2020 is over and I don’t feel any different. The year was a marathon and I feel like they keep moving the finish line. I’m getting pretty mentally worn out and with there not being much I haven’t covered from Commander Legends and not much known about Kaldheim yet, I need something easy – we all do.

There was technically some easy money made already from Kaldheim where Magda made everyone say “OMG BUY DWARVES” and Toski made everyone say “OMG BUY SQUIRRELS” and I’m still over here laughing about the time everyone bought Bitterblossom because they heard Throne of Eldraine would be a Fairytale set and everyone said “I STOPPED LISTENING AT FAIRY.” I think it takes a decent amount of savvy to buy Brass’ Bounty and Hellkite Tyrant when Magda was spoiled (but not years ago when I said to) but whenever something like that pops up and we don’t have time to talk about it, I don’t sweat it. Money you didn’t make isn’t money you lost. Besides, spikes like that are my least favorite to deal with. It’s too much stress for me. Let’s take it easy this week. Want to know what I’d buy?

Here you go.

If it looks a little over-simplistic, look, I already said I wanted to take it easy this week. I can’t take it any easier. You can have 4 precons for $90. Other sellers have more sets for around $110, which is a lot more but also isn’t terrible. How good is every deck from Commander 2019 for $90? I can answer that in one graph.

Well, good night, everyone!

You’re still here? OK, if buying a $50 card plus 399 other cards for $90 doesn’t immediately scream “BARGAIN” to you, I get it. Let’s drill down a bit more. I want to see how fast we can get to $90 retail.

$50 plus Seedborn Muse ($10ish) plus Ohran Frostfang ($7 and has upside from Toski) plus K’rrik ($5) plus 4 Sol Rings ($12) plus 4 x $4 cards (Lightning Greaves, Bone Miser, Thran Dynamo, Sevinne’s Reclamation) is $100. You’re 10 cards in and you’ve made $10. Is there a LOT of chaff here? Yep! Is Dockside due for a reprinting and may be “listed” and reprinted sooner rather than later? Seems likely. Can you make some money flipping this stuff? Yep. Can you try and flip a few of the decks unopened? Sure. There’s money to be made here, fairly easy money, and more money to be made if you’re willing to sell off some of the $3 cards rather than buylisting all of it.

Every time an older card pops and it’s in a commander deck, it’s time to re-do the math.

Do we like a deck with a $20 Xantcha, a $15 Nesting Dragon, a $7 Lord Windgrace and like 3 or 4 $5 cards? Maybe not. What would it take for $70 shipped to make sense? Will Avenger of Zendikar go from $5 to $10 in a year? Probably. Will people stop sleeping on Turntimber Sower? I doubt it. If Windgrace’s Judgment, Whiptongue Hydra and Loyal Apprentice hit $5, is this a buy? Will the deck be $100 by then? Sometimes you luck out and something really pops hard, and when it does, take a look at the deck it’s in.

With Hellkite Tyrant popping off, the number of Commander 2016 cards over $15 is now officially 10. Are Ravos and Thrasios on their way down? Will Conquerer’s Flail ever see a reprinting? Is there even a decent price on C16 decks? (no).

We can also look at decks that aren’t Commander precons for EDH cards. The Faerie Schemes Brawl deck has a $25 Smothering Tithe in it, but since those aren’t gettable at $25 anymore, it’s less appealing.

More than anything, this article was a reminder to check eBay and Amazon for sealed decks if you don’t have any whenever a card in one of them goes up. Hellkite Tyrant is up but there’s no opportunity to buy the Entropic Uprising deck for cheap since Thrasios and Vial-Smasher drove that price way up. However, Entropic Uprising made sense a year ago when Thrasios was on its way to peaking and the deck was much cheaper. Hellkite Tyrant was just gravy back then, and if you bought the decks a year ago to try and benefit from increased interest in Thrasios, you are likely sitting on some Tyrants, now. I’ll do an article like this periodically to remind everyone to check on this stuff, lest we write articles with a “should have done this thing no one recommended” tone, which I’d like to avoid.

Finally, I have a few Magda-based picks.

These are all pretty juicy, honestly. Valakut Awakening is a hot sleeper pick in a set everyone has already forgotten all about, Wheel of Misfortune in in the Top 10 cards from Commander Legends but no one knows that, War Room is the only way Boros decks can draw cards and Jeska’s Will has already gone up quite a bit but isn’t done. Shatterskull Smashing would have taken too much effort to crop out.

EDH alone isn’t enough to do anything with this, but when this does something in Modern, and it will, people will be buying 4 copies at a time. This doesn’t seem all that reprintable to me and it really seems like a card that will just be $8 one day and everyone will be surprised. This isn’t as safe as some of my other picks, but with higher risk comes higher reward.

