Readers!

We talk about reprint risk a lot but today, I want to talk about the opposite of reprint risk and how a category of cards that keeps making itself obsolete is not only sheltered from reprints, but also benefits from the need to redundancy. Today, we study cards that beg for new and improved copies of themselves that are also cards that are new and improved copies of something else. That sentence will make sense later, I hope.

What?

OK, so you know how one of the earliest things Blue knew how to do was pretend to be something else?

It was a good effect, and a very blue one. Being able to copy their best creature and thus neutralize it, copy your own best creature and thus double it and generally get a ton of value from a card that had a lot of utility in a color that wasn’t exactly known for having efficient creatures was popular early. Doppelganger and Clone both became popular cards and for years, Clone was reprinted into absolute oblivion. Doppelganger was left alone, mostly, but Clone lived on as the de facto, well, Clone effect. Eventually, WotC realized it was a fun design space and started sexying up the clones a bit with new effects, broader ranges of targets and better names than “Clone”.

The question is, if Clone had 0 reprints after, say, Unlimited, would its price be higher because of scarcity or lower due to being obsolete? I realize it’s an unfair question, but the question itself isn’t that important, it’s how I’m framing the rest of the article. We should be thinking about how a format like EDH with 100 cards that are 1-of effects is so profoundly different from a format with 60 cards that are 4-of effects that being “the best” Clone effect doesn’t matter, and being “the worst” doesn’t even matter some of the time. Sometimes you want to do your best Ash Ketchum impression and leave home 10 at to go engage in a bunch of what is basically legal dogfighting with no parental supervision catch ’em all.

Sakahsima is very popular right now and while there are a lot of decks pairing Sakashima with other creatures to amplify those effects (Krarkashima is blowing a lot of other decks completely out of the water, which has been a nice surprise and is why I didn’t try to guess which combinations would be the most played because I would have guessed wrong) people are also going mono-Blue Sakashima. Why? To load up on Clones, baby! And why not?

If you have enough clone effects, you can copy the same creature with a powerful (or hell, even a weak) ETB effect every turn and make opponents feel a sense of deja vu that ends with their death. It’s a silly deck but people like it and if people like it, they’re going to buy the cards.

If the deck needs basically all of the good clone effects, it doesn’t matter which is the best or worst, but merely how many the deck has room for. Since Clone effects, for whatever reason, are cards they’d rather redesign than reprint, the reprint risk on them is very low, making them appealing targets, and the fact that a deck can come along and make swaths of them relevant again all at once and could do so again in the future, makes them also appealing targets. Let’s look at the Sakashima page on the ‘Rec and try to find some good ‘uns.

The harder-to-get and less-printed ones have already begun to tip. The thing about Commander 2015 is that after everyone grabbed the one obvious card out of the deck, they sort of stopped caring about everything else and a lot of those cards started to pick up steam in EDH. Everyone was so focused on Containment Priest and Teferi that they didn’t realize that a lot of the decks have $3 cards in them. A lot of $3 cards. A lot of the Black deck has these 7 mana spells that most players didn’t even read that are pretty powerful effects in EDH. Gigantoplasm is still gettable for $2 on sites that didn’t get the memo and it’s unlikely the card ever gets printed again. It’s not flashy like Clever Impersonator, but there is something to be said for not being Clever Impersonator and therefore not getting reprinted. I like these at $2 and I don’t even hate them at $4.

So what will it take to push a card like Cryptoplasm out of bulk rare territory?

It seems like, with a similar amount of play for both cards, we’re waiting on supply to dry up. There are simply more copies of a bulk rare from a regular set than a card from a Commander deck. The demand for the Blue deck didn’t really materialize until it was far too late to print more – Teferi decks became a cEDH staple, Cyclonic Rift hit $20 and climbed more and we don’t need a third thing, two things is enough when those two things are the two things, but you were expecting a third thing.

So if Cryptoplasm doesn’t get there, are there cards that can?

Are we better off waiting for a card we know will recover to do that, buying when we know we’re at the absolute floor because the price has rebounded ever so slightly and the set it’s in was 10 products and 2 months ago?

