Casual Fridays

Foiling the Mystery

Praise be, Wizards released something on a Thursday night for once and made my gig 1000% better. I was worried that I’d only have a few glimpses from the Twitch stream, but apparently they have heeded my calls to adjust their timing.

We now have the whole list of 121 cards that are available in foil, and there are some doozies. What’s this mean for the current foils and the ones now being released? Let’s get into that…

Let’s start with a review of how many foils are out there. There’s 121 cards in the list, meaning that you’re going to get one copy every five boxes. (Remember, Mystery is in boxes of 24, not 36.) While that doesn’t sound like a lot, we are about to have a TON of these boxes opened, because the average value on the Mystery reprints is pretty high for now. There are some basic ideas I want you to keep in mind here: 

Idea #1: All Mystery foils will be cheaper than the pack foils.

How much cheaper is something I can’t estimate for all the cards, but as you’ll see, the amount of play a card gets is the main predictor of its future price. Sen Triplets? Not a lot of play, but foil mythics from a small set ELEVEN years ago are going to have very few copies left. Alchemist’s Refuge? Tons of play.

Idea #2: Pack foils will be fine. 

I and many other writers have expounded on the topic of reprints representing a buying opportunity. Especially for staples, when a price dips, you want to buy in. Here’s an example of Pact of Negation:

It was in Future Sight, and Masters 25, and Modern Masters 2013, and even had an Invocation during Amonkhet. Every time the price went down, you’ve got a shot at buying in for the new price. More on this in a moment. 

Idea #3: Everyone’s a mythic here.

One in five boxes will have a foil Sen Triplets. One in five boxes will have a foil Sosuke, Son of Seshiro. The sought-after foils will have a higher price, not least because players will put that card into their decks. At MagicFest Reno last weekend, a lot of the Mana Crypts being opened weren’t being sold, but were instead going into Commander decks, because for some dumb reason, it’s legal there.

Idea #4: When predicting price, pay attention to playability and don’t be distracted by age/supply.

Sen Triplets, currently the most expensive foil on the list, is an awesome card but only goes in Esper+ Commander decks. Minamo, School at Water’s Edge is in five times as many Commander decks and even sees some niche play in Modern/Legacy, as a source of blue with upside. When it comes to the Mystery foils, I don’t think Triplets will have a high price, but Minamo will be above it.

Idea #5: If the average value of a box of Mystery (Retail) is above $75 or so, stores will open them and sell the singles.

This is the main point of having a calculated box EV. Stores can’t buy Mystery (Convention) for themselves and that’s how you can sell them copies of Rhystic Study all day long. Stores can and will buy lots of this set in order to crack packs. 

To phrase it another way: If I add up the value of these foils and then divide by 121 to get an average of the value of the foil slot, I currently get about $15 (depending on mid vs. market and condition) and that means the average box has $360 worth of rares.  (Here’s a link to a Tappedout page with the total TCG coming out to $2100)

That cannot hold, and will not.

As much fun as it is to draft this set, Wizards is going to print a bunch of this, and then have at least one more wave like they did with War of the Spark. Drafters aren’t going to be the big movers, the big stores will be. I’d expect that the small stores might not bother because the variance is quite wide, and there’s going to be a lot of bulk within a couple of weeks.

Stores will open boxes and sell singles until the prices fall low enough to make that economically infeasible. Given what’s in the set, and the variance of what might get opened, I think a lot of prices are going to fall. The staples will recover (and be good buys, wouldn’t you like to stock up on Rhystic Study for $10? $7?) but the rest will crater and stay there for a long while.

With all that in mind, one thing stands out to me: There’s not a lot of excitement in the foil slot. A lot of solid value if you go by current retail prices, but those are not a strong predictor of price going forward. So many of these are niche, printings from forever ago or from an era when foiling wasn’t popular. The price is high on foil Celestial Dawn because it was on the Timeshifted sheet and a pretty rare thing to find even then. The price isn’t high because everyone wants to play the card. 

You should start with the belief that the vast majority of the foils aren’t going to be worth much. Maybe not bulk prices, but not above $3-$5. A couple of these stand out, though:

Amulet of Vigor:The retail for a foil one of these is close to $50, because it’s a key card in Amulet Titan decks in Modern. Getting two mana immediately from a bounceland is amazing, especially when combined with extra land drops. This is one of the top-tier decks in Modern, and Amulet is a four-of. I’d expect this price to be in the $30 range.