That does it for me this week. I’ll be drilling down into some Kaldheim picks next week, so tune in early and if you’re not a Pro Trader, consider signing up so you don’t have to spend 48 hours letting people buy up the picks while you wait for the clock to run out. Until next time!

Readers!

I know I love to do a data-driven series. and you love to read such a series, but 2020 is almost over, and I think it’s time to take a look back at stuff that came out in 2020, will be expensive later, and which you can get for less now. Let’s have the “wait, when did that get expensive?” conversation now that the stuff is gettable for a reasonable price, shall we?

I’m serious, I usually do a few paragraphs of preamble to have something “above the fold” so to speak because we like to tease non-Pro Traders for a few days to incentivize people to buy the membership but I am too eager to get into it, let’s talk about cards I love from 2020.

There was never a “great” time to get this card. It’s going to go up, especially the extended-border versions. The ship has largely sailed on the $40 foil (I didn’t really expect its initial price of $30 to be a bargain, but it never dropped below $30). Beyond Death is a weird, topheavy set that was the first set to have collector boosters, was hit hard by distribution issues related to the pandemic and rares in the set are somewhat overshadowed by the marquee mythics in the set. Theros Beyond Death actually has quite a few cards that I like bordlerless long-term.

I haven’t looked at how the most-played cards from that set have shaken out, and if I was surprised, it’s possible you will be, also.

What is this, a picture for ants?

You can check the page yourself and peruse through the entire set – it’s worth it. The surprises here are Underworld Breach played a lot in EDH, Heliod’s Intervention in the Top 5, Calix in the Top 10 and Nyx Lotus, Athreos and Woe Strider not in the Top 10. I didn’t like Nyx Lotus much, but I thought I was alone.

Focus on Theros – it’s a year old already and prices are flat but demand could catch up to supply soon. EDH is basically the only plague-proof paper format, thanks largely in part to spelltable. You can find some cards I missed, but I’m going to move on.

These are all too cheap. They look great, they’re not curly-ass stupid foils (I like the showcase foils, too, though) and they’re played a lot.

Cards 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the set are the Triomes. The fact that the showcase versions aren’t just full art but their stylized, sexy, unique art tells me that they are going to be the go-to in the future. I hate foils but I don’t hate making a deck look nice and now I don’t even have to use foils to make my deck look nice if I don’t want to (I don’t).

The extended art triomes are too cheap. They look to me like $1 Rishkar’s Expertise and Aetherflux Reservoir used to. Buying in above $5 is a little loose but it’s reality and is likely a bargain. I don’t know how reprintable these are, but I suspect “not very.” I think there is a lot to like from this set, but a lot of it is “very good” and not “slam dunk” but I think the full-art triomes are and always have been a slam dunk. I don’t see anything in the data to suggest otherwise. All of the top 20 cards in the set are worth looking at extended art, but the triomes are far and away my favorite. I am considering ending the article here so you don’t get distracted by other picks.

Core set 2021 was a real mixed bag. I expected… some of these things. #1 card is Sanctum of All? Granted, it’s sorted by percent inclusion, meaning a significant portion of the 5-color decks made in the last 2 years include Sanctum because a significant portion of them are sanctum decks. It’s generating its own headlines, essentially. Check out this Top 20 – it’s nuts.

At $11 on TCG Player, I think this is a fine pick-up. It might not have the most upside at this price, but it’s been flat for too long and this stupid card draws too many stupid other cards. It’s too good. You know what card I hated and James said on Fast Finance he liked and I said “No, that card sucks” and now everyone is playing it but it doesn’t matter because the price hasn’t changed much?

Could this go to $5? Maybe. It’s a non-mythic rare from a core set, but no one even drafted the set and the extended border gives it so chops. I hate foils, but the foil isn’t unattractive.

As this approaches the price of the non-foil, I more and more relax my anti-foil stance. The card is played a ton in EDH and it reminds me of cards that end up in a ton of casual decks and become $5 overnight, surprising everyone. I don’t want to be surprised, I want to have a lot of copies when this goes up. Let’s all look at the price graph and marvel at how James said it was a great card, I said I hated it, everyone is playing it, and he would have been wrong to buy them in July and I was right not to. MTG Finance is easy when you’re never punished for being wrong.

I’ll do another article like this in 6 months for the stuff printed more recently. We have time for long-term specs to materialize but, until then, stock up and prepare to look smart later. That does it for me this… year, I guess. Thanks for being great readers and we’ll see you all in 2021 where Boston Dynamics robots will become self-aware or a meteor will hit or something will make us all tweet “Man, I thought 2020 was bad.” Until then!