Do we buy on the basis of a huge price disparity between two sites because we know that Card Kingdom slings a lot of EDH product, we’re not likely to get a reprint soon, the card sees play in a lot of formats because it’s not just a big, durdly, 4-mana clone?

Do we buy somewhere between the floor and ceiling because we know there are additional factors that make a card difficult (but not impossible) to reprint and we know once it goes out of print the price will go up?

It’s hard to know exactly what to do when we see data like this. Personally, I think if we were going to target a card like Gigantoplasm, the time to do so would have been before it started to get bought up a bit, buying in at the floor. A card that is a bad version of a good card and therefore obsolete can lay dormant for years, waiting for the deck to need enough redundant copies of the effect to spike it up and when that happens, the price spikes hard. You want to be the one selling into that first wave because a second spike isn’t guaranteed for a card with medium demand and 0 supply the way it is for a card with high, sustained demand and medium supply in two waves.

I don’t know if I like any of these Clones other than Gigantoplasm which appears to have some room to grow and some supply at the old price, Phantasmal Image which has grown a lot but isn’t done and Spark Double which has additional utility but less reprint risk. You don’t HAVE to target any of these, really. But what we can do is use this case as a lesson because while tribal cards are obvious when a new tribe is announced, you’re not always the one holding Louvisa Coldeyes, sometimes you’re the one trying to buy Bitterblossom because WotC announced a fairy tale set and you stopped listening when you heard the word “fairy.” “Clone tribal” turned out to be a thing, if you apply a very loose definition of what tribal decks are. But hear me out – the people applying the same loose definition of what cards should be grouped together in a deck the way players are going to are the ones who will be prepared for the next thing that is a little less obvious than “they spoiled a Minotaur, you know what to didgeridoo about it.” Until next time.

We have done some baseless, semi-baseless and mostly baseless speculation on this column. Not everyone knows this, but in my day, I’ve even done some quiet speculation. I have largely gotten away from the uncertain where I can, preferring to look at solid data from EDHREC and base my picks on what people are actually playing rather than what I think they’ll play. Today, I am going to do a bit of a hybrid approach because I think what people are going to play soon will be very similar to something played already and I’m going to see if I can figure it out weeks before anyone brews a single deck.

My Thoughts On Leaks

Leaks suck. If you leak cards, I hope you get a splinter under your fingernail every day. I hope WotC sues you and turns your house into a camp where arsonists learn to paint minifigs and one of them burns it down with all of your stuff inside. Leaks are like telling a child Santa isn’t real, except in this scenario, Wizards of the Coast contacted me ahead of time and told me it was cool if I told everyone Santa wasn’t real and I worked for like 10 hours on a video about it and then you just blurted it out a week before I was allowed to post my video… ish. Like, in this scenario, I’d be a monster because I was about to tell everyone Santa wasn’t real… OK, this metaphor is off the rails. The point is, leakers are a combination of people who tell children Santa isn’t real but also someone who shouts out the punchline to a joke before a comic delivers it. Yeah, great, you’ve heard this one before, but the reason I’m telling the joke and not you is that I have something called

My Thoughts On Leaks Continued

timing.

That said, if the leaks are out, they’re out. I make lots of different kinds of content for a lot of different websites and they all have different philosophies about how to handle leaks. From a finance perspective, other people are acting on this information and we should, too. We’d be doing our readers a disservice if we didn’t provide the same analysis the competitors are providing. We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, so let’s look at the cards that leaked, namely the two face cards from the Commander decks.

Lathril, Blade of the Elves 2BG

Legendary Creature – Elf Noble

Menace

Whenever Lathril, Blade of the Elves deals combat damage to a player, create that many 1/1 green Elf Warrior creature tokens

T, tap 10 untapped Elves you control: Each opponent loses 10 life and you gain 10 life

2/3

Lathril is kind of spicy – having a win con in the command zone is useful. I played a different GB elf deck and it was tough to kill them without Craterhoof – I often found myself resorting to using Jarad (I went with Jarad) or Shaman of the Pack to kill them. I miss my Nath of the Gilt Leaf deck, but it gets to live on this week as the inspiration for basically the exact deck everyone is going to build around Lathril. It may have fewer discard effects, but it doesn’t have to considering Nath goes in the 99 and Discard effects are good.