Alchemist’s Refuge:It’s pretty sweet in Commander, and a staple land if you’re in these colors. This is one of the few cases where I’d expect the new foils and the pack foils to be close in price.

Scourge of the Throne: If you get to attack with this it’s usually good enough to end the Commander game but the pack foil from original Conspiracy has a tiny amount in circulation. This will be a $20 foil, but not close to the original’s $80.

Braid of Fire: Niche, but awesome. Coldsnap happened at a weird time, in a weird amount, and foils from that set are tough to come by. Not a lot of decks can use this well, so I expect this to be under $10.

Intruder Alarm: Not as common in Commander as you might think, but still a combo enabler for a wide range of strategies that will often win your pod. There’s only one foil from 8th Edition, and that’s always been super scarce. Should land in the $25 range.

Sen Triplets: This grabbed headlines for being a $150 foil you can open, but these aren’t going to sell for anything like that price. If you open the first one you’ll get $75 for it, but very quickly the demand is going to dry up. Price memory is going to kick in and keep it from getting too cheap, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that by June, you can buy this foil for under $30.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Enter the Lair

Readers!

Rather than my usual article, I’m going to dive into a discussion about EV and talk about why I think War of the Spark has a lot of potential. That’s it. That’s the whole intro paragraph.

This is the paragraph where I talk about what my methodology will be because we need some copy above the fold otherwise it will look really awkward when the paywall slams down in the

middle of a paragraph. No time for that today, we have EV to discuss.

If you go to the website Dawnglare (I just learned today it wasn’t spelled “Dong Lair” and now I’m disappointed) you’ll see box EV for each set, which is a bit misleading for a few reasons I’ll get into. First of all, they don’t count foils. They don’t count foils for any of the sets, so it’s even, but it also doesn’t accurately tell you the ceiling for boxes. Danwglare if very much a worst case scenario for the EV over about 12 boxes or so if you don’t get any sexy foils rares or chase uncommons. Considering foil Veil of Summer is the most expensive card in Core Set 2020 and you have a fairly decent shot at cracking one of those in 12 boxes, it seems silly to always omit foils. Dawnglare ignores a lot of factors but what it’s very useful for is comparing sets heads-up. That’s the first stop on our journey today.

These are the approximate values in cards you’ll get if you bust an average box of each set, and while averages can be misleading, comparing them to each other seems fine since the average is basically equally misleading for any given set. Foils will throw this way off, but you can’t bank on getting good foils so I’m fine ignoring them for the sake of our exercise. Besides, since we are thinking about which sets will have singles we’ll want to buy, foils won’t matter unless we plan to buy foils.

Since people are redeeming fewer sets on MODO than they used to, the price of a box isn’t as enforceable as it used to be. Set EV used to be fairly rigid because if the EV of a full set got to be too high, people would just buy in on MODO, cash out and redeem the set, putting more paper copies into the market and satiating some of the demand. It wasn’t QUITE as efficient in practice as in sentence form but it was a system that worked. Sets like Dragon’s Maze were redeemed less because it wasn’t worth bothering and it kept the price of Voice of Resurgence from tanking. Sets with a ton of value were redeemed more and there was more supply. Absent MODO redemption and before weird stuff like collector’s boosters and other wackiness, we can at least look at why these numbers are the way they are. We can use MTG Price to zoom in on individual sets.

We’ll be looking for whether the value is spread out or concentrated. If it’s concentrated, the packs are bad because anything that doesn’t have the chase card in it is worthless and the chase card is the chase card. If you pay $100 for a box of a set with $45 box EV, you better hope you crack some foils. Sets that are recent and have the value more spread out seem much more interesting to me because any number of those cards could go up and bring the overall set EV up with them. If there is one $100 card in a box, it’s going to get reprinted and tank everything. If there are 30 cards worth $4 and they’re all played in EDH, they could all potentially go up and add 30X to the set EV for every dollar they all climb. I think (before I check) that War of the Spark has a flatter distribution than most sets and I’ll verify that.

