Readers!

We don’t have any data but I need to save myself from election day doomscrolling on social media. It can be a bad day on Twitter or a silly day of trying to guess if people like the same stupid garbage in EDH that I do. I can’t stress enough that this is stuff I like and stuff I like isn’t always going to be popular with other people. Here is what I’d do with the new cards and what I’d need to do it.

All of the Krakr garbage (Krark-bage) was pretty obvious, but this is a Cheerios combo piece in the command zone. As Mtg Price’s resident breakfast cereal expert, I can tell you that Cheerios is a trash cereal only given to literal babies, but the deck is fun. Currently, Cheerios decks run 0-cost equipment and Puresteel Paladin, but there was a time in Magic history where Crimson Kobolds and Kobolds of Kher Keep were bounced with Cloudstone Curio with Glimpse of Nature until you get Grapeshot them to death. I don’t think you want to Grapeshot people in EDH, per se, however…

The Mystery Booster slowed the hype train, much like a wayward cow on the tracks might slow but not stop a runaway locomotive in a Denzel Washington movie when he was in his “Make movies about trains with Tony Scott” period.

Reservoir is down from its maximum but there is a lot of room to grow, especially if you can snag $5 copies from TCG Player and it’s already $8 on Card Kingdom. If it hits $14 on CK again, they’ll be offering $10 in credit and an easy double-up for barely any effort is pretty sweet. I think this card is a monster and it’s a great finisher for a stupid Cheerios deck. True, it’s a multiple card combo, but having one of those pieces in your command zone is a game-changer.

This card needs a reprint that isn’t just a more expensive masterpiece. I liked these at $35 before they hit $45 and dropped again. I think they can hit $50 or $55 if they don’t get a reprint, and it’s looking like they won’t. These are good in more than just the hypothetical Cheerios deck I bet no one builds but me and the price reflects that. There are so few copies in the hands of vendors, if I wanted to take $500 and just jack this price all up with a few well-placed buys then say “See, I called it” I could, but since I don’t have a YouTube channel I don’t see a point.

I have like 50 of these but I used them as tokens in my Prossh deck, so I am never coming off of them. I think there are a lot of lunatics like me, and with several cards like Kher Keep making tokens called “Kobolds of Kher Keep” these are attractive tokens as well as Magic cards in their own right. I’m a little surprised these stayed under $5 apiece, honestly.

For reference Crookshank Kobolds cost half as much because no one wants them as tokens. That said, Crookshank Kobolds are *only* half as much, which doesn’t seem right, either.

Unfortunately, you only get 1 copy of each in a 99 card deck, but they’re not as important as the Curio, which is easy to tutor for in a red deck. You can also build the deck with any other color(s) you want because Rograkh has partner. The deck could be fun. I don’t know what else in the deck would be expensive, though. You could build a pretty competitive deck for under $50, which is appealing, even with $30 of that being tied up in Curio.

The fluctuations between $7 and $1 are the $7 copies selling out and our algorithm scraping the $1 the sites want for the oversized card. It’s funny. What’s not funny is how much Yidris is going to cost when everyone builds a new cascade deck and none of the 4 color commanders are reprinted in Commander Legends. I should have recommended this weeks ago but, I goofed.

This isn’t directly related to anything in CL, but it IS in Maelstrom Wanderer and also, I like this card and it’s getting more expensive on CK because it’s bonkers, but also it’s cheap on TCG Player. If this is $11 on CK and $5 on TCG Player, you can practically arbitrage them.

I say this a lot but not all of you read all of my articles, so I’ll spend a little ink on this before I wrap things up. Do cards that are $11 on Card Kingdom and $7 on TCG Player sell on Card Kingdom for $11? You bet. There are a lot of reasons for this, but just know that Card Kingdom is a very good indicator of the health of an EDH card’s price and EDH is carrying a lot of the weight of the paper market right now. I think something is underpriced on TCG rather than thinking it’s overpriced on CK, and for EDH-only cards like this, it may help you to think in those terms as well.

That’s all for this week. Next week we will have a full spoiler, some data, maybe a new POTUS and I’ll be chasing the Shandalar speedrun world record on Twitch. Frank Karsten is sitting in 5th place and I’d love to knock him off of the leaderboard. Until next time!

Readers!

You know how I am always talking about how my data-driven approach has caused my confidence in my specs to increase as well as my hit rate? You’re getting better advice and making more money, I look smart, people go to EDHREC, etc? This is the week every 6 months we forget all of that.

Well this card is pretty stupid and ignoring the cards that could go up as a result seems stupid, also.

This is the biggest winner in terms of playability because you can force two players at once to hand over their decks (hopefully not on webcam) and you can take anything you want. Normally you’d target yourself and someone you kind of like, but Agent changes the whole game. I already liked this card, for the record.