This will be a bit of a Voltron deck as well, and I can tell you the kinds of cards people will likely include in a deck that wants to hit hard and will have lots of tokens.

This goes in the deck, but is it good? I don’t know. It’s crept up a bit from its floor of about $0.50 on CK but it’s not quite at the $3 it was flirting with, either. It might take more than Lathril to make this the $5 you’d want it to be if you’re buying in around $1.50, but you can make money here, albeit not easy money.

There is a heavy Discard component to Nath, so if we want to play this safe, we should ignore than stuff since it’s not guaranteed to be in Lathril. Instead, we can focus on on the common cards between the two likely decks.

You know how I feel about foils, but there are so many non-foil copies of this bulk card that the foils may be targeted. Again, I don’t personally like the foils of EDH cards but some people do, and you may just out these to greater fools if you sell online. I think this card and Pennon Blade deserve a look.

Unfortunately for Pennon Blade, it was just in Commander Legends and foils of this are everywhere due to the Collector Boosters. I think this cad is cooked, which is too bad because foils were flirting with $2 but most people had these in their foil bulk, which is almost always unsorted, meaning the market would be slow to replace the copies bought quickly. There’s no money here; thanks Commander Legends.

On the other hand, here’s a card with 2 foil printings (Legions and Eternal Masters) and whose foil flirted with $9 already. I like this for $4 if CK was getting $9 for these earlier, irrespective of if Lathril can replicate the demand that led to that earlier spike (it can’t).

Card Kingdom selling out of a card only played in EDH makes my speculator sense tingle. This won’t be $4 when CK restocks, which means it’s pretty likely their new buy price will be above what you can get these for on other sites right now. It won’t be enough to bother arbitraging, but it will be enough that the TCG Player price likely goes up to approach the new CK price, which means you profit.

One thing I will say for foils is that it insulates them from potentially being reprinted in the same deck that’s giving us Lathril, something I can’t say for non-foils. If they’re obvious enough for us to know to speculate on them, they’re obvious enough to go in the deck.

Let’s look at the other one.

Ranar the Ever-Watchful – 2WU

Legendary Creature – Spirit Warrior

Flying, vigilance The first card you foretell each turn costs Snow to foretell. Whenever you exile one or more cards from your hand, and/or permanents from the battlefield, create a 1/1 white Spirit creature token with flying.

I don’t know what the foretell ability is all about, but we can look at the rest of the deck and assume foretell is going to be fairly easy to pull off, otherwise there wouldn’t be much point putting it in a commander deck that’s likely to have some reprints.

That said, this is a blink deck that gives us value when we blink, and just like looking at Nath helped us with Latrhil, Brago can help us here. Also, don’t forget that it triggers when you exile their stuff. This could be fun.

This hit $4 once, it can do it again. If you can get these for half of that on TCG Player, I don’t hate it. Interlude and Ghostway are both in play, but I worry about them going in the deck, especially Interlude.

As much as the non-foil price is tanking a bit, CK has been sold out of the foil for a minute. I think paying $4 for the foil elsewhere for a card with (I think) high reprint risk when the non-foil was $4 on CK a while back is a good plan.

Wave and Tide are pretty old tech, but the more time that passes between today and the date Nemesis was released (February 2000), the more the trend in the price is upward. I think these will grow unbidden and a helping hand from people taking a second look at Brago tech next January will give these even more of a boost. I wouldn’t be surprised if this hits $10 for a bit.

Remember, Ranar says when you exile a permanent from the battlefield, not when you exile a creature of your own from your side of the battlefield, so this is even nastier than it was in Brago because you get value. You’ll want to blink this before the counters all fall off. They’ll get their lands back but you can rebuy a bunch of token creation. You can opt for the $15 foil, too, if you want.

That does it for me this week. I think that when we get a bit more info about the rest of the deck and what foretell is (I have to assume it involves exiling a card from your hand) w’ell know more. Until then, stay safe and if you must buy foils, remind yourself that we’re all making do in pandemic times. Until next time!