*includes full art and showcase cards

There is more analysis to do here, we could list the number of bulk rares because a bulk rare going from unplayed to played like in the case of Inverter of Truth has the highest potential but for the most part, this sort of jived with what I had assumed. The sets in bold are currently legal in Standard but I went back farther because I wanted some historical context for what likely happens to these Standard sets after rotation.

You can figure out a kind of average price for a playable card if you divide the set EV by the number of cards over $1.

With this new metric, War of the Spark has the second-lowest average price per card over $1, which is almost what we expected. I didn’t count on Core set 2020 throwing things off with an astounding 48 cards over $1. With supply generally lower in a core set, there is more opportunity for good uncommons to be worth more than $1 and the core set had quite a few of them. Of the sets that already rotated, let’s look at the sets with lower values and see if we can guess what will happen with War of the Spark (and I guess Core set 2020).

I think a set like Ixalan shows what we could expect War of the Spark to eventually do. Ixalan has a lowish box EV right now but it has a lot of cards over $1; 41 to be exact, and a lot of cards over $5. I think with the high number of Planeswalkers, good removal spells and EDH-playable uncommons, we could see War of the Spark maintain its current value and have quite a few cards that could increase.

This is everything over $2 in Ixalan. With the exception of Search for Azcanta, these are almost all EDH cards. Barring a reprint, Growing Rites should continue to grow, Banner will approach $10, Amulet will see some growth and Revel in Riches will weather the storm caused by the printing in Mystery Boosters.

Here are the interesting cards in War of the Spark.

It obviously would have been better to get these for $1, but we can’t do that anymore. That said, I still think this can hit $5 barring a reprint, foils are only $5-$6 right now and this may be better than Windgrace’s Judgment in a lot of decks, but why not play both? I like Judgment, by the way.

I don’t know if you buy these yet since the buylist price is tanking, but the retail price appears to be stabilizing. Supply is what it’s going to be so demand will be the driver here and demand for this card is good – it’s the 10th-most-played Gold Instant on EDHREC. This and Casualties are very different, but they both do a ton of work and they both have upside.

There are a lot of copies of this card, but I said the same thing about Inexorable Tide and Atraxa sent that into the stratosphere. I think Atraxa demand is known but there will be another commander where you’ll want to proliferate sooner than later and this goes in that deck. Does the name Karn insulate it from reprint risk a bit? Not sure. This seems fairly reprintable, but that’s why foils exist and those are currently only a few dimes more than non-foils.

These have to be at the reverse-J shape portion of the eventual U-shape, right? The price was high due to impatience from Atraxa players, supply caught up with demand and then supply stopped. So what happens to these foils now? I’m not sure but I think when they look like they’re recovering, it won’t just be Atraxa players who want these.

This is worth as much as it’s ever been worth and I think it’s not done. Barring a reprint or obsolescence from a better clone, which is likely, I think this hits $5.

Major stores are sold out of this at $2.50, and I think t his could be $5.

Foils of this flirted with $5 and I think we could see that price again.

That does it for me this week. I normally don’t like to work this hard so next week we will make up fewer of our own metrics. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 03/02/20 – Foiled Again

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Yeah, it’s an over-used title and a worn-out trope, but what are you gonna do? Not read the article? Didn’t think so.

Anyway, there’s often a lot of discourse over foils in Magic, especially when it comes to competitive play. Foils can warp and thus be seen as marked cards, particularly if only certain parts of a deck are foil, and apparently this dissuades many people from foiling out decks. However, I think this complication is always made out to be more of an issue than it actually is. Countless players from all levels of competition foil out their decks without any problems, and we only really hear about the small number of cases where someone has come a cropper with bendy cardboard. Admittedly certain print runs (looking at you, FTV) are much worse than others, but for the most part there will be an alternative foil available.

I could ramble on for a while about this, but what I’m trying to say is that foils are fine, and they generally make better picks from a finance perspective, so here we go.

Spell Queller (Foil)

Price today: $25
Possible price: $40

Once a force to be reckoned with back in its Standard days (so much so that the UW flash deck it occupied had to be taken down a notch by the banning of Reflector Mage), Spell Queller has since found a home first in Modern, and now Pioneer. Spirits is a deck that has waxed and waned from the Modern scene ever since it became a ‘real deck’ when Supreme Phantom was printed in M19, and has put up some decent results over that time. Spell Queller has deservedly always been a four-of in the archetype, and now that Spirits is doing well in Pioneer too, the deck has become very popular and lots of players need to pick up their spooks.

