Readers!

I love to talk about the most-built deck on EDHREC as a source of potential specs because what could be more ripe for investment than the most popular deck? Like sometimes happens, there has been some jockeying for position and this week, we’re seeing a non-Magda, non-Tergrid commander occupy to the top spot. Is there any money to be made here?

I don’t know how many more of these it makes sense to do because the clock is pretty much ticking on some of these. Orvar stuff I mentioned last week is moving and if all of the obvious stuff from Fynn, the Fangbearer hasn’t popped before next week, I’ll be really surprised. That said, I think there are a few hidden gems we can tease out, so let’s do that thing.

Magda has moved aside to let another 5-color commander through. I wonder how many people who put together these 5-color lists are actually building them. That said, I severely underestimated how powerful Golos was going to be and that was clearly a miscaculation given how popular Golos has become.

I didn’t make any bold proclamations calling it terrible or anything, but I would not have predicted that a deck that could be built so many ways, most of them pretty underwhelming, would eclipse Atraxa. That said, Atraxa is one of the more versatile decks as well, so who knows? What I do know is that 5 color commanders are fun, everyone should have at least one, their mana bases are expensive and Esika lends herself to two very popular builds – Gods and Superfriends. Esika could be the definitive Superfriends deck moving forward, so let’s delve into the deck, shall we?

The great part about a “Gods” deck is you get new Gods from Kaldheim, you get The World Tree and you get cards people forgot were Gods like Ilharg. Esika could just as easily be built with Planeswalkers, or both, so a lot of older, placeholder 5-color decks like Kenrith and Sisay could make the switch, but I expect Esika to generate a lot of new decks as well, given how the deck guides people toward Planeswalkers and Gods in a way that no 5-color commander has quite as much before.

Here is what I think could be in play.

I think cards that are high for inclusion rather than high for synergy are better picks because they’re not specific to this deck. Ordinarily, the high synergy cards are ones that aren’t used much in other decks and therefore are undiscovered cards about to go up super hard because the new deck got them noticed. We’re not going to see anything like that in this deck. Look at the high synergy cards – Kruphix, Iroas, Keranos – not exactly undiscovered gems. They’re not played as much outside of Esika, hence the high synergy score, but if we’re going high synergy, we’re hoping to get in on an early Whim of Volrath type card. If we’re picking a more tried and true card, I think high inclusion is the way to go. Athreos is the most-played creature in the deck and it’s rebounding from a significant price drop after the Mystery Booster printing. I think Athreos is a very good candidate.

If you found that argument persuasive about Athreos, good news, everything I said is also true of Purphoros, and Purphoros is played in a ton of other decks. I think it recovers without Esikia’s help, but Esika WILL help.

A card to watch, therefore, will be Nicol Bolas. The highest-inclusion Planeswalker, Nicol isn’t played a ton outside of these theoretical Esika builds the way an all-star like Purphoros is. If Purphoros goes up a ton and Bolas stays pretty flat, we must have overstated the new demand created by Esika decks. However, I think this could follow a similar trajectory, and with a lower buy-in, I think there is opportunity here.

Sk8r boi said see you l8r boi to $20, but with 2 printings in a year, they’re either going to leave this alone for a while or print it into absolute powder. I think they’re inclined to let it recover a bit, but I’d get in and our rather than hoping for $10 again.

This doesn’t have a TON to do with Esika, but the second this stops dropping (buylist, too) I like these longer term. This does a lot of work in a lot of different EDH decks, and it can replace a lot of cards that only do one of these things in a deck where you could use a card that did all of them. I like this, but I don’t need to buy too early.

That does it for me this week. Esika could be the best 5-color Gods and ‘Walkers deck we’ve seen and while I don’t expect them not to make Esika obsolete in the next year with another pushed 5-color commander, for now, let’s make some money. Until next time!

Readers!

I would have liked to have talked about Orvar before stupid junk like this happened, but there was a lot going on over at EDHREC.

Don’t let the prices fool you – Whim is sold out everywhere, even when relisted at $8 or $9. It was a bulk rare last week, but Orvar, the All-Form made it pop off. Did we miss the opportunity to pick these up cheap? Sure, but we shouldn’t look at it as if we lost money. We missed an opportunity to get some money, but as always, the less obvious stuff in a deck like this takes longer to get scooped up and gives us ample time to plan our moves. So why didn’t I write about Orvar beforevar? Simply put, there were some doings happening at EDHREC.

