having it. Players have been leaning into nationally-inspired costumes more each year, and as a result we got to see dinosaur (?) onesies and facepaint that most would recognize as “that thing Mel Gibson did in Braveheart before he started yelling about Jews.” All in all, a nifty event.

Not useful for our Monday crowd though. Because it’s team unified, players can’t share cards between decks. E.g. if I have four Torrential Gearhulk in my deck, nobody else on my team can have any. As a result it’s a tiny and weird meta, which while produces cool lists, success is often not reproducable in a, uh, standard Standard metagame.

We got the SCG Invitational too, which is a little better. Standard was mostly a bore, with a ton of energy. I suspect this format is going to be what it is until energy rotates, but we’ll see. Modern was a little cooler, with a diversity that we’ve become accustomed to. The biggest surprise was probably seeing humans in the list of top performing Modern decks. At this point, I’m comfortable calling that a legitimate Modern deck.

Reflector Mage (Foil)

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $12

We’ve talked about Humans a few times in a few different places. Our takeaway was “looks cool, but I want to be sure it’s real before I start throwing money at it.” Turns out the deck is quite likely real. As a top performing archetype at the SCG Invi, it’s hard to make a case otherwise.

Reviewing the list, I found myself noticing the full playset of Reflector Mage. Anyone who has played enough Modern knows that getting Mage’d a single time can be a massive tempo loss depending on your hand. It’s also amusingly obnoxious in EDH (especially Brago), and slots into cubes of all sorts.

You can snag foils right around $5 right now, and given that a legitimately actually new Modern archetype is running a full set, it’s good in other formats, and supply is already low (about 16 copies under $7, about 30 total) we could see this north of $10 within a few months.

Mentor of the Meek (Foil)

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $15

Do you remember this card? Many don’t. If you don’t play EDH you almost certainly have no reason to care, and even if you do, if you’re a Timmy type, this is irrelevant. Why would you want small creatures??

Turns out the card is pretty dang popular. I stumbled upon it when looking at popular commanders this month, and saw that Alesha was in the top 10. I was a tad surprised to see that, and took a gander. It’s no surprise that Mentor of the Meek would be a top card in the list and, as it turns out, is in 11,500 EDH decks. I’ve considered the card myself a few times for EDH decks, but never really thought about it. Turns out plenty of others have as well.

What’s more interesting is the grand total of 20 foil copies on TCG Player right now, and 6 others on SCG and ABU. None of the prices are high either, which sets this up to be swept up by anyone with a few bucks and a glint in their eye.

Without a reprint, this massively popular EDH card is destined for greater price tags.

Cathartic Reunion (Foil)

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $8

While it’s not a slam dunk the way some of the other cards we look at are, Cathartic Reunion may be a solid sleeper.

I noticed this in the Alesha deck as well, and it jumped out at me since I’ve tossed it into several Modern combo decks myself. There’s not really a better rate in that format for the effect, and it’s solid in EDH as well apparently, with 3,500 decks listing it. That’s not a major impetus, especially for a newer common, but it does mean there’s going to be consistent demand there.

Moreso than EDH I like the Modern appeal. It’s an efficient combo piece, and there’s always going to be decks in the format trying to do degenerate things with this card. When there are, they’ll probably want several of them. And there’s always the chance that another graveyard based combo deck will show up in the format, adding even more demand to the card.

Supply is solid on this guy, with probably 100 foils floating around out there. That’s fine though. At $1.50 or $2, you can stash these away in a pile and wait for a rainy day. Copies will get gobbled up one or four at a time, and within six months or a year we could be looking at fifteen left on the market, not one hundred. Once that happens? Well, original printing foil Manamorphose is out of stock, but the market price is $18.

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.