Spell Queller foils did see an inevitable spike after the Pioneer format was announced, but have since retraced and are in a nice spot to pick some copies up. Supply is low at just 22 vendors on TCGPlayer, with an additional nine prerelease listings. Starting at $25 there’s a nice ramp up towards $40, and with this just being a single printing foil that I don’t expect to see crop up again any time soon, the market price on these will climb pretty quickly once the cheaper singles get snapped up.

Assassin’s Trophy (Foil)

Price today: $25
Possible price: $40

I remember when Assassin’s Trophy was previewed 18 months or so ago, and oh boy do Magic players love their hyperbole. It was to finally be the end of Tron; Jund would be the best deck in Modern by a mile and it was just such a powerful card! Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, Assassin’s Trophy was adopted in reasonable numbers into GB decks in Modern, has seen decent play in Standard and is a useful card in Pioneer.

Although it’ll be rotating out of Standard relatively soon, the Modern and Pioneer play coupled with a significant amount of EDH adoption (almost 13k decks, 18% of all possible decks) makes Assassin’s Trophy a cross-format all-star. Well, maybe I’m being a tad hyperbolic there, but the card’s definitely popular. You’ll find it in basically any deck that can cast it in Modern (albeit sometimes just relegated to the sideboard), and Sultai Delirium and Golgari Stompy are taking advantage of it in Pioneer.

Trophy actually follows a very similar price and stock level to that of the aforementioned Spell Queller, with 33 listings starting at $25 and ramping up nicely. This one does have the additional promo pack foil version to compete with, but I think all copies are heading upwards and should land around $40 in 6-9 months.

Ugin, the Ineffable (JPN Alt Art Foil)

Price today: $55
Possible price: $80

I’m rounding off today’s picks with a more pricey card than normal – foil Japanese alternate art Ugin, the Ineffable. These alternate art cards have been in very low supply since War of the Spark was released, and we’re not getting any more of it.

New-gin has become one of the tools of choice for Eldrazi Tron in Modern, usually just as two to three copies but pretty much always a player in the deck. He might not be as innately powerful as Old-gin (yeah that doesn’t really work does it?), but he comes down earlier, can still blow stuff up and helps to power out the rest of your colourless spells too.

I was actually quite surprised by the level of EDH inclusion for this card – a touch under 8000 decks, which puts it well into the top ten cards from War of the Spark (and it’s definitely got some tough competition). I guess it being colourless means that players can drop it into any deck, but it is of course most popular with the colourless commanders.

With a grand total of fourteen foil copies available on TCGPlayer, I think that $55 is a lower price than it should be for this card. I doubt we’ll see another printing of these alternate art cards for a very long time, if ever, and so although this could be a longer hold (12-24 months), I’ll be damned if it doesn’t get there sooner or later. If you wanted to go for the extra extra pimp level, there are only five copies of the alt art prerelease foils on TCG, ranging from $92 to $150 – and those ones are super ultra rare.

David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern, EDH and Pioneer. Based in the UK and a new writer for MTGPrice in 2020, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: New Feature, Who Dis?

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Readers!

EDHREC has a feature that I just noticed and I think it will be useful. Look, it’s either this or we dig into how useful the new Purphoros will be at making cards go up and it’s just not built that much. I like it – having a Sneak Attack on a stick seems good to me. I also think we’re at a weird limbo point where we’re about out of cards to talk about from the most recent set and the next set isn’t out yet. That’s usually where I struggle for article topics and do my best work. Let’s get into it, shall we?

At the top of the Top 100 cards page on EDHREC, I noticed something new. Have you spotted it? Here’s some help.

Since EDHREC has limited the data to the past 2 years, it’s been a little easier to see what is trending. A lot of the “noise” from monolithic, historical decks like Oloro is gone and the signal is clearer. Yes, we’d like a bird’s eye view of EDH as a whole, but since my deal is I want to see trends before they become rules, having less data to parse is better for me. It’s better for us, really, since you’re reading this and I presume wants to use my method to make some money. Since we can see the Top 100 cards of the Week, Month and Past 2 years, let’s do that. Remember that card list comparison tool I used? Well, you’re going to get to see it again.