Being the 9th-most-played card in a frankly STACKED set like Core 2020 is a good indicator that Schemy boi had some upside already. I also think Schemes Supremes over here is sort of tough to reprint per se in the kinds of products where they historically have printed Commander cards so it could be fairly insulated against a reprinting. Sure, you’ll make a ton buying Vampiric Tutor when it bottoms out and then goes back up because it’s Vampiric Tutor, but you didn’t need me to tell you to do that.

Fantastic Voyage over here was already in the midst of shaking off a reprint. It’s curious that it bottomed out 2 years after it was reprinted and not right in 2016 when the Commander deck containing it came out but you can see that the ceiling on the card is about $13 when its supply was half of what it currently is. EDH took it from $2 to $6 as a matter of course, I think its synergy with Opposition Agent makes it a card to *watch* if nothing else.

The internet works fast and this card is drying up faster than it already was. It’s been increasing the whole last year despite being a profoundly boring card to build around. Buying these now will be risky but if you have these, sell into the hype imo.

Any card that spent the year growing in price by 50% on Card Kingdom and stayed flat everywhere else is worth looking at in my opinion, as Card Kingdom is the canary in the coalmine for prices on EDH-only cards. If you can get this for half of what CK is charging now and it goes up, you can probably just turn around and buylist these to Card Kingdom for like $10 in store credit if it spikes. It was climbing anyway, so you actually can’t really lose, here.

This is a trap.

I mean, I think. The *second* time someone did OK at an SCG event with that stupid Food Chain, Misthollow Griffin deck, I really didn’t expect that to be the reason Food Chain went from $10 to $50 considering the initial print hype only made the card go from like $2 to $10 and EDH demand didn’t change at all over that time period. So when I say “this is a trap” I am basing this off of the fact that a deck built around Krark will be terrible and worse than Zndrsplt and Okaun decks already are, which is bad and mostly a novelty. If you have the cards, and you should know what the cards are without my help, sell into the hype. Here’s what I think moves but not sustainably.

This is mostly sold out, but what’s actually curious here is the price trajectory on Card Kingdom specifically.

It is obvious where Battlebond came out, but the price started ticking back up over time after the initial feeding frenzy ended. The deck isn’t built a ton and it’s sort of clunky and all of the stuff that was bulk before went right back down to bulk, but the iconic card stayed high on Card Kingdom specifically. It went back to $4 on TCG Player and up to $20 this week (second spikes will do that) and I still have a bunch of mine from last time because I couldn’t sell them and didn’t want to out them for CK store credit (they’re paying $9 now). Iconic cards don’t plummet like cards like Game of Chaos and Squee’s Revenge are going to. It’s likely too late to make nay money here unless you still had copies from last time, but I think that’s probably fine. The deck sucks without access to Blue, anyway. Also, I think it kind of sucks with access to Blue.

Legendary Creature – Spirit

Reach Whenever another permanent enters the battlefield under your control, if it wasn’t put onto the battlefield with this ability, you may put a permanent card with an equal or lesser converted mana cost from your hand onto the battlefield. Partner

So this card is actually incredibly busted AND it has partner so you can add another color (Blue) or other colors (Blue and Red or Black or Black and Red) and did they test this card? It generates a ton of value.

The good news is this is incredibly powerful and will cause a lot of decks to be built. The bad news is that anything this enables is already expensive and probably won’t go up much. I think it’s worth looking at every landfall token producer in this context, every Karoo all the way back to literal Karoo and that cycle and what this gets partnered with. Omnath, Locus of Rage, Emeria Angel, Scute Swarm – there’s no wrong way to generate infinite tokens with this stupid card that, I would like to remind you, can be your commander.

Here is what I think this card is most nutty paired with.

Once flirted with $30, now gettable under $15? Okey dokey. The Mystery Boosters didn’t add as much supply or as cleanly as people think and this is a card that is worth $30 because every set has one or two cards that as good with it. Purphoros and Impact Tremors will always be good in a certain kind of deck.

This is stupid. You make infinite clues with a Karoo. I don’t understand the rationale behind Kodama.

Now, I don’t speak German and some people are alleging that it’s been mistranslated and should read “nontoken permanent” which would still be quite good, but I haven’t seen anyone from Wizards verify that so I’ll assume the translation is correct. Insanity.

Karoos are back on the menu, boys. Yank these out of bulk – CK was getting nearly a buck apiece on these recently.

I’m sure there is stuff that I should have talked about, like the fact that pirates are a huge theme in the set, but since we don’t have any data and anything we’re baking on as a result of these particular cards is a gamble, I’ll save data for when we can afford to wait. For now, sell into hype, buy at your own risk and don’t take any wooden nickels. Until next time!

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