Pardon Our Dust

EDHREC got a UI facelift and I think it will work even better as an analytical tool. Nothing we used before is gone but there are some new features that I’m sure I’ll go into at length in future articles. Focusing on launching a lot of new features sapped a lot of the site’s mental bandwidth and the scrapers weren’t working optimally for about a week. That’s normally not a huge deal, but during that week, we weren’t getting updates about how much Orvar was being played. Now that it’s fixed, we know.

It’s played a lot.

Sometimes people tell me that I make these pictures too wide so that the individual cards are too hard to read. You don’t need to read the individual cards, readers. I’ll zoom in if that needs to happen. What I want you to see is where Orvar is.

It’s the 5th-most-built deck in the set, right after Toski and right before Fynn (the poison guy). Orvar is popular and since that’s the case, the Whim of Volrath spike matters even less because if the deck has legs, there are other cards people missed. I found ’em.

Check out the Orvar page. A video should automatically play that tells you about the new features, and it’s worth learning about what they are. Once it’s done, you’ll see that Orvar is sort of boring. A lot of the cards are going in every single build, which bores me as an EDH player but makes me feel better about my investments as a financier. Usually when one part of my job makes me unhappy, the other half makes me happy to compensate. The money I made finding Necrogen Mists at an LGS for $2 makes me feel better about how stupid a deck Tergrid is and how much I hate that they made it. Let’s look at the obvious cards in a linear deck and marvel at how they’re still cheap.

Literally 24 hours ago, Card Kingdom had a bunch of copies, and they were cheaper than TCG Player. When a price is “wrong” like that, as we discussed last week, it’s worth noting. The “cheap” CK copies are gone, but TCG Player is still reasonable, and other sites haven’t quite figured out that this is in as many decks as Whim of Volrath and is just as reusable give its retrace ability. I don’t expect this to stay under $5 for long, and it probably goes higher.

Scepter bottoms out from reprintings, but always manages to rebound strong. This deck, in particular, makes use of a lot of cheap cantrips that have a lot of impact with Orvar out. Anything you imprint on Scepter is good in this deck, meaning there’s no reason not to run it because you don’t have to build around it. It’s always good, and with its price at a 7-year-low, it’s time to get serious about the scepter.

Can someone who knows about foils tell me if this is a good buy at $30? It seems like it is to me. I don’t love foils, as we all know, but this is a rare promo with unique art and the card is going to be played more than usual soon. With Scepter getting a lot of reprints in sets that have foils with its classic art, this is the better foil – I don’t care for the FTV one bit. If you like FTV foils, though, here’s that graph.

$13 for a foil that has flirted with $30 in the recent past. If you buy the premise that Scepter can see more play on the back of decks like Orvar, this seems like it has a lot of potential. It likely never gets cheaper than it is now.

This was on a rocket to the moon already, but in case you weren’t sure if the literal Sakashima deck was enough to help this recover from its Mystery Booster crater, here’s another deck that can’t get enough copies.

Tidespout stock is incredibly low everywhere. This is about to hit a tipping point and you’ll want to have some copies in hand when it does.

The copies from Battlebond are good, too. If I had one card I could buy this week, and I couldn’t find cheap copies of Glamerdye (my Pick of the Week last night) I really like Tidespout Tyrant. There are a lot of cards you can copy with Orvar, and a lot of them are either bulk rares like Scourge of Fleets or already the correct price like Torrential Gearhulk (unless you think it’s on its way up, in which case call it a bonus pick) but Tidespout is about to sell out and it’s nutterbutters in this deck.

When everyone decides there is exactly one way to build a deck, and it’s a popular deck, I have to push past the revulsion I feel as a self-proclaimed steward of the format and make myself feel better by stacking cabbage. Join me in buying obvious cards before they’re obvious to everyone else. Glamerdye is the exact same spec as Whim of Volrath, but one was obvious and easy to buy out and one wasn’t, so let’s do what we always do and make some money. That does it for me, until next time!