Click the “layout” button on the right side of the screen to change to text and copy the lists into the list tool. Do this along with me if you want – there will be things you can click on that I won’t click on that might be interesting for you. Here are the results.

There are only 2 cards that have been in the top 100 only the last week, 1 card in the top 100 the last month but not the last 2 years or the last week and 14 cards not in the top 100 since before the last month.

Seedborn Muse and Idyllic Tutor are in the top 100 the last week.

Muse seems to be recovering from its last printing in C19 and I think it could flirt with $10 again, something Legions copies are doing already. Reprint risk is high, but I like this as a pick-up and it’s trending this week specifically.

The reprint obviously hurt the price of this card but the original art is still worth 4 times as much as the new art, so that’s something. I think at $3 or $4, Idyllic Tutor is a good pickup as well. I’m pretty bullish on both, and I’m glad I could cut through the noise and see that these cards are popular this week.

The card in the Top 100 this month but not this week or the last 2 years is Bedevil. That seems like it points to a decline in the popularity of Kroxa lately, which makes sense. People were building Kroxa more two weeks ago than they are now. I don’t like Bedevil at its current price per se, but it’s worth bringing up anyway.

The list that is in the top 100 the last 2 years but not the last month or week bears a look.

Explosive Vegetation
Return to Dust
Fact or Fiction
Wrath of God
Avenger of Zendikar
Crackling Doom
Preordain
Zendikar Resurgent
Conflux
Harmonize
Blood Artist
Gilded Lotus
Propaganda
Vindicate

Of those, Blood Artist is pretty surprising given the popularity of Korvold decks. Avenger of Zendikar shows that there hasn’t been a landfall commander in more than a month, which jives. Crackling Doom shows that Ser Gwyn decks are falling off but that Mardu cards are popular when there is an interesting deck to put them in. There was a Mardu commander deck recently but nothing super good in the last month. Some of these cards are kind of interesting. For these to get left out, there have to have been cards that replaced them. Let’s look at the cards that were just in the last month and week.

Arcane Signet
Ashiok
Despark
Dockside Extortionist
Dream Render
Faeburrow Elder
Generous Gift
Growth Spiral
Guardian Project
Narset’s Reversal
Reality Shift
Talisman of Conviction
Talisman of Creativity
Talisman of Hierarchy
Time Wipe

These are cards that are new and have bumped older cards out of the Top 100. These all make sense to an extent. I don’t know that there’s much money to be made here, but one or two of these deserve some coverage.

Every card in War of the Spark is currently worth $3. Uncommon walkers, good removal, mythics – it doesn’t matter. I don’t expect that to hold the farther we get from the box printing, which makes me wonder which cards will pull away from the pack. We have data to look at.

Dovin’s Veto
Despark
Ashiok, Dream Render
Time Wipe
Bolas’s Citadel
Narset, Parter of Veils
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
Narset’s Reversal
Casualties of War
Jace, Wielder of Mysteries
Deathsprout
Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God
Finale of Devastation
Cruel Celebrant
Teferi, Time Raveler
Evolution Sage
Spark Double
Ral, Storm Conduit
Domri, Anarch of Bolas
Ajani, the Greathearted
Liliana, Dreadhorde General
Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
Tamiyo, Collector of Tales
Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord
Nissa, Who Shakes the World

Here is the top 25 cards in War of the Spark, sorted by EDH play. Dovin’s Veto at #1 is kind of surprising, honestly. Despark, Time Wipe, Citadel, Reversal and Casualties are all cards to watch. With 5 cards from War of the Spark in the Top 100 this week, we are liable to see some moves. Foil Dovin’s Veto? Despark? I’m not sure, but barring a reprint, the risk of which I think is pretty low, I like Narset’s Reversal a lot, as well as Despark, Time Wipe and Casualties of War. Cards from War of the Spark are going to climb and with all of the Planeswalkers, sealed boxes of War of the Spark could end up pretty insane since there are a lot of cards that could end up going up.

That does it for me this week. Join me next week where I’ll be looking for a few more data sets to analyze and talking about Throne of Eldraine cards that are already making a big splash. Until next time!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY